mary catherine is the daughter of margaret mead.
Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. - -Margaret Mead
p. 212 - rings to true of Illich (focus of change) and Erica McWilliams (key skill - usefully ignorant)
it is a mistake to try to reform the educational system without revising our sense of ourselves as learning beings, following a path from birth to death that is longer and more unpredictable than ever before only when that is done will we be in a position to reconstruct educational systems where teachers model learning rather than authority, so that schooling will fit in and perform its limited task within the larger framework of learning before and after and alongside. the avalanche of changes taking place around the world, the changed we should be facing at home, all come as reminders that of all the skills learned in school the most important is the skill to learn over a lifetime those things that no one, including the teachers, yet understands.
my own greatest resource as a teacher is the learned willingness to wing it in public, knowing that i will be faced with unexpected questions, some fo which i cannot answer: this is the challenge - improvising, learning on the job- that my students will confront all their lives.
p. 207 - on rhizomes
affirming patterns already learned would mean a profound modification of te teacher student relationship: skills achieved could be built upon or varied rather than replaced and students could be treated as expert sources on their own experience.
p. 203
most of learning of a lifetime, including much that is learned in school, never shows up in a curriculum. when school begins much of this invisible learning is negative: the inadequacy of parents as sources, the irrelevance of play, the unacceptability of imagination. school teaches the contextualization of learning and the importance of keeping different areas of life separate: home from the workplace, Sundays from weekdays, and work from play.
p. 202
the safest and richest journeys through adolescence are those of children who discover some area of skill that becomes their very own, focusing energies and demanding for at least part of the day a hones and delicious alertness. building model planes, ballet dancing, riding, computer hacking, basketball playing, working on a novel in secret, any of these, whether or not it promises a way of making a living later in life, can become a standard for feeling fully alive. a tool - a chisel, a guitar; or in my day a slide rule - taken up and recognized as a part of the self, can become the organizer of attention and commitment. such discoveries taking place outside of school, may be labeled antisocial, and children wo wither in school may blossom in the acquisition of street wisdom and be punished for it. commitment can be costly, setting children at odds with educational systems.
because schools insist on a set range of subject matters, even those children who have fallen in love with chemistry are required to study literature and vice versa. in a society going through rapid change, a diversity of subject matter is all to the good but it is one of the reasons why schools are at odds with the paths of learning as coming home. colleges sometimes become so preoccupied with "well-roundedness" that they discriminate against the happy few who have, the Hopkins's words, "found the dominant of [their]range and state." we are not skilled at offering students pathways through their preoccupations to a broader perspective, as care for one child can grow into concern for all children.
the minor tragedies of lost delight in learning echo the tales of star-crossed lovers of religious martyrs. edna millay wrote, "euclid alone has looked on beauty bare," but we can only hope euclid would have been captured by the beauty of geometry if he had encountered it in school. most children are not; most school systems do not expect them to be. every child who learns to walk is enraptured by the new skill, but few schools promote the same experience.
we do not expect most children to cleave to geometry or int the final couplet of a sonnet, as to a revelation of who they are. yet the human species has been honed through aeons of evolutionary change for readiness to learn, in small ways as well as in the dramatic ways i have been speaking of. each new recognition of pattern, each appropriated skill, could offer moment of homecoming, building toward an understanding and a capacity to participate ina complex social and biological world. it is in the sense that the model of learning as coming home can inform schooling.
p. 198
this is a kind of learning we know less about, learning that evokes the very being of the learner. in all the learning that involves the introduction of some alien skill, adaptive responses - seeking rewards or avoiding punishment - so play a part, but the learning itself doesnt not match an innate adaptive pattern no innate readiness welcomes it.
much of traditional schooling is concerned with making children devote themselves to studies that make no sense in the context of their lives. sleepiness is approximated by apathy, coercion, punitive levels of boredom. research studies on human learning used to be dones on college sophomores required to do taks in the context of the classroom - the equivalent of sleepy rats. nowadays it is more common to pay research subjects, using a carrot instead of a stick to involve them in tasks with no intrinsic rewards, and the same habit is spreading in anthropological fieldwork. yet for a species like ours, whos survivial depends upon learning, it must be intrinsically rewarding, like sex. it may be that the whole process of education prepares children for the self alienation of civilized adulthood by turning them into permanently *sleepy rats too docile to bite.
*sleepy rats:
p. 197
there is another literature about learning based on experiments with laboratory pigeons and rats. this applies across species, separated from the shape of lives, and for a long time has little to say about becoming a viable pigeon or a successful rat or an inquiring human being. my father fold a story of a psychologist who was asked whether, since rats are essentially nocturnal, he had ever tried running his experiments at night. "no way," he said. "they bite." "you see," gregory used to say, "all that theory is based ont he learning curves of sleepy rats."it is not that it might be possible to work out a percentage difference between the learning of sleepy and alert rats and in that way to correct the faulty learning curves. the sleepy rats were groping their way through a task that alert rats simply reject.
p. 197:
learning is the fundamental pattern of human adaptation, but mostly it occurs before or after or in the interstices of schooling. preoccupied with schooling, most research on hman learning is focused on learning that depends on teaching or is completed in a specified context rather than on the learning that takes place spontaneously because it fits directly into life.
