The Daily Drool

Radical pedagogy

My friend Heather, who is also wrestling with questions in education and society, recently sent me this quote:

“One result of formal education is that students graduate without knowing how to think in whole systems, how to find connections, how to ask big questions, and how to separate the trivial from the important. Now more than ever … we need people who think broadly and who understand systems, connections, patterns, and root causes.” — David Orr

David Orr is an environmental educator, someone whose focus is in bringing the goals of our education system in harmony with our goals and hopes for our planet. When he speaks of systems and root causes, however, I don’t think he is simply talking about pollution and ecology, climate change and car emissions. To truly understand a system is to understand one’s own place in it. If we want to know why the temperatures are rising, we must look to the output of our automobiles, but then to the deeper questions about why we ourselves drive so much. What does it say about our relationship to the world that our journeys must be clothed in steel and accelerated to the maximum velocity our laws and traffic will allow? Do we even remember what it feels like for our legs to be sore after a long walk, or for the wind to brush our face as we bike along a river?

The other day I was speaking with my mentor Nataniel, and he reminded me of an important piece of etymology. “Radical” has the same origins as “radish” – it means to touch the root. In trying to innovate, in pushing at the cutting edge of educational philosophy, technology, and methods, in trying to do something “radically” new and powerful, this “root” must not be forgotten. Composed primarily of carbon and water, descended from animal ancestors, we have deep roots in the earth. Even the hyper-processed synthesized foods we feed our children – the Twizzlers and Pixie Stix – taste good because they bear similarity to the sugars of fruit that grow from the soil.

The American consumer culture, however, seems to be concealing this fact. In the cities, we surround ourselves with concrete, allowing plants to grow as decoration. Suburban life ushers us from school to work to home packed nicely into an air-conditioned SUV. Farm life is progressively carried out by large-scale machinery or migrant farm workers kept on the fringes of our society. Our foods come progressively more packaged and synthesized. Successful work means more and more sedentary work before a computer screen, compressing our entire sensory and motor capacities into our eyes and fingertips. Communication through typeface supplants face-to-face or even the use of our voice. In this process I see a basic disconnect between body and mind, and between body and earth.

Now let’s say we were to continue with our metaphor of the human being rooted in the earth and growing up and outwards from it. Let’s shift our attention “upwards” through the chakras to the heart – the symbolic center of emotion. Do we find our emotions well connected to our bodies, and our minds to our emotions? I would say (and I might be treading on tender ground here) that at this point we find a difference between men and women. First, I think women maintain a stronger connection between emotion and body. The cycles of the body are also cycles of mood, and having to confront the inherent vulnerability in being penetrated means learning to accept and understand the continuity of our energies. As for the connection between emotion and mind, I need only to point to women’s intuition as the deep power that comes from knowing the wholeness of one’s being. What does this mean for men? I would say that we are inherently more vulnerable to having the threads cut or disguised between mind, emotion, and body. Think of promiscuous sex – in and out of one relationship, in and out of another – how deeply are we truly changed by the experience? Why would we put our emotional vulnerability on the line if we don’t have to? The capitalist and academic cultures further encourage us to conceal ties between mind and emotion – we are asked to be “objective” in our research and “objective” in our managerial decisions. What does it mean to be objective? It means to see other people as objects, not as subjects. It means holding ourselves back from connection and empathy by removing the “subject” from ourselves, our research “subjects” (an illusory use of the word), and our associates. Is it a surprise that we occasionally tend to “objectify” women?

Of course, this is all ground well tread in pop psychology and lore. Rudolph Steiner (father of the Waldorf schools) and Maria Montessori even sought to remediate these disconnections through “holistic” forms of education, schooling that engages the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. True yoga, when it includes jnana (wisdom) and bhakti (love), is another great example of education that integrates our different capacities. Once again I’m just wondering what role information technologies play, particularly in children’s lives, in perpetuating and remediating these breaks from the “root.” How can we develop a 21st century pedagogy that is holistic and truly radical?

I could launch into a moralistic diatribe here about the ways that unhealthy use of information technology might inhibit the development of a whole person, but I laid down enough gloom and doom in the first part of this piece. It’s a great deal more productive to speak about the ways that technology might help people develop body, emotions, mind, and the connections between them, and then talk about balancing and integrating other forms of activity and education. That’s what I’m trying to do in my application to doctoral programs at the University of Toronto and Harvard, which I need to pull together in the next few weeks. Toronto has been sounding particularly good of late, especially after seeing Bowling for Columbine and watching the Republicans take over my own country. They also happen to have a Holistic and Aesthetic Education department and are doing some very innovative work with collaborative learning technologies.