So I was blogging for Thinking Parents today at Snook [1], about individualism versus institutionalism [2]:
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 [3], and wondering myself where learning without schooling can catch the most light [4] 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 [5] is about reconciling science with the humanities, or how to understand them as an integrated whole, and "The Ant and the Peacock" [6]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 [7] 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. [8] 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 [9].
. . .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 [10]." 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 [11], 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 [12]. If your learning inspires others, all the better -- but no forcefeeding! [13]
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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