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Let’s start off with a self-directed poll: How much do you remember of what you learned in the fourth grade? In high school? In college? Or graduate school?
If you took the time to calculate how many hours, days, weeks, months, and years you sat in classrooms and weighed that against what you actually retained, you’d come to the sad realization that the imbalance is severe.
Take another moment to register how much energy and money went into all that effort: teacher training; teachers’ salaries; running school systems; creating curricular materials; parental engagement; and state and federal lawmaking. I could go on, but I suspect you get the point: The incalculable waste that we call “education” is shameful.
As America enters the first phase of what I hope and pray is a new era of awakening, I’d like to offer a reflection on four key principles to guide our educational policy and practice.
We learn by doing
There’s an old Chinese proverb: “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.” Learning that sticks happens through activity, not just hearing a lecture or reading a book. In the late ‘60s, I had the good fortune of being trained as a teacher in a British infant school. Children (4 to 7 years old) in this low-income, underserved area of London, clamored every morning at the school gate to start a day filled with engaging activities: baking; building; sewing; writing books; dressing up; and putting on plays. School was a daily adventure. Teachers had to marry the two meanings of the word “interest”— to teach the children what was in their interest in a way that was interesting to them.
As humans, we are always in action. The limited understanding of Descartes’ dictum “I think, therefore I am,” has led to a pedagogy that limits learning to the very restricted activities of reading, memorizing material, and then regurgitating it on tests. Consider this: Did you learn to ride a two-wheeler by someone telling you how to balance yourself? Did you learn to tie your shoelaces by clicking on a YouTube video?
Learning to value one another
At current count, there are 195 countries in the world, which “house” people of every color as well as the absence of color (aka “white”), some 4,200 religions, people who are able-bodied, and those who are differently-abled, people who are fit and those who are ill (mentally, physically and spiritually), and the almost countless ways we are all different. I hope (and again, pray) that we are waking up to the fact that “we” means diversity and the imperative to appreciate, value, and include one another, rather than separate, demonize and exclude anyone we deem as “different.”
In 1987, when the spaceship Apollo 8 sent back photographs of the earth suspended in space, we could all see the earth—our collective home—as one whole. We are one community. When I was a teenager I had 15 penpals all over the world. Way before computers, social media, and Zoom rooms, we exchanged letters, birthday gifts, and holiday cards. Imagine what we could do today if we created a curriculum around such connection. Technology not only makes that possible, but it also makes it easy and limitless.
Each of us is here to make a contribution
A well-functioning community depends on each member finding and fulfilling her or his function. Each of us is here to contribute to the greater good, the whole. Education could, and should, be designed to cultivate the uniqueness of each individual. Instead of schools being a tiresome gristmill of competition, they could be exciting arenas of connection and cooperation. Instead of the cookie-cutter, assembly-line conception of schools that dates back to the industrial revolution, let us re-conceive our schools and institutions for higher learning as true gardens of growth, where every child, teenager, young adult is cultivated to grow to his or her potential, resulting in a world of self-realized individuals who know and fulfill their true purpose as members of the world community.
The role of education is to cultivate the spirit
The spirit is the third leg of the human three-legged stool: body, mind, and spirit. Yet spirit is the least considered and most neglected “leg” in our education system. We have so conflated “spirit” and “religion” that we have a phobic reaction to even considering how to make spirit a vital part of the mission of schools and schooling. Yet spirit—in the form of the human imagination—is the light, the fire, the flame that drives us to be our best as individuals and community members. We should train individuals to pay attention to and follow the voice of their spirit—the one voice each of us has, in the great chorus of voices in our heads—that is always giving us unfailingly good direction to take the next right step for our individual well-being as well as that of the greater good. We need to train our children to hear this voice and to follow its direction.
The human being is an amazing creation. We were given a body, a mind, and a spirit that is capable of feats beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. The biggest feat of all—our greatest challenge right now—is to live, in the present, in the space of love, not fear, of connection, not competition, of giving rather than taking.
The word “education” has its etymology in the Latin roots educere and educare. Educere means to draw forth. Educare means to train or shape. To date, our education system has favored training and shaping. Let us awaken ourselves to the possibility of first drawing forth, in every youth, everywhere on this amazing planet, his or her highest potential to contribute to the greater good, and shaping our world community from that.
References
Bass, Randall V.; Good, J. W. (2004). Educare and Educere: Is a Balance Possible in the Educational System? Educational Forum, The, v68 n2 p161-168.
Virtues in Movement, a new global initiative. https://amanibana.wixsite.com/vim-network
