Four Convergences, Two Views of Education, and One Future to Choose
Thursday, 19 July 2007 Clay Burell 
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This one’s long. I hope you’ll read it anyway. If nothing else, watch the videos 
Convergences 1
When I lived in Westwood (UCLA neighborhood) in the ’80s, I walked home from work one sunny afternoon and saw a helium balloon, floating eye-to-eye with me above the sidewalk. It had a kite-like tail for a body, and knotted into that tail was a scrolled sheet of paper.
I untied the scroll, unrolled it, and read the word “LOVE.”
Beneath that was an address: Chihuahua, Mexico.
I’ll never forgive myself for failing to send a letter to that address, thanking the sender for such a wonderfully random connection. I mean, imagine that balloon’s trip from the sender to me. Its altitude, “view,” weather, its days and nights. And the astronomical odds it would find anyone and, wilder still, me.
Laziness, busyness, whatever stopped me – it sucked.
“Loves Lost” by Ultrastar175g on Flickr.
Convergences 2
I’m thinking of that because I sent my own “blog-balloon” out a few days ago to three subscribers I’d noticed in my Sitemeter from Moscow, Belgium, and Turkey. I didn’t say “LOVE,” but I did say “Let’s connect.”
The Belgium reader got my balloon and did what I now wish I’d done that day in 1982. He took the trouble to respond with an email.
Blogging has an uncanny way of generating coincidences sometimes. This was one. The Belgian linked in his email to a video about a school that he thought I might find interesting (and which he has a direct relation to, of sorts). I followed the link, and Lo: I had embedded it in a post in the first two or three weeks of this blog’s life. The title of that post? “Nine Minutes Making Me Want a Different Teaching Future.” The content of the post, besides the video, was me writing a typically verbose version of: “Wow.”
I want to learn more about this school, and hope to persuade my new balloon-buddy to be a guest for a Skypecast of questions about it. Here’s the video again:
And here’s a link to the original Sudbury School‘s website.
Convergences 3
That same week, another non-American blogger from the Antipodes, Cindy Barnsley, whose individual style and Australian perspective makes for such good reading these days, posted this gem on her Thinking 2.0 blog. Another view of education for you:
Is it just me, or does this ring too true for comfort?
Convergences 4
The web widens. This same week, Doug is questioning the foundations of School Anything-point-Oh in his provocative “Resistant, Clueless, or Just Defensive?“. After dropping a link to the Sudbury video into a comment on that post, I followed two of Doug’s links to two other thinkers with similar suspicions: First, the theologian-philosopher Ivan Illich, in whose “Deschooling Society” (1970) we read:
Rich and poor alike depend on schools and hospitals which guide their lives, form their world view, and define for them what is legitimate and what is not. Both view doctoring oneself as irresponsible, learning on one’s own as unreliable, and community organization, when not paid for by those in authority, as a form of aggression or subversion. For both groups the reliance on institutional treatment renders independent accomplishment suspect. . . . Everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs “deschooling.”
. . . . Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term “liberal education.” The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling’s sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learning and education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature.
Illich then touches on the infantilization of our youths I’ve been writing about lately,
School groups people according to age. This grouping rests on three unquestioned premises. Children belong in school. Children learn in school. Children can be taught only in school.I think these unexamined premises deserve serious questioning. We have grown accustomed to children. We have decided that they should go to school, do as they are told, and have neither income nor families of their own. We expect them to know their place and behave like children. We remember, whether nostalgically or bitterly, a time when we were children, too. We are expected to tolerate the childish behavior of children. Man-kind, for us, is a species both afflicted and blessed with the task of caring for children.
We forget, however, that our present concept of “childhood” developed only recently in Western Europe and more recently still in the Americas.* Childhood as distinct from infancy, adolescence, or youth was unknown to most historical periods.
. . . . [C]hildhood is a burden to a good number of those few who are allowed it. Many of them are simply forced to go through it and are not at all happy playing the child’s role. Growing up through childhood means being condemned to a process of in-human conflict between self-awareness and the role imposed by a society going through its own school age. Neither Stephen Daedalus nor Alexander Portnoy enjoyed childhood, and neither, I suspect, did many of us like to be treated as children.If there were no age-specific and obligatory learning institution, “childhood” would go out of production. The youth of rich nations would be liberated from its destructiveness, and poor nations would cease attempting to rival the childishness of the rich. If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present disjunction between an adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained.
Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.
After challenging our notion that childhood is “natural” instead of historically conditioned (and damaging to the young), Illich goes on to challenge what experience confirms for all of us teachers every time we look at our gradebooks after sweating blood teaching a unit. Illich challenges that “learning is the result of teaching”:
By definition, children are pupils. The demand for the milieu of childhood creates an unlimited market for accredited teachers. School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
We have all learned most of what we know outside school. Pupils do most of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers. . . . Everyone learns how to live outside school. We learn to speak, to think, to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick, and to work without interference from a teacher. Even children who are under a teacher’s care day and night are no exception to the rule. Orphans, idiots, and schoolteachers’ sons learn most of what they learn outside the “educational” process planned for them.
Skeptics, before protesting that they would never have learned geometry, chemistry, iambic pentameter, or the Bill of Rights without teachers and schools, should first honestly ask themselves these questions: first, how much do you remember of any of those school subjects, now that you’re well into adulthood? Second, when was the last time you made use of any of that learning, or felt the need for it? Third, what did you not learn, due to studying these subjects by coercion from age six to twenty-something – piano, computer programming, languages, architecture, whatever your own personal “opportunity costs” may be – that you could have learned, had classrooms and prescribed curriculum not completely monopolized your development for 20-odd years?
There’s too much in Illich’s lengthy essay to do justice to here (and I haven’t even touched on his “networked learning” ideas that are so much more ripe for employing with web 2.0 than they were when he wrote this in 1970). I’ll limit myself to a passage that is a formal variation on the South Park team’s “Music and Life” video above:
School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of creativity. School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition.
Can’t you see the cartoon student on that race to the top-floor office in the video?
. . . .In school we are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with the amount of input; and, finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates.
In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being “with it,” yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
Learning that is “the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting” and “being ‘with it’” – “it” being whatever part of the real world is “meaningful” to the young individual: it’s all so related to the “real world project-based learning” idea taking so much of my mental space lately.
But it’s also more. Illich is talking less about my classroom than he is about the Sudbury School in the first video above, it seems to me.
Don’t the students there – even the 11-year-olds – seem awfully adult?
Doug’s second link is to a contemporary edublogger who strikes me as Illich’s philosophical heir: Stephen Downes. His open reply to Christian Long, “To The School or Classroom 2.0 Advocates,” is fertile indeed, and the timing is right. It resonates with the ideas of citizenship and relevance I’ve been writing about so much lately. A couple of glimpses:
Instead of bringing students to the learning, as the education system has done for about a century, we must now, if we wish to be relevant at all, bring learning to the students. This means setting students free to pursue their passions, and then being there when they need coaching, mentoring, or a safety net. . . .
The task we should be undertaking is not one of trying to stuff more and more knowledge into students’ heads, but rather, finding more and more ways they can make meaningful contributions to society.
I can’t believe his balloon landed in front of me only this week.
I’ve got more questions than answers right now, but even more misgivings than both combined about the value of school, with or without technology, these days.
Call me heretical for wondering if the deschoolers, home-schoolers, and Sudbury schoolers have found the solution with one quick flick of Ockam’s razor. Etymology time again: heresy, in Latin, simply means choosing. Since “choice” pre-supposes consideration of alternative possibilities, “heresy” simply means “critical thinking” instead of “blind following” to me. Jesus was branded a heretic too, along with Socrates, Gandhi, and Buddha. Not bad company.
Or call me radical. More etymology: radical, Latin, refers to “roots,” and implies a desire to uproot. Maybe – and I’m only going as far as ‘maybe’ here – our schools, like the untrammeled industrialization whose origin they share, have become socio-cultural “weeds.”
So maybe, as any good gardener knows, a little radicalism is good for this garden?
Show me what I’m missing here, seriously.
And thanks for reading.
- Pass It On: Christian Long’s "Future of Learning Manifesto"
- "Did You Know?" There’s More to the Future than Economics?
- Education as “Aversion Therapy”: Watchmen Author Alan Moore
- Nine Minutes Making Me Want a Different Teaching Future
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No. 1 — July 20th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
It’s tough to keep two contradictory thoughts in mind at once – 1) “school” is so broken that it can’t be fixed and 2) I owe it to the kids who show up every day to fix it.
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No. 2 — July 20th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Hi Sylvia,
I hear you. Bur a third thought floats there too: Create alternatives to free them from having to show up at all. Not easy, I know, especially when that institution buys our bread. But worth some creative thinking.
That’s what’s intriguing about the home-schoolers and Sudbury schools to me.
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No. 3 — July 20th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
I’m working through Illich now, front to back in my own dogged fashion, wanting to give him a full hearing. As Sylvia points out, the contradictions inherent in accepting his point of view and advocating anything for schools is a major problem. As I understand him, the challenge is one of reordering our worldview, unchaining our expectations from the limitations of an institutional vision that defines who we are and what we might become. I’m thinking in terms of salvage operations at this point.
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No. 4 — July 20th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
I guess to do all three involves some sacrifice of a perfectly consistent world view. I remember Seymour Papert answering a question at a conference from a teacher who said something like, “what you say is all well and good, but what do I do on Monday?” He said essentially that what you do on Monday should lead to “someday.”
I don’t know if that means “salvage” or creating building blocks that are so good that they will survive tectonic shifts in the foundation. I really like the “unchaining expectations” idea…
Hey, just like the grindstone either wears you down or polishes you, it seems to me to be better to keep working in the current system, critiquing it, and at the same time preparing for a new one. The effort will pay off in both sharpening your perspective, and impacting children’s lives here and how in a positive way in spite of the obstacles.
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No. 5 — July 20th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Good points, D and S. Sylvia, your comment that it’s better “to keep working in the current system, critiquing it, and at the same time preparing for a new one” is pretty much where I stand – again, unless a rich uncle dies, I have not much choice to “finish school” myself.
That Knowsley initiative to build new institutions is interesting in this respect. It almost seems (minus the Microsoft element) a futuristic version of the Sudbury model, with a bit of unschooling thrown in.
I just read somebody (maybe Downes?) saying that we’ll never change our workplace until the owners or big shareholders have a change of heart themselves.
I can’t say I have much hope that schools will ever, at least in my lifetime, decide to change themselves into something without bells, prescribed curriculum, and true youth empowerment.
In fact, I wonder if trying to influence the bosses to do that is the surest way to being “expelled” as a teacher for “heresy.” (Illich quotes Durkheim or Weber, I forget, arguing that education is essentially a new religion with taboos that can lead to excommunication.)
Maybe investors or philanthropists are the way to go to create something different.
Thanks as usual~
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No. 6 — July 21st, 2007 at 5:57 am
Clay,
Here’s another convergence for you: I’m a fan of Illich too, and I’ve made reference to him several times in my blog.
I too question whether school can be repaired from within.
Part of the pathology of institutions is that they divert more and more of their resources to self-preservation, and away from the ideals that were behind their establishment. One method is to create the sense of indispensability: how many people (and especially teachers and administrators) would say that school is optional, even though they agree that the outcome of schooling is deficient?
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No. 7 — July 21st, 2007 at 9:41 am
I thought of an interview with a famous Australian cartoonist, Michael Leunig, when I read your post. It is interesting that he is touted as one of the most creative people in the country and has chosen homeschooling for his children. When asked about homeschooling his children he said:
“Well, they learn, you see, children want to learn. I think healthy children just, you can’t stop them learning and so you’ve got to provide, it’s a matter of provision. You create an environment where they are keen and eager to, and curious, and so, for instance, my daughter, Minna, loves her horses. She has a couple of horses and the horse is the teacher at that point. When they’re walking across the paddock, paddock is the teacher, the snake that crawls in front of them is the teacher. When they’re helping fix a fence or fix the pump, that is the teacher. Children’s eyes go to things, they sparkle when they see something, so you say, “OK, we’ll go there. We follow that”. You follow things.”
This is an important thought. How do we open up ways to “follow things” and provide more choice about what these “things” are?
I thought it was interesting that one of the students in the video you embedded talked about teenagers need to talk – I can’t remember where I read it but I recall one study that reported that students on average asked one to two questions a day in class. That’s an awful thought that you sit in a place for six hours and speak twice. Another of the students spoke about how “doing” was so much more powerful that listening to someone out the front talking. However, if you think back to any teachers who had an impact on your life they weren’t the ones that stood out the front and told you stuff. They were the ones who asked questions that made you think, who challenged you to question your ideas and society’s values. They were the “teachers” who helped you to make connections between what you were thinking/writing/talking about. Like Buddha, they were the people who said “don’t believe this because I say so, believe it because it seems true for you”. I have to say, and maybe I’m constrained by my own Deweyian “illusion of perspective”, that we are thinking critically about these educational and democratic issues because of, not in spite of, our liberal education.
Christopher Sessums, on school reform and read/write technologies, wrote how: Every action is a political action, and every action shapes our collective future in some way or another. Can bloggers call for this new task force, help outline the course of action, or is our perspective so limited by our choice of Read/Write technologies that we will not be able to see the whole picture as clearly as we need to?”
Sylvia’s reiteration of Papert’s comment that: “what you do on Monday should lead to “someday” is also crucial. We need to imagine and realise practical reform now. Given that I agree that schools in the next decade or two (at the most optimistic) aren’t going to change radically we need to be foot soldiers of change, even if it seems to be at the edges, and to push for systemic reform that recognises and values intrinsically rewarding learning. I think there are a lot of positives – if I thought the system was hopelessly dysfunctional and beyond repair I would find another job tomorrow.
Maybe I’m just being reactionary…
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No. 8 — July 21st, 2007 at 10:20 am
Hi
Also liked this from Miguel Guhlin in response to Stephen Downes:
“Why? Why should we ‘bring learning to students’ when they are so eminently capable–or not since we need some system to rebel against, like traditional schools–of organizing themselves against the totaliarinism (sp? use?) of schools? Let’s stop whining about changing our schools, and just share how these personal communication tools are powerful in our own lives, how we are using them to change what we do AFTER school, and remind kids that while learning is 24/7, school is from 8:00 AM to 3:30 PM, hence all the more valuable for that.”
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No. 9 — July 21st, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Hi Cindy,
I agree about the “foot-soldiers for change” idea – it’s what keeps us here thinking and writing and conversing about how to make those changes. We seem wired for it.
I’m not sure I see anything in Miguel’s reply that I can agree with in my own experience in schools of students organizing for much of anything beyond a better prom or lunch, so I wonder if he gave evidence of that. I also don’t think he’s fair to Stephen to dismiss Stephen’s ideas as “whining,” when they are substantive, whereas Miguel’s response is not. I’m new to Downes, so this makes me curious about the treatment his ideas receive. (I’ve also occasionally read Miguel, and seen him once at least consider quitting his job because he’s seeing no change in education, so he seems conflicted about this basic issue.)
By “one future to choose” I really was hinting at the possibility of quitting school at some point to explore alternative educations without them. (Again, the paycheck is a golden handcuff that makes this a challenge.)
I know that “Abby” is the daughter of privilege, so her “unschooling” is problematic. Most students’ parents are not a sleep-researching father and stay-at-home mother like hers. So finding alternatives for all, instead of just the privileged, leads me to dead ends right now.
But the idea of spending my last decades participating in attempts to create alternatives to a system that, if not “totally” broken still attracts me. Yes, I’ve seen moments of value in my classrooms. But the cost-benefit analysis of those moments for young people doesn’t comfort me. Are they worth 12 years of factory processing we subject our students to?
And isn’t the search for other ways an attractive one?
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No. 10 — July 21st, 2007 at 10:51 pm
Thanks for linking to my film “Voices from the New American Schoolhouse.” I enjoyed reading the entire blog.
Please let me know if you are interested in a complimentary DVD of the full length film (80 mins.)
You can email me a mailing address.
Danny Mydlack
newamericanschoolhouse.com
dmydlack@towson.edu
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No. 11 — March 4th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Clay,
This discussion hits very close to home; too close for comfort.
“Should I stay or should I go?” Yes, I was hearing that tune in my own head in the mid-90s, during my stint as a public-school teacher. I decided that, for my own health, I had to leave; but I experienced considerable guilt at the ones I’d be leaving behind.
It’s difficult not to get riled up, or to rile others, when discussing such issues. I’ve often said in public presentations that I’d rather discuss politics and religion than education, because arguing over who’s in charge of the country or universe is nothing compared to arguing over the right way to raise kids.
So I really don’t want to alienate or anger anyone, but I do want to put some of your words up against themselves:
You say:
your comment that it’s better “to keep working in the current system, critiquing it, and at the same time preparing for a new one” is pretty much where I stand
and also:
I can’t say I have much hope that schools will ever, at least in my lifetime, decide to change themselves into something without bells, prescribed curriculum, and true youth empowerment.
I can’t tell you what’s right for you, of course, but I will share with you my choice: I decided that I didn’t want to wait until my next lifetime to make a real change. I decided that the best thing I could do would be to do whatever I could to promote an alternative approach, rather than work within (for or against, as a reformer or subversive) a system unlikely to change itself.
Two roads are diverging in a forest. Granted, one path offers, presently, little in the way of financial rewards; but I’m telling you, Frost had it right: the road less traveled has, for me, made all the difference indeed.
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No. 12 — March 4th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Clay says: Maybe investors or philanthropists are the way to go to create something different.
This is precisely what I’m working to do with CASE, the Center for Advancing Sudbury Education.
The primary obstacle facing truly alternative education is that our government has a virtual monopoly on education. We’re compelled by law to give financial support to the government’s schools; anyone wishing a full-fledged alternative has to pay for that with after-tax dollars.
Why must we continue to confuse government-guaranteed access to education with the government’s being in charge of the schools?
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No. 13 — January 30th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
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No. 14 — February 13th, 2009 at 8:20 am
[...] I wrote a fairly long piece on Sudbury schools here a year or two ago.Bruce: questions: what are your thoughts on the equity issues here? It’s a [...]