Sometimes used interchangeably for schooling
or its newest incarnation social emotional learning,
I think we can all agree it usually involves learning something,
or at least asking questions that suggest learning
might be happening.
Sitting in a classroom and not only absorbing information,
but connecting it logically to your life
and other things it bears no relation to,
and then using that new knowledge to arrive at an insight
that says something about humanity previously unknown
to most of us? Who has time for that? seems to be
the question being withheld.
It’s like an entire species of aardvark was teleported away
overnight and everyone’s okay with it.
Okay, maybe not okay with it,
but not really doing anything about it either, sort of like
what we see happening in politics these days
each time we definitely don’t want the news because its
wreaking so much havoc on our anxiety and
retraumatizing us. I wonder what’s on CNN.
I think the dilemma we’re facing with education
is that its focus and definition changes depending on the
needs of a society, and right now society needs educators
to babysit children and encourage them to not question authority
and expertise more than it needs them to teach students
for a broken record of reasons how to define learning for
themselves, which usually involves questioning everything,
even this definition, I mean it’s as flimsy as any.
Listening to others and waiting your turn? Does that
involve listening to oneself first, and realizing all the ways
one is always getting in one’s own way?
And what about want and the whole function of
behavior thing? Does it include the possibility that some
students and educators too I think want to forget how to
learn and would prefer to drift unconsciously through time
hurting one another and especially themselves because
they think so minutely of hope and goodness pain and cruelty
start to look like heroic and martyr-like acts meant to discreetly
glorify neglect while hunting for touch?
Is education devolving into a system of self-extinction?
Should we continue to go to school, knowing this might
be a possibility?
the real subject is always you 