The Nine Pillars of Tomii Academy
- Return Education to Learning, Not Rote Memorization
- Stress Real-Life Application of Knowledge, Not Useless Exam Scores
- Acknowledge the Need to Pursue Education Outside of Traditional Academic Classrooms
- Redefine Success and Wealth to Include Life Purpose and a Balance of Physical, Mental and Spiritual Wealth
- Expose Lies About Money and Wealth Taught in Schools Today
- Reprogram Our Brains to Think Critically, Not to Blindly Obey “Authority” Figures
- Provide an Educational Curriculum Applicable for All Ages
- Stress Personal Responsibility in the Pursuit of Our Life Goals; De-emphasize the Blame Game
- Utilize Peer to Peer Learning to Foster Cooperation and Critical Thinking Skill Development
Far too many among us accept, without challenge, articles, ideas and information presented to us by a very rigidly controlled and mainstream media narrowly funded by a few extremely wealthy people. For this precise reason, most of us need to deconstruct our present belief system before we can start the process of arriving at the truth and we need to empty our mental trash bins that currently command our minds to comply and obey, before we even can find the space to welcome new information and truth into our brains. Unfortunately, many of us fiercely cling to a very rigid belief system, whose origins are deeply rooted in institutions of politics, religion, finance, education, nationalism and culture, and in a diametrically opposed manner to a sound intellectual and introspective foundation. I’d like to make it clear that I am not opposed to any of the above constructs, but only to the institutions that rule over these constructs and have deceived the entire world about them.
The most intellectually honest among us, after deep introspection and critical reflection, would acknowledge that our most deeply held beliefs about life have not resulted from any analytical or empirical research, reflection and critical thought, but were simply adopted and blindly embraced as a result of cultural norms, traditions, and endorsements by people in positions of authority. In fact, during the course of my lifetime, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been engaged in debate with someone whose entire argument of an opposition viewpoint consists not of fact-based, intellectual refutations of my viewpoint, but simple, vomited claims made by demagogues, like “that’s been debunked by a fact-checker”. The reason such a push back has zero intellectual gravity is because such a claim never provides the basis for why a position has been debunked. “Fact-checking” websites are continually exposed as billionaire-funded websites that declare anything that opposes their narrative as a “fact-checked” lie despite the provision of zero evidence to back these claims, and thus, the reason why it is critical to the survival of intellect in our society for people to understand the difference between a completely invalid argument and a valid one.
More importantly, for many of us, our deeply held beliefs were blindly adopted from pre-engineered societal frameworks established in our psyches from birth. As a consequence, we unfortunately perceive those pathways that deviate from these pre-ordained pathways as odd or strange, when in fact, these pathways may possess the pathways to a much more meaningful life than many of us live today. For example, consider how homeschooling, as recently as 2024, was still considered by most as a fringe choice and not accepted as a viable and competitive alternative to institutional academics, even after the forced home schooling of billions during three years of global lockdowns. A consequence of this narrow belief system is a crippling inability to formulate realistic expectations of the effort required to make our dreams come true and a sense of entitlement that spawns unrealistic expectations of receiving large financial rewards in a socially and morally responsible manner without the expenditure of equivalent effort. This is the reason why so many young adults want to become social media influencers today, because they observe their peers fleecing their followers for millions of dollars with the expenditure of little effort beyond grandiose delusional “get rich quick” schemes pitched to their followers. And for those of us that reject the get rich quick pathway of becoming a social media influencer due to its immoral exploitative pathway, pursuing the traditional route may not be the best choice for many of us as well. How many of us blindly accept the societal norm of pursuing good grades and high test scores to gain entrance at top-tier schools to secure a good job at a prestigious corporation without ever questioning if this process will even make us happy or provide us with a meaningful life?
The vast majority of us engage in this process simply because it is what everyone else is doing and because it fits our belief of what we are expected to do.
Consequently, if we take this pathway and find ourselves unsatisfied with life, we feel cheated of not attaining the result promised to us. How many of us have accepted our religion or no religion as the best choice for no other reason than our parents had no religion or commanded us to adopt the same religion as theirs? How many of us actually read the scriptures ascribed to our religion before rejecting or accepting it, or even studied several religions before rejecting or adopting a religion, as any intellectual would do? How many of us have passed judgment on another culture, race or community, without ever spending even one hour talking with not one, but with many different members of that culture, race or community? In my lifetime, I’ve met many adults that called the very type of gang members I mentored as a young adult in Los Angeles “animals that should be locked away in jail forever” even though every single person that offered such a cursory, non-experiential critique had never set foot in a poor community ridden with crime, never spent a single minute speaking with the teenagers they wanted to lock up “forever”, and possessed zero understanding of the life and death struggles constantly faced by the teenagers that lived in these communities. Yet, when we find ourselves monthly, if not weekly or daily, engaged in conversations with people with zero experience about a multitude of topics in which our opinions about them have been derived from many years of empirical experiences, our opinions are sadly often summarily dismissed for opposition perspectives based upon nothing empirical. In other words, institutional education has stripped us of knowing how to think properly.