Education to change the world

Five Preliminary 'Provocations' for Reflection

Anything that anyone has ever learned – and much, much more – can be learned by everyone

Most of what is remains unknown; whereas cleverness is concerned with the miniscule known, one requires wisdom, experience and intuition to engage with the unknown – sadly current curricula, and the naive concept of 'evidence-based decision making', tend to neglect the unknown, and the need to develop wisdom, with predictable catastrophic consequences, some of which – like species extinction – are irreversible, and others – such as loss of cultural capital – are extremely difficult to rebuild

Throughout our history our species has evolved psychosocially; in most of the world this has reached a 'socialising' culture, in which one generation designs and imposes the learning agenda on the next generation; the next step in our evolution is towards an 'enabling' culture, in which learners are enabled to clarify and achieve their unique (personal) and shared (social) learning agendas, i.e., because we are a social species, rather than being socialised we need to be enabled to realise our social potential – and, paradoxically, this is undermined by all socialising agendas, which learners respond to through diverse expressions of compliance, resistance, rebellion and withdrawal

(these ideas are partly based on the challenging writings of Lloyd deMause 2002. The Emotional Life of Nations. Other Press, New York; see also: www.psychohistory.com)

Because of the above, strategies for motivating learning need to be recognised as part of this inappropriate 'socialising' approach to education – as our species is naturally passionate about learning (as learning organisms with personally relevant content, time and place specificities), this needs to be recognised and effectively enabled

Money is just one of many tools that can be used in the service of achieving our 'higher' goals – such as enabling equitable and ongoing (resilient and sustainable) personal, social and ecological (and 'spiritual'?) wellbeing – all institutional structures and processes, including those relating to money, urgently need to be collaboratively redesigned and managed (particularly regionally and locally – rather than just centrally) to reflect this understanding (the over-focus on fiscal solutions to our educational challenges in 'The Gonski Report' 'Review of Funding for Schooling' 2011 - www.schoolfunding.gov.au– is indicative of the failure to appreciate the broader roots of our problems)

Because of the limited understanding of the above (and many related) 'truths', our species faces major personal, social and ecological challenges. It is important to ask: in what ways can education help us get out of the many messes we are in? Most current education will not significantly help us. In fact, it will result in a perpetuation of the mess, and most likely add to it. So how can we learn our way forwards, and how might educators, at every level, from kindergarten to universities, be most helpful? Well, this will require a number of important things to happen. The first will be to dare to stop defending and perpetuating the status quo, which is what most educators do today; although usually without realising that they are doing this. To change this we need to examine our educational systems critically; and to do this we will need 'testing questions' related to the sort of lives it makes sense to hope to be able to live, and to the institutional structures and processes designed to support them.

Such institutions would need to be able to effectively enable and nurture wellbeing and health (at every level), equity and social justice, peace and non-violence, love and compassion, sharing and collaboration, and ecological sustainability and healthy, species-rich ecosystems. These need to be the measures of our success, rather than growing productivity, consumption, profit and power.

At the personal level, 'testing questions' need to recognise individuals that are empowered, aware, with clear values and visions, in loving relationships, with a sense of purpose and meaning, and having competencies that enable them to make wise decisions and take effective, responsible actions that are life affirming (a comprehensive list of personal, social and ecological testing questions may be found in most of my presentations at www.stuartbhill.com).

Keeping all of this in mind, we should be in a position to ask the following two critical questions: 'what in the current educational system is enabling any of this to happen?' and 'what is preventing this from happening?' So, to improve things we would need to act in ways that nurture the former and phase out the latter.

We would also need to understand how each of us can best be enabled to learn. My understanding of this is that we each have our own unique learning agenda and preferred ways of learning; and we tend to want to focus on one thing at a time, and pursue it obsessively until we have mastered it to our satisfaction. This was particularly confirmed for me by the findings of a 15-year study called the Peckham Experiment (Stallibrass, A 1989. Being Me and Also Us: Lessons From the Peckham Experiment. Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, UK; see also: www.thephf.org; www.ru.org/stalib.htm); and also in my work at the University of Western Sydney, where I aimed to enable students to learn about Social Ecology, which deals with all of the things I am discussing here (I define Social Ecology as: the study and practice of personal, social [including all economic, political and other institutional considerations], and ecological sustainability and change, based on the critical application and integration of ecological, humanistic, relational, community and 'spiritual' values to enable the sustained wellbeing of all; see also:Wright D, Camden-Pratt C, Hill S (eds) 2011. Social Ecology: Applying Ecological Understanding to our Lives and our Planet. Hawthorn Press, Stroud, UK; powerpoint presentations on applied social ecology are available at: www.stuartbhill.comand www.scribd.com/doc/55937783).

So, organising learners into age groups, sticking them in classrooms, and subjecting them to imposed, diversified, daily curricula is clearly a recipe for disaster. Predictably, most of the learners, for most of the time, are sitting there waiting for something to happen that is of relevance to their particular learning agenda. It is a bit like roulette – with very few winners and lots of losers!

No wonder learners commonly don't pay attention, misbehave, seek compensatory stimulation, go to sleep, drop out, and learn so little of what is being presented. In such systems, learners really have only three choices: to go along with the agenda of the SYSTEM, and become 'colonised' and half dead in the process (which is what happened, and is still happening, to most of us), to rebel and tie up half of one's energy in resisting the imposed learning agendas, and in trying to stay alive (this usually involves a diverse range of acting-out behaviours, which are invariably addressed through 'behaviour management' strategies; by focussing on the symptoms of the problem, and aiming to achieve compliance, these fail to recognise, and thereby help perpetuate the underlying causes), or to withdraw and drop out. All of the world's real geniuses, not surprisingly, were individuals who, in one way or another, were able to escape or recover from the 'colonisation' process.

It is not really very complex; indeed, it is actually profoundly simple: educators can be most effective by enabling learners to clarify what they want to learn, and in supporting them in their unique learning journeys. This may involve empathetic, active listening, providing respectful, constructive feedback, appropriate challenging, facilitating access to relevant information and resources, mentoring, modelling and sharing (particularly of enabling stories from one's own and other's experiences, including from throughout history), acknowledging and celebrating efforts and achievements – and even, occasionally, when requested and appropriate, to actually do some 'conventional' teaching. Currently, this is being most effectively done in the best of the 'democratic (alternative) schools' (Hecht Y 2010. Democratic Education: A Beginning of a Story. Alternative Education Resource Organization, Roslyn Heights, NY; see also: www.yaacovhecht.com; www.educationrevolution.org; www.idenetwork.org; www.aapae.edu.au;the last two sites list the 14 'democratic schools' in Australia).

Because there is a limit to how much individual coaching our poorly paid and under-appreciated teachers can provide, a primary task – in addition to addressing this – is for educators to design, establish and maintain the structures and procedures that can provide the above 'services' through mutual support and collaboration within, and beyond, the school learning environment.

The underlying challenge, however, is to fundamentally transform our institutional structures and processes so that all of this can actually happen; and to be constantly ready to courageously take small meaningful initiatives whenever and wherever opportunities arise.

A visual comparison of key influencing variables within 'transformative' and 'colonising' educational systems is provided below in Figure 1. Thus, within the 'transformative' educational systems, equitable and respectful differentiation (valuing and working with difference) replaces hierarchical differentiation (with winners and losers); enabling and valuing spontaneity and deep subjectivity (and the associated development of wisdom) replaces an emphasis on control, predictability and naive objectivity (with its focus on memorisation and limited cleverness); and nurturing relationships that are mutualistic, caring and loving (co-operacy: collaborative pluralism in the service of wellbeing for all; Hunter D, Bailey A, Taylor B 1997. Co-operacy: A New Way of Being at Work. Tandem Press, Birkenhead, NZ.) replace the current focus on individualism and competition. In the Peckham Experiment, mentioned earlier, when children were enabled to follow their own learning agendas, rather than those of adults, they showed little interest in competition, and focussed on consistently improving their own performance over time.

Fig. 1. Comparison of key elements of transformative and colonising education (modified from E O'Sullivan 1999Transformative Learning: Educational Vision for the 21^st Century. Zed Books, London).

Yes, if we approached education in this way humans might actually be enabled to become much more fully human, and who knows what might happen!