Re: "Education is Over" by William Rankin

I highly recommend reading William Rankin's "Education is Over" piece.

No question that our future quite literally depends on the future of our learning environments. AND I think something vital is missing that I’d like to explore.

First, we are on very similar wavelengths.

“It’s not hard to equip learners to find information — they can do that in fractions of a second with the device already in their pockets…But having found it, what should they do with it?”

Here is a short clip from a 92 talk describing a thought-experiment that assumes every child has easy access to the totality of human knowledge and then asks the question “What is the mission of education?”

We are similar in many other respects as well, but here is where we seem to differ:

“Modern education has continued its dogged focus on information rather than on human development, learning, wisdom, and the growth of human well-being.”

When the word learning is used like that (which virtually everyone does) it contributes to diminishing and obscuring its meaning. What aspect of human development doesn’t involve learning? What aspect of wisdom or well-being? Learning is implicit in everything we do and in how we experience our every experience. Our failure to recognize the deeper and more fundamental role of learning — learning as the central dynamic of being human — gives license to the platonic arrogance I so heartily agree with you must be transcended.

Thinking of learning as an ancillary mental acquisition utility (rather than the central dynamic) results in compartmentalizing learning in profoundly learning disabling ways. Learning isn’t just another one of the many things we do it’s the central dynamic in everything we do. Thinking of learning as as a utility is what led to valuing “knowledge is power” and to missing that “the power of knowledge is its resourcefulness to learning”.

Apart from misdirecting us to value knowledge over learning, the ways we learn to define the role of learning in our lives insidiously defines our sense of agency and choice. Most would agree with the statement “I learn”, few yet get that “I am learned”.

The most important thing that most of our kids are learning in school (NAPE 2020) is that they are not very good at learning. They are learning to distrust their own 1st person learning.

I think we are at a tipping point in which everything depends on realizing: nothing is more important to the future than our children’s learning, and nothing is more important to our children’s futures than how well they can learn when they get there.

The tipping point for the shift we need is a generation of adults, who unlike any previous generation, completely flip the mission of parenting and educating from “teaching kids what WE think they should learn” to “stewarding how well THEY can learn whatever they want or need to learn”. The later including the former, but subordinating it.

I think stewarding how well, how healthily, our children can learn (in every way learning effects their lives) needs to become the central organizing principle (the ends) and that “what” we think they should learn and “how” we think they should learn it, while critical, are never more important (the means).

There are a series of other key distinctions that emerge once learning’s central dynamic role is appreciated. One of the most important involves differentiating “healthy learning” and “unhealthy learning”.

Humans can innocently-intelligently learn in ways that are profoundly unhealthy to their bodies and minds — that are deeply learning disabling. They can learn maladaptive cognitive schema that misinform their learning and unconscious emotional (shame) aversions that misdirect their learning.

We live in a very learning disabled society. I think before we develop the next step in Aristotelian curriculum we need to design its foundation with an “above all else do no harm” principle. From there we can learn our way into understanding and preventing “acquired learning disabilities”. (“Institute for the Study and Prevention of Acquired Learning Disabilities” https://www.learningstewards.org/2020-vision/)

Can we engage in a dialogue and further explore the meaning of learning and what redefining it means for our overlapping and potentially synergistic domains of work?