The Freeing Discipline of Wonder
So I was blogging for Thinking Parents today at Snook, about individualism versus institutionalism:
I pretty much hate "versus" applied to any two things. I choose the -ism suffix to mean anything (not just religion) that becomes dominant dogma, elevating some system of belief or aspect of being to an all-purpose imperative, too much of one good thing to the exclusion of others. The one tool that makes every problem look like it needs a good hammering.
In this sense, individual-ism and institutional-ism are indeed opposing mindsets pitted against each other. Ugh!
. . . So today I'm remembering Mortimer Adler's oxymoronic definition of education as the freeing discipline of wonder, and wondering myself where learning without schooling can catch the most light without throwing off too much heat, across the full spectrum of individual and institution?
Two books came to mind in this context --
"The Hedgehog, The Fox, and the Magister's Pox" by Stephen Jay Gould is about reconciling science with the humanities, or how to understand them as an integrated whole, and "The Ant and the Peacock" is about reconciling this seeming paradox in nature: are individuals or collectives favored?
Is home education the single-minded and prickly hedgehog or the lithe, inventive fox? ("The fox devises many clever strategies; the hedgehog knows one great and effective strategy." )
The Hedgehog/Fox suggests our human tendency to make every question a simple dichotomy between two opposite choices is probably just baggage from caveman decisions like fight-flight, sleep-wake, mate-wait.
I suggest that tendency itself should be evidence against institutionalized education! - look what "School" does to degrade and demean knowledge and wisdom, by breaking it up into little disconnected learning "standards" with forced choice, right-wrong answers and discrete disciplines. But I digress . . .
The "ant" could be unschooling and home education in this discussion -- insignificantly small, renouncing tooth and claw -- but as easily could be Schooling, because the ant lives in the "public-spirited ways of the commune."
Or is learning beyond school more like the flamboyant peacock? Cocky, hardy souls renouncing the collective to strut their own path into Harvard, never mind the nattering peahens all about?
The question isn't simple. It goes deeper than choosing between individual and institution. Deeper than science or philosophy can answer alone. The only right answer seems to be that unschoolers, indeed all humans, are both AND neither, which makes the real trick being able to appreciate the full spectrum of individual and collective characteristics, in all its spiraling complexity.
Or one can go for the strange sort of faithful nihilism certain that reality is just plain neither, instead of both. I appreciate Christopher Hitchens when he's biting AND illuminating, but not when he forces me to choose between thinking him creative and thinking him destructive.
The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. . .Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.
Put this way, it's not really Ronald Reagan he finds so irredeemably stupid and useless. It is us.
If every concept is the enemy of its opposite, then we cannot be both smart and stupid. Or both antiwar and prodefense, like Donny and Marie a little bit country AND rock 'n' roll.
. . .both sides of the war issue are protesting in town square. The mayor reminds them that they must share the stage. Randy Marsh gets into a rock (anti-war) and country (pro-war) duet . . .
The 2005 Tony winner for Best Musical, "Avenue Q," introduced a funny AND wicked song demonstrating through jokes on its diverse characters, that "everyone's a little bit racist" even when we love each other because of AND despite it.
So I prefer these conciliatory books! 
Neither book sets up or takes sides, both books raise whole new lines of inquiry rather than prescribing answers, and both are greater than the sum of their factoids, at their core about beauty, goodness (AND, not OR) intelligence -- three things which a reviewer said "especially puzzled Charles Darwin." Transcendent themes that, as MisEducation is so fond of reminding her readers, echo cognitive scientist and education professor Howard Gardner's brilliant course of study for reforming public schools, 12 years of learning based on truth, beauty and goodness.
Learn these three life powers in school and out, AND grow into your own style in whatever ways taste real and right to you, AND satisfy your soul, as this slow food writer did. If your learning inspires others, all the better -- but no forcefeeding!
Depending on how the loaf is sliced, my family often seems to find ourselves in a small, abnormal group of two to five percent on one trailing end of some scale or curve. Home educating of course, a few unusual physical/medical things, some test scores, my own educational level, refusing to pick any political party, heck, even being the traditional family of four --biological mom and dad married and living with their own two children -- is getting to be a form of (positive) deviance. I think now it's less than one in three of American households, something like that.
There are other ways to slice the bread where we're well in the middle of some huge, indiviudally indistinguishable middle or norm. But surely the way we can all have the whole loaf, to be all of who we are -- all at the same time -- is to avoid slicing up human identity in the first place?
About all I've learned both in school and out, taken as a whole, is that everyone's a little bit deviant AND a little bit normal --
Something else from Adler: "“Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.â€
Or foxy peacocks, or whatever . . .
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All the Sense in the World
Submitted by JJ Ross on 15 March 2007 - 3:32pm.
I wish I had wise or at least witty words about it all, but it's such a BIG topic! I'll just dive in and see if I touch on anything you'd like to go on with.
Before my graduate studies in education, my bachelor's was in a top-ranking college of journalism and COMMUNICATION. What you say about actual words carrying only a fraction of the whole meaning is quite true, and even the words (as we see so dramatically here!) can be subject to various communication problems,
Which brings me to the language and forms of
so-called learning disabilities -- not my area of education policy expertise, although in the 80s I did serve as interim principal of a large elementary school designated as the tri-county magnet for kids with physical disabilities (which are so often intertwined with emotional, and sometimes mental, challenges.) Then when I was a large state's director of instruction, I had the three instruction and curriculum "bureaus" under me on the organizational chart for a year or two, including all the ESE (exceptional student education) services, Head Start and Title I, etc. But even the "regular" programs has to deal with all sorts of similar issues, accommodating differences with differentiated instruction, remediation of subject area and skills deficiencies, language problems among non-English speakears, etc. And then perfectly "normal" kids would have a crisis like losing a parent or losing a limb and suddenly they would have a learning problem too, which brings me to the thought that --
I do consider myself a disciple of Gardner's, not just his famous multiple intelligences but his later cognitive, education theory and leadership studies. So I should say that I believe both that there are research findings to inform our efforts to think, teach, learn and persuade each other, *AND* that despite the reality of those findings and their often-useful application in classrooms, in the aggregate, that every mind (teacher, parent, or student) is unique and laughably too complicated for any of us to to treat education as behavioral conditioning, the way a Skinnerian would.
Gosh, just getting started and it's time to run -- taking a breath, and a break for chauffeuring, shall we go on later?
OH and
Submitted by JJ Ross on 15 March 2007 - 3:37pm.
we limit ourselves too much when we think of human interaction as "education" -- at home or in school learning is mainly about relationships, Gardner's leadership studies inform all political discourse I think, and there's a great book titled "Emotional Design: Why We Love (or hate) Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman you simply must read! I think anyone who cares anything about the human condition should read it, before they start giving political advice for sure! :)
OH and again . . .
Submitted by JJ Ross on 15 March 2007 - 3:43pm.
darn, I NEED to go but there is this I saved once because I thought it was a related idea for independent home education and unschooling:
'QUIRKY KIDS' IN NEWSWEEK
By David Noonan
May 3, 2004 issue- Like the conscientious pediatricians they are, Perri Klass and
Eileen Costello keep up with the ever-evolving vocabulary of childhood dysfunction. . . .They've seen hundreds of kids, counseled and comforted hundreds of worried parents. And Klass and
Costello know how scary it can be when those medical labels are applied to a young child for the first time."The terminology has real value," says Klass, "but it
is also terrifying." So the two Boston pediatricians chose a simpler term to lessen the terror for families.Their solution: just say "quirky."
That's the word Klass and Costello settled on as another way to describe and think about the hundreds of thousands of kids who are "outside the common patterns," as they put it in their book, "Quirky Kids," which will be in paperback this summer. . .
I saved this in a forum at NHEN I titled "What's in a Name? Not Clarity!" and you might enjoy playing around with some other posts there too . . .
So now you talk about the human condition
Submitted by Margaret Bassett on 15 March 2007 - 4:57pm.
and that makes me think of Hannah Arendt, who wrote a book by the name, which would drive any good communications major up the wall. Since she was German, it's excusable that her sentences hang long and twisted. But since she knew philosophy and the ravages of Hitler, she can be forgiven for syntax. "The Human Condition" makes a point of defining work. Her nomenclature and mine don't quite jibe, but I think you can understand what comes from it all with my simplified explanation. There are menial tasks which everyone is beholden to carry out to some extent; household chores such as preparing enough food and shelter. There are constructive endeavors which include manufacturing of goods which persist for a time and building works which provide infrastructure, etc. for others. And then there is what we sometimes refer to as "opus" or "calling." The motivation is to give of oneself and present the poem, painting, play, whatever to others.
In the best of all worlds, we should all have something to give to others. Most children come with a sense of wonder and giving--the dandelion bloom as a present to one's mama. Childlike awe is wiped out quickly in many schools, and therefore in many homes. The little "why itch" is a joy to behold in children. A few teachers seem to agree. It formulates a chance to make a living and just live in one person.
In my case, there was never any doubt that I needed to study government so that I could get to Washington and help people have enough to eat, and not lose their farms. (Dust Bowl and Great Depression). I was not anxious to take law, with all those dry torts, and decided the legislature was not my calling. However, it was clear that the greatest need was to have understanding between peoples. By the time I was at the University, reality hit me. We had a dinner for the International Club, and I was told by an upperclassman that I could not seat a Chinese and a Japanese next to each other, because their countries were at war. And so things got rougher. During World War Ii the British, the Russians and the Americans fought together for what I thought would be freedom. Imagine how disillusioned I was to find that US Congressmen were fighting over whether we could abide Russians. McCarthyism was a state of mind much larger than one Senator's name.
Since I decided that information, call it education if you like, was the only way to help people understand that all of them are human. Religious people were likely to say we are all God's children, but they were also likely to say we had to believe in God their way.
During the summer of my tween years I used to walk to our country school to find something to read and think about. I would peruse the faded, fly-specked globe and see various countries defined in pastel colors, surrounded by lots of blue water. It occurred to me that people don't live by such tight boundaries. Even cattle would go from one farm to another unless there were fences, and they were only animals. People could go over and under fences.
Was it money which made folks so cantankerous? Or skin color? Or religion? Or schooling? Wasn't it right to believe that if we learned enough, there would be no wars? That's my take on life and I stick with it. The globe seems a little smaller in space now, but other than that nothing much has changed in 70 years. Different names and new boundaries appear on the globe, but it's still the same old world.
All of the above is a long way of saying that I don't believe people should be propagandized in schools, newspapers, churches, blogs, or stump speeches. Each person is at heart a potential globalist. And the first place to nurture the idea is at school, which is required to accept all young people. Snootiness should be forbidden. If a child is autistic, he is not disabled. He is autistic, maybe can't remember where he lives or what the times-tables say. If a high school graduate is neat, clean and honest and can't parse a sentence there must be some job which fits better than secretary to the CEO. To each his own. Gardner made a dent in that. And a Professor Thompson hit on NLD (non-learning disorder, which is very easy to Google.)
Then comes the mother of all bad legislation. NCLB! The 60s revolution sang of ticky tacky, little boxes. Is there anyone who can write a song to express the little boxes of multiple choice answers to please the likes of Margaret Spellings, just another Secretary of Education who has no clue.
And, in closing, as I forewarned you, I'm political to the core.
This just in - from my Efriend Yvona
Submitted by Margaret Bassett on 16 March 2007 - 10:23pm.
Peter Flom, a friend of mine, told me this one.
A guy is flying in a hot air balloon, and he's lost. So, he lowers himself over a field and shouts down to someone on the ground:
"Excuse me! Can you tell me where I am and which way I'm headed?"
"Sure! You're at 34 degrees, 2 minutes and 1 second north, 210 degrees 20 minutes 12 seconds east, at an altitude of 1102.2 meters above sea level, and, right now, you're hovering, but you were on a vector of 2.31 radians at .14 meters per second."
"Huh. Thanks! By the way.....do you have Aspergers Syndrome?"
"Why, yes, I do.....but how did you know?"
"Well, everything you've told me is true, it's way more detailed than I needed, and you told me in such a way that it's no use to me at all!"
"Huh......Are you a clinical psychologist?"
"I am! But HOW IN THE HECK did you know THAT????"
"Welll.....
You don't know where you are
You don't know where you're going.
You got where you are by blowing hot air.
You like to put labels on people after asking them a few questions AND although you're in exactly the same situation you were in 5 minutes ago, now, somehow, it's MY fault!
Yvona Fast
www.wordsaremyworld.com
Author, Employment for Individuals with Asperger Syndrome or Non-Verbal Learning Disability: Stories and Strategies, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2004
What's in a name?
I'm thinking Culture Kitchen. Is that a funny place for culture? Or is a kitchen the best place to chew the fat?
I had a moment and I thought of asking you a question. It has to do with educational philosophy. I saw your reference to Howard Gardner. For starters, are you with me that people communicate more non-verbally than they do verbally? I think that is often put on an equation of twice the former to the latter. So, what can ACTs or other such entrance tests show except that a person can take tests. I suppose you are familiar with the autism spectrum discussion. But what I wanted to ask, really, is what you believe is a disability and not just a what? Quirk of nature? I refer to the easy end of the spectrum with Aspergers and non-verbal learning (NLD). And then the question in the question (because you have undoubtedly more educational theory background than anyone else I could ask) is: are such things disabilities. I'm serious, because I was on a yahoogroup with some very savvy people who, in most cases, had been diagnosed as disabled because of NLD. If they fell into a category where their verbal skills matched jobs which they found, they could actually work and still be covered by ADA rules as far as Human Resources departments were concerned. Many such folks work, using computers. The downside of their aptitude is in "social skills." They don't understand facial expressions or voice inflections. They take jokes seriously and think they are not doing a good job, when they were being accepted.
Does any of this make sense to you?
You seem to be a person who enjoys all media for learning, not just pages of print. And that is not something I can't say for bloggers in general.