All learning needs to be an adventure, an excitement and a challenge to the mind, heart and spirit of those in pursuit of excellence.

Education needs to be seen as preparing people intellectually and occupationally for life, but also providing social, emotional, sexual, political and spiritual development.

When there is imbalance in the holistic development of individuals it seriously blocks overall effectiveness. The high-achieving academic who has no clue on how to develop and maintain emotional closeness with others is a serious risk to himself and those with whom he interacts.

A powerful enemy then to education is its focus on academic and career skills to the detriment of the more important emotional, social, political and spiritual educational needs of children and adults.

This imbalance is also evident in the training of teachers where undue emphasis is put on what to teach but little emphasis on the how of teaching.

Furthermore, teachers carry into the classroom considerable emotional baggage from their own histories of education in home and school: unless their complexes, dependencies and fears around education are resolved, they will pass on this baggage.

No opportunities exist during or after training for teachers to reflect and resolve these deep-seated difficulties.

There is the added problem that many teachers have lost their motivation to teach. Due to many of their needs being unheeded by governments and unions they are ill-prepared to inspire children to retain their love of learning.

Parents are the primary educators and teachers will know that by the time children come to school many already have lost the love and eagerness for learning which is present in all infants.

Evidence of such loss is lack of motivation, poor or little concentration, rebelliousness, hyperactivity, sickness, timidity, fearfulness and perfectionism.

Whereas preparation for teaching is largely inadequate and requires radical rethinking there is absolutely no preparation for parenting.

The first three years of children's lives are crucial to their future and the training of parents for the complex task of rearing and educating children is a challenge that successive governments fail to take on. Like teachers, parents subconsciously project their problems onto children.

It is a well established fact that leaders in any field of endeavour (for example, parenting, teaching, therapy, politics, medicine) can only bring their charges to the same level of development that they themselves have reached.

The future of society does not lie with children, but with adults. When I help children and adolescents who are deeply distressed, I can trace back the origins of their problems five generations. This phenomenon has nothing to do with genetics, but all to do with adults not taking on the responsibilities to resolve their own emotional, social, educational, sexual and spiritual difficulties.

It is also the responsibilities of political and social agencies to provide the opportunities for adults to get the help and support needed to pursue liberation from their fears. Only when adults are liberated will their presence liberate children.

One of the great tragedies of education today is how what was intrinsically has become extrinsically driven. Intrinsic to learning is the rotating experiences of failure and success; these are the gems of learning.

However, the practice of employing failure as a stick with which to beat children and adults, and success as a carrot to motivate, has effectively destroyed the intrinsic nature of learning.

Education has become extrinsically driven and this has created major motivational problems in the classroom and workplace. This is as true for teachers and parents as it is for students. If you want to reward an aspect of learning then reinforce the effort, but treat equally and joyfully the appearance of failure and success.

Bill Gates is quoted as saying that "the greatest impediment to progress is success", but he could have usefully added the other equally common phenomenon of fear of failure and fear of success.

Other enemies of education are the slow, weak, average or brilliant labels put on children, the confusion of intelligence with level of knowledge, lack of appreciation of all areas of knowledge, large class sizes, programme-centred rather than person-centred curricula, poor leadership and little back-up of psychological and social services.

Dr Tony Humphreys is a consultant clinical psychologist and author of A Different Kind of Discipline