Imagination Trumps Knowledge

I am heartened to read in Business Week the results of a recent survey of 1500 chief executives, which I believe validates the need for many diverse educational paths for youth including the Rodney Dangerfield of educational pedagogies, “Unschooling”. Frank Kern, senior vice-president of IBM Global Business Services, reported in the May 10 edition, “What Chief Executives Really Want”…

There is compelling new evidence that CEOs’ priorities in this area are changing in important ways. According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value (NYSE: IBM – News), CEOs identify “creativity” as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.

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Over Consuming College in an Over Consuming Society?

My son Eric sent me a link to a May 15 New York Times piece by Jacques Steinberg, “Plan B: Skip College”, where the author challenges, or at least questions, the idea that the best path forward for all high school graduates is to go to four-year college. Steinberg cites statistics that only half of those who began a four-year bachelor’s degree program in the fall of 2006 will get that degree within six years, according to the latest projections from the Department of Education. It made me wonder that in a society where people are prone to over consume those items deemed by advertising and cultural norms to be “needs”, we may be over consuming college as well.

(See a lot of discussion of this piece on DailyKOS.)

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Thoughts on the Internet

I am trying to come to grips with this profound new institution which seems likely to be as transforming for society in the 21st Century as movable type was in the 16th. It struck me just now that no institution in our contemporary society has been more significant in my own development over the past ten years than this many-ways-connected network of computer servers originally designed to be a communication channel most likely to survive a nuclear war. In fact, I think it has played this primary developmental role for my partner Sally and our now young-adult kids as well, and I suspect that it has quickly established itself as a critical tool of human evolution.

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Embracing a Successful Anarchic Institution

I recently read a May 7 article in Education Week, “Embracing Wikipedia”, where author and science teacher Matthew Shapiro makes the case for Wikipedia as a research tool, particularly for students (and therefore I guess for any casual life-long learner), competing favorably (at least in Shapiro’s opinion) with the “Gold Standard” Encyclopedia Britannica.

Heads up folks… you might even want to sit down! Wikipedia uses an anarchic form of governance. In fact, though it may be a long time until “brick and mortar” institutions adopt it, this portable, adaptable and minimalist governance model, may well be one of the biggest trends of the 21st Century, particularly in cyberspace.

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Techies

Eric in 2009
Trying and failing… some people say there is no better way to educate oneself.

Yet we have an education system for our youth built around externally orchestrated programming for success. Educators and savvy parents collude to prepare students for successful testing to get into the best possible college to guarantee the best possible chance for success.

Our son Eric chose at age 14 to abandon this programmed path of schooling for success in favor of his own self-directed path that some critics of unschooling would call the road to failure. It did turn out to be the road to failure, failure of a major self-initiated project, but in terms of real learning, a bonanza for our son. We called it his “unschool graduate school”.

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So My Kids’ Generation Wants to Live a Balanced Life

America is a country shaped in many ways, for better and for worse, by Calvinist principles, both religious and secular (see my piece “American Calvin”). Perhaps the most persistent of these principles is the conventional wisdom that work is good for the soul, more work is better, and a failure to buy into this regimen is a severe moral failing. Our country was built on the hard work of individuals, not by “idle hands”. But a recent study by www.livescience.com, shows that my kids’ Millennial generation is more inclined to “work to live” and live a balanced life than my own Baby Boomer comrades.

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Sweathogs, Heathers & Mean Girls

Conventional patriarchal wisdom does not necessarily think about young women who are coming of age developing a “thick skin” to help them navigate the slings and arrows of life. Women are supposed instead to be soft, receptive and relational rather than “tough bitches”. But our daughter Emma learned to toughen up to survive a gauntlet of challenging female classmates, and that thicker skin facilitated her overcoming her shyness. Her experience recalled for me the cliques of girls in the movies “Mean Girls” and “Heathers”, and the very tough class of students known as the “Sweathogs” in the “Welcome Back Kotter” situation comedy of the late 1970s. When I discussed it with Emma recently, she said it was definitely the low point in a life that she has generally found blessed and wonderful.

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Taking Eric out of School

Eric, age 17, three years into unschooling
The recent piece on Good Morning America featuring a mom and dad who were unschooling their two kids, and the negative, rather than inquiring tone, that it was framed with, made me recall our own decision to let our son Eric unschool, rather than go to high school. I wrote a piece about it in January of 2009, “Unschooling Instead of High Schooling”, and I have reworked that piece below, based on additional thought, more feedback from Eric, and more water under the bridge…

We pulled Eric out of school in February 2000 at age 14 because it had become clear that he hated going to school every morning and had a profound incompatibility with the conventional instructional academic environment. We had been considering doing it for a while, and Eric’s mom had done a fair amount of research on homeschooling on the Internet. After pulling Eric out, which removed the most acute of his issues, Sally and I had tried initially to build a home curriculum that included the four standard academic areas – English, social studies, science and math. Eric, as it turns out, had other ideas. Continue reading →

The Politics of Half-Full or Half-Empty

It seems to me that any discussion about what it’s going to take to move the human race forward on its evolutionary path (which is what life is all about as far as I can see) needs to start with a basic question. Is our glass half-full or half-empty; do we live in a world of abundance or scarcity? For 5000 years (at least according to Riane Eisler’s book The Chalice and the Blade) we have framed the world in terms of scarcity. Not enough food to feed everybody. Not enough of the superior “us” to resist and/or control all of the inferior “them” (however “them” is defined in any locale in any given moment in history). This has led to what, by conventional wisdom, is generally framed as an imperative (but I think is a choice) to adopt a human society based on a hierarchy of control that is often described as Patriarchy, rather than the profoundly different societal model called Partnership. Continue reading →

Shaken and Stirred

I had 69 metal staples after surgery
Taking off from James Bond’s iconic instructions for every martini he orders (“Shaken… not stirred”) I have had quite the adventure with the whole sequence of my bicycle accident, later loss of function on my left side, emergency cranial surgery to remove a large blood clot, and the subsequent recovery, a midlife crisis manifest, and a “reboot” of sort. As I learned time after time from my dad, life at its best is an adventure, not always fun, not always happy, but a compelling narrative worth living and sharing with others. I have been both “shaken” and “stirred”. Continue reading →