#douglas thomas

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STREETS of BMORE x MICA:

Iconic row houses, spots around town and the mod Brown Center.

The subjects of unschooling and radical school reform have recently been brought to the forefront of my studies through various channels. In one class I am working on broad ideas surrounding teen engagement, use of technology, and formal education. In my personal research I've been studying the history of the public school system as well as many lines of alternative thought.

I begin to ask myself perplexing questions such as: what does a list of skills that I personally own look like?

Here's what I came up with:

1. Preparing food         Chopping food, knife skills         Preparing meat, knowing when meat is good/bad to eat         Knowing when food done cooking - safe to eat         How to combine spices/foods to make a flavor palate I enjoy eating

2. Working with children         Tolerance/love for children via a respect/understanding of their mind-sets         Knowledge of what physical requirements very young to toddler age children require

3. How to climb high mountains without equipment, to a certain degree of difficulty

4. How to sketch images I do/don't have in front of me for reference to a reasonable degree of accuracy

5. How to read

6. Basic understanding of Spanish, French

7. Proven ability to learn foreign languages if immersed in language

8. Ability to ride bicycle for upwards of 40 miles

9. Ability to carry a tune, and hear music/notes/pitch accurately

10. Basic sewing abilities, with and without machine

11. Comprehension skills, ability to make inferences, critical thinking, basic "design thinking"

12. Ability to critique, imbue taste, evaluate visual elements compared to natural standard

13. Superficial understanding of emerging technologies

I took this challenge due to a speech I read by Daniel Quinn, a cultural critic, who writes much on the subject of education and schooling. He talked about a question I struggled with during my time working at a day care with young children. I used to have a hard time describing to parents the major successes, as I saw them, of their child over the course of the 8 hours they were under my care each day. These were observations of advanced learning, many times of learning how to learn. They usually included moments of communication that went beyond simple speech, or complex physical experiments happening with multiple objects, in a trial and error type fashion, involving several major elements of physics, math, and sometimes even chemistry. These children were usually under two years old. My main problem was that the consistent milestones I heard from parents in terms of their kid's successes and learning goals usually revolved around the memorization of facts. I'm referring to the names of people, colors, animals, sounds animals make, etc. While these moments prove very exciting to adults, myself included, as time went on I began to wonder a very simple statement: why are parents so concerned with things their child will learn no matter what, to a near definite certainty, sometime in the future? 

I always felt helpless with this question, as I grappled even with how to explain my feelings on the matter to my colleagues. Getting back to Daniel Quinn, I found a cohort.

"Working on the kindergarten and first-grade programs, I observed something that I thought was truly remarkable. In these grades, children spend most of their time learning things that no one growing up in our culture could possibly avoid learning. For example, they learn the names of the primary colors. Wow, just imagine missing school on the day when they were learning blue. You'd spend the rest of your life wondering what color the sky is. They learn to tell time, to count, and to add and subtract, as if anyone could possibly fail to learn these things in this culture. And of course they make the beginnings of learning how to read."

I'm not the only one! Next I began to wonder what skills are important and relevant to learn in school. Thus the list I composed earlier in the post. A clear majority of these skills that I now deem important I did not learn in school. Many of them I learned from my parents and friends. And the ones I did learn in school I only fully excelled at once in undergraduate art school, where the education methods were vastly different than those in my public high school. 

Quinn goes on to ask what skills are essential to humanity. He postulates on the outcomes of a cataclysmic even that would leave citizens struggling to survive, void of skills that most humans before us grew up learning such as knowing which plants are edible, how to build a shelter. He compares such skills to those learned in publics schools: how to extract a square root, how to analyze a poem, skills learned for the most part with no element of individualization, no care for a student's actual interests, or natural leanings.  I think of A New Culture of Learning, and the Mechanistic Approach: "Learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered[…]as if the students themselves were machines being programmed to accomplish tasks. The ultimate endpoint is efficiency. Learn as much as you can, as fast as you can. Measure by standardization" (Thomas, Brown, 35).

This all ties in for me with teen engagement. When has memorizing facts ever been engaging? Learning, and learning to learn is seductive, fun, inspiring. Most of the skills listed above I learned in extremely personal experiential ways, and many of them I taught myself. 

I'll end part one with a quote from another "unschool" thinker, John Taylor Gatto: "…we need to trust children from a very early age with independent study." What does an independent study program look like for a 9th grader? A third grader? A kindergardener?  

In A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, the authors point the way to a new era of possibilities in education. Through the massive exposure of rapidly changing information and methodology that is the essential make-up of the internet and the hardware that packages it, as a species we must leap forward into a future of modern learning. Not so different from the "active learning" style which counters the passivity of human nature, the desire to give up responsibility for individual learning in a group scenario (Bion), Thomas and Brown show the power of learning from others through an ever-changing environment, and how this might foster the cultivation of the imagination. 

In the context of Marshall Berman's The Experience of Modernity, the application of active learning and learning from each other fits into another aspect of the modern paradigm and its essential characteristics (Capra). I have felt a great unrest in the current education model, a feeling that I think permeates across this country and many others, arriving at a frustration and desire to integrate the youth and adult populations of our world more fluidly with the resources available to us. Marshall says that we must embrace the natural pull we feel between the desire of a concrete past and place in the world, unchanging, and the will towards advancing our culture, intelligence, and overall paradigm. He writes of the evolution of style in architecture:

…ominous undertows: a lack of empathy, an emotional aridity, a narrowness of imaginative range.

These same qualifiers can no doubt be applied to the style of modern education. A system that is built for a sweepingly generalized population, lacking in empathy for the individual (be it teacher or student), where change and new practice is under constant scrutiny, narrows the imaginative range of learning for an entire society. 

Thomas and Brown point out the futility of memorization as a learning mechanism when the material to be studied is under constant change. Technology allows us constant access to this roiling flux.

Embracing change means looking forward to what will come next. It means viewing the future as a set of new possibilities, rather than something that forces us to adjust. It means making the most out of living in a world of motion. We can no longer count on being taught or trained to handle each new change in our tools, the media, or the ways we communicate on a case-by-case basis.