Education - Quareness Series 81st "Lecture".

To educate = to lead out. And the real leading in education is not commanding or controlling (as is so often the case) but creating a climate of possibility. Us humans are organic creatures, as indeed are our cultures, and people tend to thrive or otherwise under different conditions. Policies based on mechanistic conceptions of education don't seem to appreciate that it's really about people either wanting to learn or not, with many drop-outs finding the set curriculum approach largely irrelevant to or at odds with their lives outside of school. In contrast more enlightened policies tend towards decentralising teaching, recognising that the system must engage with the individuality, creativity and curiosity of students to get them to truly learn.

Curiosity can reasonably be viewed as the engine of achievement. We are constantly creating our own lives through a restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and one proper role of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. But in place of curiosity, what we more often than not see now is a culture of compliance and standardisation...obstructing rather than supporting learning...where our students and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite their powers of imagination.

The role of a teacher is simply to facilitate learning but it seems that the dominant culture of "education" is now more focussed on testing. It's the dominant character of such that's the problem here rather than testing per se which would be better viewed as a diagnostic and helping aid for teaching. Real teaching then is hardly just a delivery system for passing on received information. Ideally it must also involve engaging, mentoring, provoking and stimulating. In the end if there's no true learning going on, there's no real education going on.

Here's a little story courtesy of Ken Robinson (British author and Professor of Arts Education at University of Warwick) - a 6 year old girl (of whom the teacher said she hardly ever paid attention) sat at the back of the classroom during a drawing lesson and was very attentive indeed...the teacher was fascinated and asked her what she was drawing, to which she replied "I'm drawing a picture of God"...and when the teacher said "but nobody knows what God looks like" the little girl said "they will in a minute".

Children tend to take a chance...whether they know or not, they'll have a go...they're not afraid to be wrong. And we know deep down that if we're not prepared to be wrong, we'll never really come up with anything original. Unfortunately by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity...they have become frightened of being wrong. Having been "well educated" out of our creative capacities, many of us grow up to dread the stigma of mistakes in all aspects of our lives.

Human intelligence is diverse. We think about the world in all the different ways we experience it...by movement, sight, sound, in abstract terms, etc. Our intelligence is also dynamic and wonderfully interactive...the process of having valuable original ideas more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

Human resources are buried deep...you have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface...you have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. But too often our "education" is not the way that happens. We can create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. The essential nature of our life is organic, not this obsessive linear narrative we espouse e.g. the pinnacle for our education is getting into college. Our human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability.

Here's another pointer from Professor Robinson - there's so much competition now to get into (the right) kindergarten that people are being interviewed for it at 3 years of age...kids sitting in front of unimpressed panels flicking through their resumes saying, "what, this is it?...you've been around for 36 months, and this is it?...you've achieved nothing". Shouldn't it be obvious that a 3 year old is not really half a 6 year old???

A good living is about passion and what excites our spirit and our energy? If we're doing what we love to do, what we're good at, time takes a different course...an hour feels like 5 minutes. On the other hand if we're doing something that doesn't resonate with our spirit, 5 minutes can feel like an hour. Perhaps the real reason so many people opt out of our education systems is because these don't feed their spirit, their energy or their passion. Given the pace of technological and social change in our world today, our current systems (largely based on linearity and conformity and batching people) are set to become increasingly redundant for growing numbers of people. We may urgently need to move to a model that is based more on agricultural principles, recognising that human flourishing is an organic (not a mechanical) process. Like the farmer, all we can really do is create the conditions under which human development will thrive.

They say we humans are naturally different and diverse

As well as curious and inherently creative,

And this is what really enables humanity to flourish.

We may best prosper with a broad curriculum

Celebrating our many and various talents,

And not beholden to small and narrow focus.

Curiosity, that fundamental engine of achievement,

Can facilitate flourishing, even without further aid,

Given the natural learners that we all are.

And our common human currency can be seen

As creating and recreating our own lived lives,

Constantly imagining alternatives and possibilities.

They say it never rains and nothing grows in Death Valley

But a short rain did fall copiously in the winter of 2004

And a carpet of spring flowers later graced the Valley floor.

What had seemed barren and dead was but dormant,

With the sub-surface seeds of possibility just waiting

For the right conditions to spring into life. 

We too may bloom with an enhanced sense of possibilities,

Set of expectations or a broader range of opportunities,

And such climate change can happen at any time.

It's increasingly looking like the "selling facts" business model of our schools and colleges will have to adapt/change...facts are now readily available with the click of a mouse and perhaps soon by simply asking a wall in your house or wherever. Whilst it could be said of our undergraduates today that they don't know much, they may still have a lot of interest in almost everything. A little further along the education path, the master's student would know a bit more but it's been narrowed somewhat. And for the Ph.D it seems we must know a tremenduous amount about almost nothing. But students of the future will need a taste for the boundaries, for what's outside and just beyond. Ingesting a whole bunch of facts for later regurgitating in exams might tend to leave everybody with no added intellectual heft whatsoever. 

It can seem that we nearly always get what we screen for, and we may need to think carefully when we're testing whether we're evaluating or whether we're weeding. Evaluation really amounts to feedback and an opportunity for trial and error with a chance to work on such over a longer period of time. It's different from weeding but when people talk about evaluating students, teachers, schools or programs, they're usually really talking about weeding...and that's hardly a good thing going forward. Our approach to testing may need to foster attitudes such as..."I don't know but I'll look it up or ask someone, I'll find out". That's more how we can truly evaluate...the willingness to search beyond the facts. As our great poet Mr.Yeats said..."Education is not about filling buckets; it is lighting fires".

Sean.

Dean of Quareness.

August, 2017.

It seems tragically wasteful that many may go through their whole lives with no real sense of what their talents may be.