Education is scarce, but learning is abundant

The paradox in the headline is one that is made by humans, not nature. Education—namely, what goes on in schools and is certified by them—is made scarce by defining only those who have school degrees as being educated; this means the more degrees one has the more educated you are supposed to be. Those who can pay for the most expensive (scarcest) degrees—or if they are poor receive an even scarcer scholarship—are thought to be more educated than those who attend schools in less tony zip codes. This mentality leads most parents to fret that their schools are shortchanging their children, and the current call for teacher accountability to be tied to student achievement is one example. Costly studies, programs, and additional teacher certifications are all being done to make sure that if a teacher teaches, the student will learn it and prove it by getting a higher score on a test than they did before the teacher taught the material.

Since homeschooling throws this paradigm out the window it is ignored by policy makers, educators, and most parents who feel their children won’t learn anything worthwhile on their own or from their community. However, homeschooling has much to add to this discussion, particularly in times of economic contraction and tuition increases. Homeschoolers have been finding people and places for their children to learn with and from for decades, but they are not necessarily certified teachers, though some are. Indeed, many of them are local businesspeople, other homeschoolers, and people who are willing to share their interests with others.

The fact is, if you know how to do something you can help someone else learn it. You may not be a good teacher at first, but it is possible to learn how to be a good teacher on the job, especially if you are able to get honest feedback from your students. Most important, learning is a journey and you don’t need to have a master teacher who holds your hand every step of the way. Teachers, like guides, change depending where you are in your journey. Few people are exploring where and how teachers and learners can find one another since it is assumed this process can, or should, only happen in school according to bureaucratic formulas. However, John McKnight and his colleagues have been learning otherwise for many years.

John McKnight is a pioneer for encouraging people to get more involved in their local communities and develop local resources that aren’t controlled by distant institutions, and his work has inspired me over the years. His website, www.abundantcommunity.com, is a great place to learn about his work. This blog entry was particularly striking because it deals directly with low-cost ways to learn. He writes: 

Throughout the United States, local school districts are cutting back on teachers and curriculum while increasing class size.  With our current economy, it doesn’t appear that this trend will soon be reversed.

This grim prospect depends upon whether we have the novel belief that it takes a school to educate a child. Historically, the primary source of education was the knowledge and wisdom of the villagers. However, as the power of schooling grew, the neighborhood knowledge got devalued and unused. And so it is that local people often feel cornered as schooling recedes.

In one African-American, working-class neighborhood in Chicago, they’re finding out what their neighbors believe they know well enough to teach the local young people. When they interviewed 19 adults living on 3 blocks, they found that they were prepared to teach 37 different topics.

To see the list of topics and learn more about this, read John’s essay “It Takes A Village to Educate a Child.”

Don’t Let the Shadow of the Future Cloud Children’s Lives

One of the many gifts I received from my attendance at the Radical Nemesis: Ivan Illich conference on April 1 was getting together with old friends and colleagues, many of whom I hadn’t seen in some time. Though the conference was quite good, the conversations we had after the event, during dinner and breakfast, were, to me, even more interesting. Indeed, Dan Grego, the director of the TransCenter for Youth in Milwaukee, had many sharp things to say, particularly when our conversation moved to education.

I often note, as others of like-mind do too, that we should live with and enjoy our children now, in the moment, and that it is okay to ignore what the state curriculum says we need to be making our children learn now and instead focus on what the children are actually interested in and are motivated to do, no matter how far removed from conventional schooling it appears to be to us.

During this conversation Dan referred to Ivan’s idea of “the shadow the future throws” on our present thoughts and actions. Dan told me the following story, which is part of a longer work in progress that he shared with me following the conference. Dan plans to publish the complete article soon, but he gave me permission to use these excerpts.

The Educator’s Folly

Back in 2004, the National Council of La Raza received grants to support the creation of Early College High Schools across the country and determined that some of them would be in Wisconsin.  A press conference was held at the Milwaukee Area Technical College to announce the initiative.  I was invited to attend.

When I arrived, crews from several local television stations were setting up their cameras and microphones.  A group of young people enrolled in the alternative high schools that had been selected to participate in the project were sitting in the back of the room waiting for the dignitaries to show up and the press conference to begin. 

I mingled with the students and chatted with some of them.  I got to know a young man named Ben who was seventeen.  After talking with him for a while, I made a prediction: 

In a few minutes, you and your friends will be asked to stand behind the podium and listen to the speakers.  At some point, one of them will say something like: “This is a great day for Milwaukee because our children are our future.”  When that happens, go over and grab the microphone away from whoever is speaking and tell him: “I’m here right now.”

The press conference began.  The students were herded behind the podium.  The president of the technical college welcomed everyone and introduced a representative from the National Council of La Raza who described the initiative.  Then, he invited the superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools up to the microphones.  The superintendent said: “This is a great day for Milwaukee because our children are our future.” 

Standing behind the cameras, I made eye contact with Ben and gestured to him to do what I had suggested.  He smiled shyly, looked down at his shoes, and shook his head.  The press conference droned on to its conclusion.  When it was over and the media people were packing up their equipment, Ben found me in the crowd. 

“How did you know someone would say that?” he asked.

“Because,” I answered, “most of the people in the adult world don’t believe you’re here.  They think you are somewhere else they call The Future.”

 2.

There are some practical reasons why educators should abandon their “obsessive speculations about the future.”  My conversation with Ben points to one of them.

For too long, in modern, industrial societies, adolescents have been given mixed messages.  Fashion designers and advertisers treat them as mini-adults and bombard them with seductive images intended to persuade them that they can be sexy at thirteen; while in schools, they are often infantilized.  They are told over and over again in subtle, and sometimes in not so subtle, ways that they cannot be expected to make real, useful contributions to their communities until some nebulous “future.”  No wonder so many young people feel they are “growing up absurd.”[1]

. . .  A second drawback of educators’ obsession with the future is that it is actually a hindrance to parental involvement in the education of their children.  Parents, of necessity, must live in the present.  They have mortgages to pay, homes to care for, neighbors they are obliged to love as they love themselves, communities to which to contribute.  If children are being educated for The Future, then schools are separating, in a fundamental way, children from their parents.  And Wendell Berry has pointed out this separation inevitably leads to the undermining of communities:

Neither teachers nor students feel themselves answerable to the community, for the school does not exist to serve the community.  It exists to aid and abet the student’s escape from the community into ‘tomorrow’s world,’ in which community standards, it goes without saying, will not apply.[2]

This obsession with The Future is, by definition, irresponsible.  To be responsible is “to be able to respond” to someone or something.  Since the future has yet to happen, one cannot possibly respond to it.  The consequences of the obsession, both for individuals and for communities, are almost entirely negative.

. . . I think our future-obsessed educators misunderstand the true purpose of education.  Education is the process by which people become responsibly mature members of their communities.  If young people develop character, become familiar with their cultural inheritance and the wisdom of the past, and acquire the habits of mind that will help them think critically, they will find their way to productive adulthood. 

By placing the use of the energy and talents of our youth in abeyance, by separating children from their parents and thereby undermining communities, and by irresponsibly presuming to know the future, educators participate in folly, the proportions of which resemble a modern form of idolatry . . .

. . . C. Douglas Lummis, a former professor of International and Cultural Studies who taught in Japan, once asked Ivan Illich in an interview to speculate about a “possible future.”  Illich responded sharply: “To hell with the future!  It’s a man-eating idol.  Institutions have a future…but people have no future.  People have only hope.”[3] 

It has not always been this way.  In the past, in most cultures, people had the sense to know that the future was in the hands of the gods.  The classics scholar, Bernard Knox, wrote:

The early Greek imagination envisaged the past and the present as in front of us – we can see them.  The future, invisible, is behind us.  Only a few very wise men can see what is behind them; some of these men, like the blind prophet Tiresias, have been given this privilege by the gods.  The rest of us, though we have our eyes, are walking blind, backward into the future.[4]

The story of how human beings abandoned this understanding and began to believe that the future was ours to design and control is long and has been told a number of times . . . [5]

---

[1] Paul Goodman. 1960. Growing Up Absurd. New York, NY: Random House.

[2] Wendell Berry. 2002. The Art of the Commonplace. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, p. 63.

[3] Ivan Illich and David Cayley. 2005. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, p. xix.

[4] Bernard Knox. 1994. Backing into the Future. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 11-12.

[5] See, for example: Robert Nisbet. 1980. History of the Idea of Progress. New York, NY: Basic Books; Morris Berman. 1981. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Christopher Lasch. 1991. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.  The story was also the theme of a novel that won (ironically?) the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship.  Daniel Quinn. 1992. Ishmael. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

The Importance of Vulnerability in Learning

I often hear about the qualities needed for children to learn effectively and they are, sadly, often the same among most schools and homeschooling parents: for instance, children should sit still and follow instructions, complete their assignments every day, and get good grades. From a technical, school-efficiency view of learning these qualities are vital for providing detailed records of student performance in order to inform the school what they will do next to the student, but from a person-centered view of learning they are not nearly as important. This view, which I hold, places individual motivation, open questioning, and the singular ways in which each child learns to be far more important for nurturing learning than school efficiency. As John Holt often noted, “…little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning.” When I viewed this TED video by Brene Brown, author of The Gift of Imperfection, I understood, more completely, the importance of maintaining personal vulnerability, not just for learning but also for living a full life.

Dr. Brown presents herself as a hard-nosed researcher whose job is “to control and predict,” the essential task of research. However, as Dr. Brown, a social worker, applied hard science to her task of measuring the ability of people to feel connected to others, she learned that being able to feel connected to people also involved deep feelings of shame and fear, something she didn’t expect. As she explored the role of shame and fear in how we connect, or don’t connect, with others she also went on a fascinating personal journey that led her to change her ideas not only about social work but also about life, learning, and parenting. Brown initially follows her professor’s advice to “lean into the discomfort,” and she organizes the messy discomforts of her life and work into neatly arranged Bento boxes, but she eventually concludes that this is not how we can form authentic relationships with others, and so, applying her research to herself, she had to relearn how to be vulnerable, how to take risks in love and life, how to “lean into the joy.”

John Holt wrote at length, nearly 50 years ago, about how fear and shame inhibit learning (see How Children Learn and How Children Fail) and his observations are well supported by Dr. Brown’s research and stories. Though she doesn’t spend a lot of her time discussing children and learning, the overall message of this talk is so well presented and vital that you will easily make your own connections to parenting and education.



New Unschooling Documentary Preview

Dr. Robert Kay, a psychiatrist who worked with the Philadelphia public school system for many years, has been a friend and supporter of unschooling for decades. Bob and I have also been friends for a very long time and I always enjoy his ideas and articles about education. Erick Mijlin, of Artifact Pictures, took an interest in Bob and filmed "a meandering conversation about teaching and learning" with him. Bob's genial presentation of the concepts behind mass education and individual learning confirm unschooling as a fantastic option for families. The entire 27-minute DVD is available from Artifcat Pictures. Artifcat has released two excerpts that you can view below.

This summarizes the history of education in under four minutes, relying heavily on John Taylor Gatto, Joel Spring and Michael Katz.

This summarizes, in under two minutes, how and why learning occurs and what we can do to help it flourish.