Ken Robinson’s 2010 TED talk is up titled, “Bring on the learning revolution!“ (via @hjarche)
Of course it is full of moving sentiments and wonderful ideas, presented with great wit, and I’ll recommend it to everyone (not that I have to, as it recommends itself)… but I think it falls short on substance:
Criticizing schools is easy (which is not to say unjustified). Saying we need a “revolution” is easy. Talking about doing what “resonates with your spirit” is easy too — and too easily parroted by people with less genuine intentions and appreciation than Robinson’s.
While the education system certainly needs to be updated, focusing all of our attention on the system itself is, in some ways, perfectly counterproductive. The autonomy and creativity we want to foster is inherently defied by any type of systematic scheme — even a revolutionary one. The way to teach autonomy and creativity is to just become a model of autonomy and creativity, allowing others to observe and mimic while enabling or complementing their self-driven attempts to cultivate personal mastery.
In the classroom there are techniques teachers can use (which I know nothing about, except through casual conversation with teachers) to nudge students, and no doubt there are many anecdotal cases indicating a teacher can intervene successfully to put a student’s life on the right track, but I think those are exceptional cases (balanced by perhaps just as many negative outcomes), impossible to repeat and replicate on a mass scale, so we have to say it’s ultimately up to each student to learn what their own story is and follow through on it.
And up to each of us too…
(Matrix fans will jump in at this point to say, “I can show you the door, but you have to walk through it.”)
The kind of education system Robinson gestures towards can’t exist within a society that still works on old assumptions. Kids aren’t going to learn to think dynamically and critically if everything outside of school is still framed by fixed rules and linear goals.
Approaching it from the other direction, if students live in households and communities that are open and generative (in Zittrain’s sense, not just Erikson’s) then schools should naturally evolve that way as well, as they are immersed within that culture, from which they take not just demands and ideas but also staff and leadership, importing generative norms and behaviors with them.
It goes both ways, and it might seem hard to know where to start. Education has always been a bit of a “chicken and egg” thing: schools make people while people make schools. But it only looks that way when we make the problem abstract. When we look at the challenge in context rather than in the abstract, the question of “what comes first?” dissolves into “what can I do now?”
What you can do now — i.e. while you wait for some super-genius to concoct a brilliant scheme for revolutionizing education — is simply start challenging yourself to keep learning new things: pick up a book on a topic you’ve always been fascinated by, or try answering a question you’ve always wondered about, or try making something to find out if it really works. What you learn will naturally lead to new questions and interests — which is exactly what we want. We want this ongoing learning process to take on a life of its own, influencing others and softening the rigid barriers to personal growth that ossify in our schools and workplaces. It builds positive feedback cycles as the evolving institutions become more hospitable to autonomy and creativity.
Having a sense of purpose helps; eventually it isn’t enough to go from one book to the next without a sense of coherent mission.
What worked for me was, ironically, trying to invent a better way to learn (and account for learning). I figured, what’s the worst that could happen — even if I “fail,” I’ll still learn a lot about learning!
So if you’re looking for a purpose, try answering these points and let me know how it works for you:
- Explain exactly how you learn most effectively (when self-directed).
- How do you demonstrate or account for what you learn that way?
- How might you teach others that way and scale it into a “system”?
Maybe you learn best in a traditional school environment. If that’s the case… why did you read this?
More via my Best On Education page and my book, Truth, Will & Relevance.
