 What is the purpose of education? Those of liberal bent tend to
assert it is to allow us to become what we were intended to become --
fully capable individuals and members of community. Conservatives are
more inclined to believe it is to acquire the essential survival skills
of modern society, efficiently. And there are practical souls who think
its purpose is to learn how to make a living.
How would we 'score' the current formal education system of
affluent nations on its ability to achieve these purposes? I would
grade it rather poorly:
- Enabling us to realize our full capability -- D
- Enabling us to acquire modern survival skills, including how to make a living -- F
Institutional education has no time, ability or flexibility to
help us realize our full capability. Besides, its methods -- teaching
in the abstract in classrooms disconnected from the 'real' world, to
bums on chairs -- are not effective because this is not how we learn.
As Gustavo Esteva says, we learn better when no one is teaching us, by doing and observing, not by being told.
The survival skills we need in a modern society are not addressed
by the teaching of obedience, numeracy, literacy, and 'management
skills'. As the chart above indicates, to survive we need to
learn how to learn,
we need to understand how the world works, we need to learn to think,
critically, creatively and imaginatively and adapt, how to work
together, and how to self-manage -- to take care of ourselves and each
other. Formal school systems teach us none of these things. Because
they are so artificial, inflexible, and predicated on 1-to-n knowledge
transfer, and because they depend utterly on the passivity of students, they cannot possibly hope to teach us these things.
My book on working naturally, in Natural Enterprises, has the
daunting task of giving readers -- in the context of guiding and
facilitating them through a process for learning how to make a natural,
responsible, sustainable living -- enough survival tools to do this
effectively and successfully. And much of the book aims to give readers
the courage to learn how to use these tools.
But no book or classroom can teach people how to use these tools.
You learn how to understand your strengths and passions, how to find
partners for an enterprise, how to do research on what people need, how
to innovate continuously, how to imagine possibilities, how to
collaborate, by doing, by practicing, by discovering what works and by making mistakes.
Our formal education system has no time for practicing and allows
no room for making mistakes. In this system, practicing is remedial
work for those not competent enough at rote learning and not blessed
enough with native skills to get it right the first time. And in this
system, making mistakes is fatal, carrying the unbearable stigma of failure.
It doesn't matter that Inc Magazine discovered that the only
attribute that correlated strongly with exceptional entrepreneurial
success was previous business failure. These 'exceptional'
entrepreneurs had either the good fortune to fail quickly and
inexpensively, or the inherited wealth to be able to bounce back from
'failure'.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to the proponents of our education system that if students aren't succeeding, it is the teachers who should be given a failing grade.
The greatest critics of the formal education system -- people like Ivan Illich, John Holt, and John Taylor Gatto
-- would have us believe that the designers and proponents of this compulsory
system deliberately conspired to make students helpless and dependent
(incompetent to make a living for themselves, and hence frightened and
compliant to the point they will put up with the drudgery of wage
slavery). Whether or not this is true, the reality is that now, thanks
to automation and other technology, we no longer need that fear and
obedience to keep the industrial economy humming along.
In fact, that complacency and incompetence has now become a
liability. The rich and powerful need increasing masses of dumbed-down
'consumers' (brilliantly defined by Jerry Michalski as "gullets who
live only to gulp products and crap cash") to buy their junk and keep
their ROI growth up to shareholders' expectations. But since those
consumers are (mostly) no longer needed in the industrial economy and
since (even in times of low interest rates) creditors will only
subsidize mindless consumption so far beyond the consumers' earnings,
the corporatists have had to turn -- for new production and new
consumption -- to globalization. This lets them externalize (leave
taxpaying citizens to pay for) the social and environmental costs that
enable them to buy cheaper from struggling nations and to sell to new
consumers in those same nations.
The works in affluent nations, deliberately cowed and dumbed down
by the education system, have become increasingly useless, worthless,
expendable.
What's to be done with them? With us?
The answer, I believe, is entrepreneurship -- relearning how to make a living for ourselves.
My book, and entrepreneurial programs and networks (like BALLE)
can get us started. Those who have the innate critical and creative
thinking skills, sufficient self-confidence, the time to find
appropriate business partners, and to make mistakes, and to understand
themselves well (their Gifts, their Passions, their Purpose) will be
equipped to succeed at this, on their own terms.
They will become models of working naturally and Natural
Enterprise that others can follow. But will this be enough to transform
our dysfunctional and unsustainable economy? I'm not sure it will,
unless we also work to replace our education 'system' with something
that works in post-industrial society.
What might this replacement look like? How do we learn, naturally, or as Illich says, convivially?
Illich would tell us that this replacement would not contain
experts, or institutions, or processes that commodify learning. Gatto
would tell us it would not have teachers, or classrooms, or curricula.
Esteva, sounding a bit like Bucky Fuller, would tell us it is hopeless
to try to fix, re-form the existing system -- we need to create an
entirely new learning process, and let the old system crumble.
I suspect this new learning process would have these attributes:
- It would be a self-managed process, both at the individual
and at the community level. We would trust people to do what they want,
to
learn. Esteva found that in Mexican 'radically de-schooled'
communities, young people quickly grew bored of mindless activity and
began to pursue the natural inclination to learn. When I was in my last
year of high school, we were exempted from classes if we attained
certain test grades, and by the end of that year we had learned
to learn from each other and from the real world, away from classrooms
and teachers, so well
that our 'de-schooled' group won almost all the scholarships.
- It would be based on apprenticeship (which literally means
'grasping', 'understanding'), learning by observation of those
acknowledged by the learner as having exceptional capability, and on
practice (literally, 'becoming better').
- It would be playful, joyful, fun.
- Skills like literacy and numeracy would be learned in the context of apprenticeship and practice, not as separate 'subjects'.
- The entrepreneurs and artisans from whom we learn would not be
paid, but would know that they would eventually be rewarded for what
they showed others, what Esteva calls receiving a 'cooperación'.
- The role of those who care about learning would be creating tools that make learning easier and more powerful.
- The activities of selected mentors would be primarily listening, facilitation and, when requested, coaching.
- A key objective of the process would be achieving autonomy, freedom from dependence, self-sufficiency.
- Another objective would be cultural regeneration -- relearning local (connected to place) skills that have been forgotten.
- The process would be improvisational and evolutionary, not planned or designed.
- It would be based on growing hopefulness, not raising expectations or achieving goals.
- It would entail renouncing those technologies and other obstacles
that impede true friendship, which is essential for collaboration and
learning to make a living together.
But this describes a process that is local and community-based.
What about cities and other places that have no real community? Such
places lack what Esteva calls the 'conditions for apprenticeship' and the cohesion that
allows collective learning (rather than 1-to-n teaching).
Perhaps the reason that the most successful experiments in
rediscovering this kind of learning process have been in small,
relatively 'uncivilized' places in struggling nations is that these are
places where true community still exists. For those of us in anonymous
cities, and in 'modern' places where we think community has something
to do with shared goals or interests, it may be frightening to discover
that deep community is a precondition for true learning, and that,
without such learning, an entrepreneurial, natural economy may be
unachievable.
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MADE IN CANADA
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