|
In Search of Great Skills
How we are separating learning and growth
from the natural process of living
By Jim Strickland
If Napoleon Dynamite (of the 2004 film of the same name) was
right when he said that “girls only want boyfriends who have great skills,” then
I’m surprised my marriage has lasted 15 years. It’s embarrassing to admit, but
my wife has already figured it out and swears she loves me anyway, so here goes:
I have very few great skills. Ouch… there, I said it. Sad, but true.
Now before I go any further, let me qualify my confession by saying that I have
now become, in my mid-40s, a virtual skill-learning machine. This past summer
alone, I learned how to make homemade pizza, started knitting, took up gardening
and taught myself how to play “Hey There Delilah” on the guitar. Not bad for a
recovering incompetent. But how did I make it through school and this far in
life without learning how to do anything really useful?
Well, let’s think about that. Schools are designed to prepare (read “program”)
our children to fit into the world (read “economy”) as it is. And the world
(economy) that currently exists is largely controlled by powerful multinational
corporations that exert enormous influence over our governments, our schools and
even our minds through mass marketing and control of the media. These
corporations don’t want people who can actually do anything. They need people
who will follow directions, work long hours, put corporate needs before their
own and those of their families and, of course, consume.
So, is it any surprise that this is exactly what our schools teach: obedience,
willingness to put aside our own needs and interests, submission to someone
else’s imposed agenda regardless of how meaningless and irrelevant it may seem,
dependence on “experts” to tell us how to live our lives?
When I think of great skills, or the basic skills needed to live
a good, meaningful life, I think of verbs like growing, making, building,
creating, playing, connecting – skills that unambiguously add to the quality of
our lives. Growing food is living directly. So are knitting a hat and playing
music.
Doing what someone else says will prepare us for some
hypothetical need we may or may not have in the hypothetical future is living
indirectly at best. But we tell our children that they must submit to these
soul-squashing exercises in irrelevance if they want to be “successful” in life.
By pushing this secondary, once-removed learning that is disconnected from real
experience, we are systematically alienating our children from the basic
competencies of the good life and creating education addicts.
Social thinker Ivan Illich put it well in his important book
Tools for Conviviality: “People who are hooked on teaching are conditioned
to be customers for everything else. They see their own personal growth as an
accumulation of institutional outputs and prefer what institutions make over
what they themselves can do. They repress the ability to discover reality by
their own lights.”
We are creating a generation of dependent consumers who are
losing the ability to define the good life for themselves. And as Napoleon will
attest, the girls aren’t happy.
|
"Our schools teach obedience, willingness to put aside our
own needs and interests, submission to someone else’s imposed agenda
regardless of how meaningless and irrelevant it may seem, and dependence
on 'experts' to tell us how to live our lives."
|
So…what to do? Novelist C. S. Lewis wrote that “a sum can be put
right: but only by going back ‘til you find the error and working it afresh from
that point, never by simply going on.” In other words, we’ve made some mistakes,
some bad decisions, that will not be corrected by simply tweaking the system. In
fact, one popular definition of insanity is repeating the same behaviors and
expecting different results. When something is not working, our first response
is often to do more of it. Not particularly smart or effective. Going back in
order to correct the errors that led to our current situation is going to take
courage, fresh thinking and a willingness to shift paradigms.
What are some of these historical mistakes that are separating
learning from living and creating a world that is both inhospitable and
inaccessible to young people? Here are three examples:
For one thing, we have built our entire culture around the
automobile. Our self-imposed dependence on cars and other motorized
transportation is not only having dire environmental consequences, but it is
also undermining the sense of place and personal connections we need to maintain
strong, healthy communities. Children growing up in the suburbs are especially
isolated from the real work of our world. We have created a lifestyle and a
long-distance infrastructure that is unsustainable – unsustainable energy
consumption, unsustainable stress and unsustainable age segregation. Schools are
becoming the only legitimate places for our children to be. Not a healthy
situation.
Another mistake, closely related to the first, is our movement
away from primarily local economies. Strong local economies use less energy,
strengthen our sense of community and provide a wide range of work worth doing
for all ages and abilities. This grassroots diversity makes local economies
naturally more inclusive and better able to integrate learning with the rest of
our lives. Children can see first-hand how their community works and can learn
by observing and participating.
A painful example of this second roadblock to developing great
skills is the way industrial agriculture has undermined small, family-owned
farms. In his book Deep Economy, Bill McKibben writes that “the number
of farmers has fallen from half the American population to about one percent,
and in essence those missing farmers have been replaced with oil.” What could be
more fundamental to the good life than working in harmony with the natural world
to produce the food that keeps us alive? But most of us don’t even know where
our food comes from, much less how it is produced. Corporate-controlled
industrial agriculture has alienated us from this process, disconnecting us from
the earth and shrouding this essential knowledge in a crippling veil of mystery.
One other barrier to natural
learning is our continuing insistence on compulsory school attendance. By its
structure, methods and very existence, compulsory schooling teaches the absolute
antitheses of democratic values and healthy self-reliance. Legally mandating
school attendance requires the state to define what constitutes a “school” and
the content of an approved curriculum. Since the state functions largely at the
beck and call of the corporate world, this essentially allows the powerful
corporate elite to determine what our children should know and be able to do.
Given that it is these very elite that are perpetuating the other errors I’ve
mentioned, it is quite unlikely that compulsory schooling will do anything but
continue to support these debilitating trends. Don’t expect any radical changes
here.
These are just a few examples of how we are separating learning
and growth from the natural process of living. We need to go back to these forks
in the road and work the problems afresh. Imagine what it will take to decrease
our addiction to speed, distance and oil? To build strong local economies? To
reclaim control of our learning and our lives? These are places we can start to
create true learning communities where acquiring great skills comes as naturally
as breathing. And while you’re thinking about that, let me catch you a delicious
bass.
Jim Strickland lives in Everett, Washington with his wife and three children. He
is a community-based educator in nearby Marysville where he works to promote
non-coercive learning and the development of true learning communities. Jim
invites response from readers who are interested in joining the conversation on
integrating learning with the rest of our lives. He can be reached at
livedemocracy@hotmail.com.
This article was published in 2009.
|
