Today I will present the first of four keynotes I would like to share with my audience; these have been prepared and presented at various Bitcoin conferences since November 2024. These presentations weave bitcoin, education, myth, consciousness, Austrian economics, and time cycles (evolutionary astrology, human design). You read that right, I am great at synthesizing. Although I have been a public speaker with my artwork for thirty years, debuting as a synthesizer and integrator of complex ideas is my new platform.
Today I am sharing Bitcoin Education: Beyond Schooling and Indoctrination, first presented at My first bitcoin unconference on November 13 in San Salvador. I have used the open source curriculum to facilitate study groups for teenagers, women, and curious adults who want to learn about the most important technology of the twenty first century.
Over the next month I will also be sharing Bitcoin as a State of Consciousness, presented at Adopting Bitcoin in San Salvador two weeks ago; The Value of Scarce Time, Austrian Economics 101, first shared in English at BitBlockBoom in Dallas and recently in Spanish at Adopting Bitcoin in San Salvador; and Bitcoin the Promethean Quest for Individuation and Liberation, which marked my debut as a Bitcoin presenter at last year’s Adopting Bitcoin.
SLIDE_1:
My name is Monika Bravo, I’m a multidisciplinary artist, polymath, and educator.
I’m very happy to be here today, sharing with you some of the most foundational lessons I’ve learned about value, freedom, and the way we learn.
What I want to explore today is how Bitcoin supports a based education—>beyond indoctrination. It does ask each one of us to understand why we act and to verify what we know through empirical practice, and thus taking responsibility of our individual understandings.
This talk moves through three threads:
how we learn, how we verify, and how we integrate value into life itself.
SLIDE_2:
I was born into a lineage of progressive women pedagogues.
My grandmother founded the first preschool in Colombia in the late 1930s; in fact, you can see her here in this photo with my grandfather and a group of children including my mother.
My grandmother wanted to teach children and funded a Kindergarten; taking the name from German educator Friedrich Fröbel, who coined the word in the 1830s.
He believed that children should be nurtured and allowed to grow naturally, like plants in a garden —
observing, building, singing, and caring for their environment.
He emphasized play, creativity, sensory learning, rhythm, movement, and self-motivated activities.
He saw beauty, order, as pathways for understanding harmony.
He encouraged working with the hands, engaging the senses, and expressing imagination through form and color.
He believed that each child carries an inner law of growth that unfolds through freedom and attention.
He saw the role of the educator as a gardener of potential, one who tends rather than commands, guides rather than instructs.
His ideas influenced Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, and John Dewey, who later shaped early education throughout Europe and the Americas and where both my grandma and my mom based their pedagogy.
By the 1930s, Kindergarten had become an international term representing this philosophy of freedom, play, and guided discovery.
My grandmother’s vision placed her in direct lineage with that progressive German pedagogy — an education rooted in curiosity, observation, and the unfolding of the child’s natural intelligence.
SLIDE_3:
My mother named her school after John Dewey here a picture around 1969.
She was inspired by his idea that education should not prepare children for life but be life itself.
Learning, for her, was a living process — interactive, sensory, and democratic in the truest sense of the word.
She believed that learning had to be enjoyable and built the school around ludic practice — learning through play.
Her classroom was alive with curiosity, projects, and conversations.
She didn’t just teach lessons; she taught us how to think, to question, to participate, and to find meaning through direct experience.
Dewey wrote that education is the foundation of democracy, but what he meant by democracy was not the political structure we now associate with the word.
He meant a living system of participation : where individuals learn to think for themselves, to act with responsibility, and to coexist through dialogue and shared discovery.
What we call “democracy” today has become its opposite: mass conformity and dependence on centralized narratives.
This contradiction stayed with me.
It led me to write about how pedagogy, once a tool for individual empowerment, became the vessel for ideological programming.
It was never Dewey’s intention; it was the distortion of his ideas.
My mother’s version of democracy was closer to sovereignty — education as the architecture of awareness and responsibility.
That is what she passed on to me.
And that is what I bring to this conversation: education as inquiry, awareness as participation, and responsibility as the foundation of freedom.
No more Slides/transcripts, instead keep listening….
Without Volume Confirmation, There Is No Breakthrough
A breakout without volume is noise, not signal.
bonus EPisode: Can Bitcoin Help You Understand Yourself?
NOTE: this episode was recorded earlier in 2025
