Education | The Direction of Intention

Step Into The Ring With A Teacher

Posted on December 19, 2010 by davidrobinsoncreative

image by urbanneighbourhood.com

I have a particular fondness for educators and a distinct dislike of the system in which they work. Despite what you may hear on the news, the vast majority of teachers are heroic. They are deeply dedicated to serving their students in a world that increasingly prohibits them from teaching. Currently, teachers are the scapegoats for an antiquated assembly-line system that was designed in another century to produce workers for an industrial economy (you know, for all those jobs we’ve shipped over seas); it was designed to produce people with a minimum competency. No amount of testing or fixing will make it something other than what it is: out-of-date. Teachers are driving a Model T in a Formula One world. It is madness.

When I call the current system of education outdated or madness, I’m not just slinging hash. Here are two examples of what I mean:

We (Patti and I) recently worked with a group of teachers for a week and a dedicated, intrepid young teacher told us this story: “I work in a district that is 95% free lunch (which means the children attending school are mostly very poor. A proper meal is a primary reason many of the children come to school in the first place). In my community many of the children come to school never having heard of the alphabet. There are no books in their homes and no one has ever read to them. I teach the first grade so one day early in the school year I was teaching the kids the alphabet and my principal came in to observe. Later, he told me that I had to stop teaching the alphabet. I asked him why and he told me that the state standards say that children in the first grade should already know the alphabet – so I needed to do what the standards dictate. He actually told me to stop teaching the alphabet and teach the kids to read. I said, ‘but they don’t yet know the alphabet.’ And he told me that my job was to teach according to the standards and I was not to teach the children the alphabet.”

I wish I were making this up. Madness.

Only in an assembly-line mentality does the notion of standardized tests make sense; in that mentality there are standardized students, standardized communities, and standardized teaching practices (which brings me to story #2…in a moment). Of course, the conversation that we as a nation are NOT having is the one about equitable funding, that is to say, standardized funding for all schools. It is worth noting that the teacher in the story above, out of his meager pay, buys light bulbs for his classroom so that the children to whom he is forbidden to teach the alphabet aren’t sitting in the dark. Now, there’s a metaphor!

Story #2: In the world of assembly-line thinking variance is anathema: it is imperative that all widgets look and act alike. So, removing the teacher from the equation is a top priority. There are now curriculums that require teachers to start lessons at the same moment as the teacher in the next classroom, to speak the same words at the same moment, to turn the pages and deliver the same content using the same language – all at the same moment. No kidding – and that’s not my story. My story is that the media is reporting an alarming drop in creativity; there is a crisis in homegrown innovators. Of course, teachers are catching the blame. Our national response to the reported crisis in creativity is to further hamstring the teachers by removing any capacity for meaningful engagement from the classroom by doing more of what is causing the crisis in the first place.

Patti and I have been hired to work with educators to “infuse” creativity into their curriculums – to teach them how to be more creative. The educators that hire us know that this is madness. They already know that creativity is not something you infuse into anything or anybody – especially in a system that is so clearly averse to variance. These educators are asking us to address a bigger question: how do we keep childrens hearts and minds engaged and vital (and teacher’s hearts and minds, too) in a system that is so dedicated to dulling them? They’re hiring us to help them have the conversation that the politicians, the media, the unions, the text book publishers,…are not having: the system isn’t broken, it is antiquated and the people best qualified to imagine something new are being attacked.

Not only is our current content-driven education system antiquated, it is at odds with what the latest learning theory and brain research suggests: 1) learning is most effective when it is process-driven, and 2) the process is infinitely more effectual when students are self-directed and self-regulating, and 3) The learning is most successful when it has immediate application. This is not new news: empower the learner and you will ensure powerful learning. Said another way, content takes care of itself when the pursuit is real.

In ancient times communities would stand in a circle around a goat and ritually heap blame onto it for all the ills the community had suffered. After purging themselves, they would drive the goat into the desert or they would kill it and eat it (a communion meal). This ritual cleansing was meant to rid them of their bad luck and, more importantly, to absolve them of their sins. A scapegoat is supposed to afford the community an opportunity you start the year with a clean slate. However, outside of a ritual context, a scapegoat serves an entirely different function: it absolves the community from taking responsibility for their participation in what they know to be wrong; it provides an excuse that alleviates self incrimination, self reflection, self direction, self regulation and the possibility of actually doing things differently.

We have known for 40 years that our education system was off the rails. Standing around our teachers and heaping blame upon them is to pretend that there are no other players in this game; it is to pretend that our education nightmare is happening to us and not created by us. The sooner we stop blaming the teachers and step into the ring with them (and students) the sooner we’ll have the opportunity to design a system of learning appropriate for the 21^st century.

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Open Your Symbol

Posted on May 22, 2010 by davidrobinsoncreative

Split Gate photo by rishwei

I’m preparing to tell the story of Sisyphus to educators in Hastings, Nebraska. Patti and I are helping them shift their perspective so they might consider some alternatives to the madness in which they find themselves. They, like educators everywhere, are desperate. They find themselves locked in a system that has less and less to do with learning and teaching. It’s no wonder. Our system of education was established in another time for reasons that no longer apply to the world in which we live. What they (we) are experiencing, a hyper emphasis on measurement and assessment is a fairly predictable pattern of behavior: it happens when the world changes, when the demands of a new circumstance collide with an antiquated system. Overemphasizing assessment and measurement is the strategy leaders take when they don’t know what to do; it is an attempt to fix something that isn’t broken (it’s antiquated); it is action for the sake of action in the hopes that something different will happen. Rolling a rock up a hill in perpetuity would seem to be an apt metaphor.

It’s more apt then you might imagine because the metaphor, when you know the whole story, isn’t about punishment or meaningless action. Like all great stories, Sisyphus is a story about transformation of consciousness. The image of the man rolling the rock up the hill forever is only a horror story if the symbol is read literally (and taken out of context). Sadly, taking a symbol out of context and reading it as a literal “happening” is a symptom of a community that’s lost it’s guide star. Story is the glue that binds and the metaphors within the story provide the commons, the place where all the varying points-of-view can meet. By reducing metaphors to the literal the community closes the door on its capacity to unite and transform. Everything becomes political and economic. As Yeats wrote in The Second Coming, “The center cannot hold.” The essentials are lost so we test.

In Bali you often pass through a “split gate” when you enter home compounds or temples. They are beautiful, ever present symbols. Two opposing towers that look like a single structure cleaved in two to form a gate. The halves are symbolic of the polarities, an architectural yin and yang reminding the Balinese of the polarities of our existence and the importance of balance in all things. Budi took me to a split gate and said, “The half on the left is the masculine, the half on the right is the feminine.” He asked me to pass through the gate and to turn and look back at him. Once I was on the other side he asked, “Now which is left and which is right? What was left in now right, what was right is now left!” He threw his head back and laughed (Budi has a great mischievous laugh, a broad Cheshire grin), saying, “What is important is that you remember that you must pass between!” He was teaching me about balance, about the middle way. This symbol for balance, this split gate is the metaphor for a life transformed, for how it is to be done.

The split gate and Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill are the same symbol. If you knew the whole story and were capable of reading your metaphors as metaphors you’d know that the rock was symbolic of the masculine aspect and the hill is symbolic of the feminine. Sisyphus task is to bring into play the masculine rock with the feminine hill. His movement is between the two, which is to say that he lives and loves and labors in the field of dualities, just like me and just like you. The purpose of living is not in the achievement of the task but in the quality of the engagement, the dance between the poles.

When the masculine (objective, quantitative) hijacks the feminine (subjective, qualitative), balance is lost, the center cannot hold, the essential is lost. Which loops us back to education. No amount of measurement, testing, or forced performance standards will bring about the transformation of the system. They remove the teacher from the equation, reduce the child to something standardized and stifle the single, essential aspect necessary for genuine learning: a quality relationship engaged in genuine inquiry. Measurements, in this case, are actions meant to knuckle-down and control, to fix “what is.” That’s why the educators in Hastings are desperate. They know what is needed – especially now – is the kind of wild imaginings that are only possible when we step into unknown territory and create new structures that support learning (systems based on the latest brain science and learning theory – not the 19^th century system that we still champion today), something relevant in today’s world.

Sisyphus is one of many stories that can show us the way.

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