The Human Fire 1.26 - Education for Possible Futures
What an education should create for us
This edition of The Human Fire, the first in a series on the Art of Life and exploring the elements of "possibility," comes a week later than originally intended. Last weekend, my mother, who has been in hospice care for some months now due to Alzheimer's, took a turn for the worse. She passed away this past Wednesday morning, my father at her side. She was my first teacher, and continued to teach me even when she could no longer remember me. I dedicate this issue to her, for all the lessons for which she has been the catalyst.
The first class I formally taught occurred late in my senior year of high school. As part of an AP European history course, our teacher asked each student to choose a historical figure about whom we would teach our classmates. I chose Mozart, and my class examined the ways Mozart's life and music reflected the ideals of the European Enlightenment period.
My teacher, Ms. Barrett, approached me after class, the intense seriousness on her face reverberating out through her wavy curls. For a moment I worried I'd bombed the assignment, even though it had seemed to flow pretty well and my classmates seemed engaged. "What are you planning to study at college?" she queried. "Uhhh," I replied, caught off guard. "Probably history and music." "Good," she continued, the intensity fading a bit, "because whatever you study you need to be teaching."
It's hard to overestimate what the encouragement and recognition a teacher gives a student can mean to that student's future. I've been teaching in a dozen different contexts and roles throughout my career, mostly outside of official educational institutions. In fact, I've always thought of myself primarily as a teacher. It's where I feel most at home in myself, and Ms. Barrett could see that.
It's equally true how the lack of encouragement and recognition can limit the futures open to a person. That's to say nothing of the access to opportunities available due to where someone is born, the color of their skin, their particular sex or gender, or the economic resources of their family. All these things conspire to block the possibilities.
We know that education can give us a future. But much of what passes for education in our world limits the futures available to our species. And that's something that, for the sake of our future as a species, needs to shift, and shift quickly.
Oxygen
There are a number of thought currents out there right now - I won't call them intellectual, because they are in fact anti-intellectual - that seek to diminish the creative potential of human beings. Rather than dwelling on each one, I would point us to the work of David Christian, pioneer of the "Big History" concept, as an antidote to that diminishment. Viewed from the time scales of universal history - as in, the history of the universe itself - human beings are a last-second addition to the universal stage. And yet, we possess something unique in all the universe: collective learning, the ability as a species to transmit and build upon knowledge from generation to generation. That, according to Christian, is the defining characteristic of our species - something to celebrate, and something to elevate as the crucial characteristic to build upon for a livable future.
Since I was on the university teaching trajectory for a time, I've collected a handful of official degrees, as well as at least four score and twenty friends with degrees and twice as many opinions. I suspect that all of us were educated in ways we didn't anticipate. Intellectual disciplines can train you to think a certain way, to see problems through particular lenses, which can bring a world of insight. It can have its limits, of course, but despite that I find it incredibly useful in such a complex time to see things, for example, in historical perspective. It makes me quicker to pause and listen and discern, in the face of whatever news hurtles into my life.
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Fuel
I know a few souls who think TED talks are the worst thing that ever happened to our collective learning, so much so that "TED-talkification" is now a clunky adjective describing sound-biteified contemporary culture. Personally, I find this highly amusing and ironic. Amusing because, as a former preacher, I see TED talks at their best as essentially a kind of educational sermon: occasional, contextual, provocative, and not in any way meant to capture the whole of an issue or subject. Ironic because the most watched TED talk of all time is a questioning of modern education titled, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?"​
If you're one of the 75+ million people who've watched arts educator Sir Ken Robinson explore just how education can kill the creative potential of students, then you may remember that one of his central points is that we are organic, not mechanical, creatures. An education that serves merely to prepare you to be an industrial cog in a great machine might have some utility, especially for a state interested in maintaining such a machine. But it might not have much humanity. It might forget that we have bodies, for example, bodies that love to move and dance and laugh.
What we have is a system that simply replicates itself, one that, as Robinson says, is "educating [students] out of their creative capacities." What if we had a system that produced more human humans?
We didn't plan to homeschool our son. My wife and I assumed he'd go to the public school in our town, just as we went to the public schools in our towns. But as a cluster of learning issues emerged during preschool, we chose what we thought was a supportive, small private school to start his educational journey. Instead, we pulled him out of kindergarten halfway through the year, two months before the pandemic started and after five months of learning, well, nothing, having been bullied, and leaving with a sour taste for schooling.
As a parent, I came into this journey with extensive graduate study in the history of education and two decades of teaching experience. Yet I can say that I've learned more about education through being one of my son's teachers than I did in most of my degree programs. Every assumption about learning acquisition, about pedagogy, about goal setting, about timelines, about relationship - all these have come under scrutiny, and many tossed out the window.
I can also see where my education has both hindered and helped me adapt to the realities of my son's experience and needs. It hindered me in instances where I trusted an abstract system to provide an "adequate education." It helped me when I was able to apply developmental and contextual frames to the practical decisions of what, who, when, and how that my son needed. (And, it helped provide the wisdom necessary to recognize that my wife was both smarter and more adaptable than I was on this subject of education.)
In the end, the homeschooling path has showed me the limits of my own education and how much I still have yet to learn. But it's also made me eager to pass on what I do know: how to learn from experience, how to adapt when circumstances call for it, how to increase in wisdom and joy through whatever we learn.
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Heat
Even the smartest among us can misunderstand things. Take William James, one of American's greatest thinkers, who made landmark contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religious studies. James is known for his advocacy of pragmatism, a uniquely American philosophy that stresses the notion that ideas are tools for thinking, not abstract essences - an "idea about ideas," as Louis Menand put it. Pragmatism was formulated by James' friend and fellow philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (like "purse"). Peirce thought James' emphasis on practical outcomes distorted the heart of the philosophy, so much so that he coined a brand-new term - pragmaticism - to further clarify and correct what James had gotten wrong. Where have you misunderstood an idea or issue that your friends or teachers have had to correct you?
Education, it seems to me, is a process of focused attention. It's not about mere skills, or bodies of knowledge, though it includes those. It's rather about the dance between them, a weaving together, a building upon, and responding to what has been and what may be. Posse, rather than esse, as Irish philosopher Richard Kearney put it. How does that understanding inform your own education? What possibilities have opened for you from your education, and what has been closed to you?
Until next week, I'll see you down the path,
Chad
I am sorry to hear about your mother's passing. Blessings on you and your family.
Love this piece!
I attended 17 public schools, graduated barely, attended trade school for a dying profession.
My education offered me the possibility that learning had less to do with content than relationship: many times I've found myself learning something not because I liked the thing, but because I resonated with the teacher.
I don't feel bound by a degree or lack of one, though at times have begrudged the loneliness of my path.