An initial attempt to communicate the big ideas

Herein, I will attempt to offer support for a growing movement in education, one that I believe to be urgent and important. Nothing is intended as an indictment, but just a collection of observations and interpretations. I have nothing but respect for those who came before, and suggest change only because change is occurring around us, and not because we have been shrouded in ignorance. I would caution the reader to consider what I propose, and accept it only after sufficient scrutiny, observation, and experimentation reveals some truth.

Because I'm no poet, I'll start with a quote from a Lebanese Arab, written in 1923. Do you know who it is?:

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of HIS wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.
The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.
And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.
For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.

There is a difference between remembering and learning. Most of those who were charged with the education of my generation didn’t seem to understand this, or else they valued remembering over learning. This was even more true for my father’s peer group and, I imagine, still more so for his predecessors. Remembering is a skill, to be sure, and one with particular value, for it helps us piece things together (we must first survey the pieces). But the product of that construction – understanding – is a different matter altogether. Remembering has specific application, and otherwise has value only during this process of synthesis; information is incidental and almost always has an expiration date. Understanding, however, changes us forever. We change every time we discover new truths for ourselves, passing landmarks on our intellectual journey. In this way, we move past our old selves and our old truths, constructing ourselves anew. But perhaps the most important part of this process is the struggle that comes with assembling new truths. The terrifying experience of departing from the bedrock of previous understanding in order to consider a new, perhaps better picture for our reality, is one that affords us a powerful opportunity. Through fear, uncertainty and setbacks, we persevere, rising up with a new sense of our capacity for risk-taking and problem solving. This is how I suggest we conceive of learning, and the details of this process are as unique as each of us. As a science teacher, I make it my mission to teach students to pursue truth--their own truth--through empirical methods. I work to encourage them to seek truth on their own terms, so as to challenge themselves to take risks and refine their method for approaching problems. My goals for students go far beyond the content of the courses that I teach. I seek to support their personal development; to prepare them for the never-ending barrage of novel challenges that life will most certainly present them with.

This is a strong departure from the educational paradigm of the past century, whose motivating force was principally fear: fear of failure, and fear of our own weaknesses (fear of fear). For this, we have constructed artificial incentives, carrots and sticks, to herd the flock through the sieve of educational content standards. Those who pass through, having demonstrated an ability to satisfy their instructors’ contrived metrics, move on to refine their academic technique, perhaps making a few discoveries along the way, but just as likely gaining little in the way of an expanded worldview. Those unfortunate enough to be caught in the sieve built of someone else’s idea of truth, having little skill in acquiring knowledge about a static reality that is researchable in books, flounder in judgment of their inadequacy, groping for an identity not rooted in information treasure-hunting and “point” acquisition.

It has frequently been remarked that no matter how much money and resources we put into public education, we have little change in the outcome for students. This problem is very complex, and I think reflects a larger social quagmire that most educators are reluctant to address, but I propose that one aspect to the solution is a shift in education (and society) away from a material game of acquisition toward a deeper, more transcendental kind of educational nurturing. I don’t propose that we abandon the idea of knowledge altogether, but rather that we allow knowledge to be the byproduct of peoples’ development and refinement of their techniques for acquiring understanding. I believe that good knowledge is inevitable if we seek truth effectively.

The universe is chaotic. We are floating in a frigid airless expanse full of scorching radiation and giant projectiles. To make matters worse, things are continuously changing; weather is marginally predictable, resources run out, geological events alter the face of the planet, suns explode, the universe expands... Our existence is extremely tenuous, or at least it seems. A natural reaction to this is one that we, in our civilization, embraced some millennia ago: to create safeguards against the forces of change--to remove, or at least reduce, the unpredictability of the natural world. Such has been the charge of technological innovation, and we have had great success, at least in the short-term. We have managed to control the cycles of water in order to maintain a steady supply of food. We have developed ways of tapping into chemical energy stored in the earth to keep our towns lit at night and our homes a comfortable temperature. We have made the necessities of life so consistently available that people have time now to fret over what sort of shoes might go best with their new designer handbag. From our perspective, the chaotic has become rather static, though that is largely illusory. While we work hard to control the natural order, natural systems quietly busy themselves patiently assembling a counter to our structures. Soils deplete, the atmosphere changes, forests turn to desert, and rivers fill with soil. Eventually, all of man’s greatest creations are destined to be overwhelmed by the transitory nature of all things.

There is a major psychological consequence for this shift toward an artificially controlled ideal. In a static reality the universe is knowable; it is possible, in theory, to acquire a grasp of all that is, to become knowledgeable. And we have been at it for some time now. We hold in high regard those who are best at knowing, and feel ashamed of what we don't know. Naturally, our educational system reflects this. We are taught to seek knowledge, operate within a structured, rigid construct, and pursue a particular ideal character, regardless of our individual uniquenesses. We are assessed only on our organizational skills and our mental capacity for, and dedication to, collecting details. Meanwhile, genuine understanding and the tools to acquire understanding are often neglected entirely. With our sense of self now reliant upon knowledge, we cling to our internal libraries of static information, protecting them, occasionally to our detriment.

This mental game of acquisition has a physical parallel; there is a material outcome of this training. In the tangible world, many of us in our society find ourselves obsessed with objects. Our civilization is built on the idea of a life full of stable and secure possessions, cordoned off from others. We are protective of what is ours, and fence in our corner of the world, mirroring the confining and limiting nature of our intellectual reality.

And people face prejudice and discrimination based on the sorts of acquisitions they've made. Most subsets of culture have their own ideal image of success, complete with brand names and unique knowledge. There are private unofficial clubs whose job it is to keep possession of the great many things that have been collected by members over the generations (and some quite official ones). And there are similarly isolated groups who've been disenfranchised out of pursuing these things because the tools to acquire them are either alien or deliberately kept out of reach. Our obsession with things has lead to a modern caste system, maintained, in part, by a mythology that involves transcendence - the American dream.

There is a conflict. We are products of the universe, and the universe is continuously in flux. Our nature is to work within this chaotic sea of change, but yet we fight to control it, and ourselves, and we waste a tremendous amount of energy doing it. We limit ourselves to something static and almost immediately obsolete in the quest to bolster an ego whose foundation is unnatural.

But there is another way. We can choose to value the pursuit of understanding and wisdom, with no judgment for where one might find themselves on that journey. We can live for the journey, rather than comparing ourselves to some artificially constructed end product. We can teach our children the processes by which they might seek understanding, and trust them to find their own truths, in their own way. We can embrace diversity, flexibility, and the artistic nature of exploration.

I heard something beautiful the other day from a professional on the cutting edge of science education. She said, "if you're not comfortable with uncertainty, then you cannot do science. In other words, the process of pursuing truth is an uncertain one, and nothing but your own validation (or that of your collaborators) will guide you along the way. And this gets right to the essence of the matter. Rather than seek a discrete set of information as evidence of success, a scientifically proficient student would simply have a refined method by which she seeks truth. She would be able to state, with confidence, her conclusions, whatever they might be, and include a summary of her uncertainty. If her method were well-developed, then she would likely encounter some quality knowledge, but that knowledge would be almost incidental. What is much more valuable is the ability to distill truth, and to navigate in unknown territory. Her life will almost certainly be studded with innumerable obstacles that she will need to negotiate, and the greater her skill, the more she will gain from each challenge. Further, the kinds of knowledge that she acquires will have a greater likelihood of possessing ingenuity and artistic beauty, as it will reflect every stage of her unique journey.

I talk about science because it is the area that I study. But this is only one road and one skill set. There are paths for all of us, though the unifying idea is the search - the journey. If we honor each person's path through life, we can begin to do something bold and transformative for society.

Many academic-minded students have all but mastered the skills required to achieve success in that environment. They say and do the things required to achieve good marks, which requires significant organization (both physical and mental) and prudent communicative reservation. But these same people might have little or no ability to deal with situations with which they are unfamiliar. A colleague recently completed a linear study of a group of high school kids with which he worked for four years. He gave them a well-developed assessment of reasoning skills (Lawson’s) at the beginning of 9th grade, at the end of 10th grade, and then again at the end of 12th grade. He then compared their results to their grades in science and their overall GPA. Most alarmingly, he found 0.0000 correlation between reasoning skills and GPA for all three assessments. As you might imagine, their GPA also had nothing to do with their improvement in reasoning, and perhaps most surprising, their science performance also had no relationship to either their reasoning or their improvement in reasoning.

Perhaps the best example of what I’m talking about might be art. If you wanted to teach a person how to paint, you wouldn’t necessarily just tell him to reproduce a particular painting. While this might be a useful exercise, it will not help him become an artist. What is more important is that he learn skills: certain sorts of brush strokes, how to use different brushes, how to mix paints in a variety of ways, etc. And when he does something that you didn’t teach him, you wouldn’t scold him, but praise his creativity. You also might want to help him find images that are inspiring, or learn how to connect his technique with emotions or his imagination. The point is that if he is going to create something that has meaning for him, he need only learn a set of skills/processes, and then move forward in his own way. He should practice the creative process until he finds his certain knack for self-expression. And even then he might find that sculpting affords him a more ready avenue for artistic expression. Such is the case with every form of learning. The best thing we can do for students is to help them refine their process, to help them learn the skills that will lead to the development of their own methodology, which will hopefully then be a sound one (if it isn’t working, we can guide refinements). With this equipment their journey can be full of adventure, challenge, and passion, rather than stress, fear, and disappointment.

We are killing our kids’ inherent tendency to explore. Human beings are seekers by nature, and all of us have a unique quest. We explore and figure out, driven by our personal passions toward an unknown destination. We are not meant to compromise, and there is no excuse for compromise in today’s world - where we have the means to satisfy every person’s basic needs such that their minds can be liberated for the journey. I’m not saying that every person is destined to be a monk or wandering mystic. There are some of us who, without external influence, would find ourselves working as accountants or electricians. There is a lot of satisfaction to be found in that work. I’m not even suggesting that this paradigm shift would necessarily alter anyone’s life choices in any significant way. All I’m saying is that it would change the spirit in which many of us do things. We would be driven by the empowerment that comes with making choices for ourselves, rather than by the impression of necessity. Most every challenge in our lives could be an opportunity instead of an inconvenience.

Here are some of the possible changes that would take place in the world if we stopped fighting to control possessions and embraced the journey, the chaos, so as to finally begin working with the nature of things instead of against it: [to be inserted later… the list keeps growing]

I propose that we shift our paradigm. We should move from a vision of the world as discrete, static, and controllable to one that embraces the continuous flow of things. Our innovation has been sorely limited by an insistence on a sessile attachment to what came before (while history is very instructive, it is certainly not deterministic). Our capabilities have been bridled by an artificial perimeter to our reality, and those who have broken out of the box have either been heralded as genius-heroes or crucified for their heretical objection to their contrived containment (or both). We have shown what we can do when we put our minds to something, now the next step of our social evolution is to step back away from our egos, view the world and ourselves as we truly are, and return to the endless flow of change.