Acceptance and Welcome Through Shared Goals and Experiences (FREEDOM!)

Acceptance.
Feeling welcome.
Having the confidence that you are loved by your fellow human beings.
I certainly need these things and I think everyone else does too.
Human beings are gregarious creatures, social creatures, our survival, our very nature compels us to seek each other out.
When we do not feel welcomed and accepted by our fellow human beings, a terrible pressure is placed upon an individual, a sense of suffocating isolation, and lonely despair settles over one's heart like a black cloud.
I speak from personal experience, experience that I'm sure nearly everyone can relate to.

I think that no where is this need and its absence more keenly felt than when a child and young person is in school.
The acceptance or rejection of one's peers is keenly felt by a young mind and heart that has not yet built up the layers of callouses adults accumulate over years of coming to accept the soul-draining reality of acceptance and love of one's fellow human beings being a nearly non-existent thing.
The how? of addressing this problem though is extremely simple and commonsense for everyone.

"I don't want to be in the same group as him/her. They're ugly." or "They're stupid." or "They're clumsy."
How many of us have heard this when we were children, either being the personal recipient of the comment, or hearing another child being derided so.
It is a painful thing to hear, but, at least it is honest, and that is something as adults we must depend upon, the unfailing honesty of children before it is clouded by the adult notion that "some lies are acceptable", or "white lies are sometimes ok." Lies may make for smoother relations in the short term, but over time they prove to be unstable foundations on which to build a relationship.

Truthfully, if we look deep inside a person, past the surface appearance and behavior, we genuinely see that all human beings are valuable and have unlimited resources to share.
Looking past the surface though takes time.
Human beings are designed to make quick assessments as a survival mechanism inherited from our more primitive past when a rapid decision meant the difference between life or death.
Foregoing this instinct requires that a person must have the security and certainty that permitting oneself to invest time into searching more deeply into the truth of something will not result in punishment or pain.

So, the solution is very simple.
When human beings engage in a project together, they come to know one another.
With a common goal, a shared purpose, one another's strengths are revealed and come to be appreciated.

Now, this of course is already a common facet of the schooling experience.
However, speaking from personal experience, I can say that projects I have worked on in school have rarely been satisfying.
Why?
Because they were rarely ones I was interested in, and this is absolutely vital. Vital.

Forcing children to work together, creates immediate resentment.
Adults expect results and the already embittered children are easily upset with one another when they feel there is a lack of energy and enthusiasm on the part of their group-mates.
WHAT A HORRIBLE SITUATION TO PUT CHILDREN IN! (or anyone for that matter)
The group-mates expect energy and enthusiasm from one another, but they are already at a horrible disadvantage, since what they are working on does not interest them much or at all.

The Velja Approach directly addresses this, because I wanted to make connections with my classmates, real connections, but they simply did not materialize when engaging in a school project I felt no affinity for.

In The Velja Approach, students begin their own projects, on anything they can imagine, and they themselves seek out classmates who would enjoy working on the project with them.
They have the entire school of classmates to engage. They have tremendous freedom to explore their ideas to the extent of their vision.
Permitted to dream as big as they possibly can, students are filled with energy and enthusiasm, and find no lack of these things in their group-mates.

Previously excluding qualities, like,
"he/she is ugly," or
"he/she is stupid", or
"he/she is boring" are
evolved beyond, grown beyond, mitigated and cease to be concerns,
as the bonds between the students form and strengthen because of the sheer energy and satisfaction from working together on a common goal, a shared purpose, THAT THEY HAVE CHOSEN WITH COMPLETE FREEDOM.

"Freedom is essential to human beings."
Without it, human beings are not human, they are robots with a heart and soul constantly crying for attention and love.
This cannot but create human beings who are perpetually in pain and despair.

The Velja Approach addresses this at the beginning of a human being's life and turns school from the detention centre and assembly line it currently is, into the research laboratory of possibility it should have always been.