What happens when you place the ability and responsibility for learning and teaching into the hands of the people with the passion to learn?

What happens when you blur the line between teacher and student, until it no longer exists?

What happens when “Those Who Can, Do, and Those Who Can’t, Teach” becomes “Those Who Can Do, Teach, and Those Who Can Teach, Do“?

What on earth does this mean for schools, colleges, universities, the institutional life of education?

If you know me at all, you’ll know I bear little love for the institution of schooling, and the lust for “schoolifying” everything. Formerly, if you wanted to learn something, you found somebody doing it and you apprenticed with them. Now if you want to learn something, you hit your web browser and google up a school.

What happened to us, as a culture? Well, you can read John Taylor Gatto’s the Underground History of American Education for the full story, but in short, we fell asleep, and woke up in school, and stopped questioning where and why it came from.

Once you take authority away from the institution, and put it back in the hands of the doers, where does that leave institutions?

I believe a role does remain for these institutions. For a long time, as the various permutations of fluency games improve and cohere, they’ll need the guiding hand of those with the skills, and with some understanding of the pedagogical challenge at hand. It will take a while to fully transition from a culture of expert pedagogues to a culture of self-teaching play. Because Evan and I have first aimed at language education, I think we will see some rapid culture change there once we get the ball rolling. Everything else will come in its own time.

Perhaps eventually the schools, colleges, and academies will transform into cultural and community centers, places with the space and tools to facilitate experimental and exploratory play in the fluency of different skills. Hotbeds of light-hearted conversation and commensality, perhaps they will have a role for quite some time to come.

In any case, let’s begin. Whatever happens, we know where we started. Right here.

When it comes to culture change and personal growth, I notice folks often (naturally, according to the conditioning of our culture) asking others to “go first”. But why not apply new tools and understandings to ourselves first, until we’ve mastered them? Why not “go first”, ourselves?

For example, take the practice of Nonviolent Communication. When I first started practicing NVC, I “helped” conversation partners out a lot by “correcting” their NVC use. After indulging this kind of arrogant mischief for quite a while, it finally occurred to me that correcting others behavior presented a massive wall to trust, understanding, and peace. In essence, by correcting them (without their request to do so), I spoke “violently” (in the parlance of NVC). From that point on I made it a practice of applying the observation and empathic skills strictly to myself and my own needs, assuming that others would benefit from the clarity such practice produced in me. I discovered the truth in that assumption as my skill improved.

Funny enough (or not so funny, depending on how you look at this) I practiced the same short-sighted abuse of new tools when learning Don Miguel Ruiz’ “Four Agreements”.  You could find me lecturing my girlfriend of the time on how she hadn’t adhered to “Don’t Take Anything Personally”, or one of the other Agreements.

Honestly, I have done this with many of these kinds of personal and communicative tools, over the years.

By the time I began to experiment and practice the Haudensaunee’s three “Peace Principles” as communicated to me by Jake Tekaronianeken Swamp, I think I’d finally hit on it. I accepted these principles as a gift for myself, and they would benefit others to the extent they changed my behavior in more life-affirming ways, rather than how I lectured and corrected others in their use.

American culture elevates the ‘word’, especially the written word, to such a high level, that it commonly eclipses the purpose of the word: to communicate understanding, to change behavior, to have a real impact in the world. Often words talk to words, without any of them sullying each other by affecting the “real world”.

I stand here to say that my life has grown far more satisfying once I lost interest in explaining my philosophy, in favor of benefiting from it.

In fact, could someone come to understand your values, and learn the tools of communication you use, simply by experiencing you using them? Not through your articulation of them, nor purchasing the book that explains them, nor through diagrams on white boards, but simply from observing you as a role model?

This sounds an awful lot like “mentoring”, doesn’t it?

Perhaps you will allow me to challenge you: can you take your top, most dearly held values, or your favorite new tool of growth or communication, and embody them for a month without explaining or articulating them to anyone else, enough so that an observant person could discern these unspoken values, tools, or focus of growth?

A pretty cool idea, I think.

What presuppostitions does “disagreement” hide? Do “agreement” and “disagreement” help (or hinder) conversations, decisions, and understanding?

For a long time now, whenever I hear someone say “I disagree” to me, or someone else, it always sticks in my craw a little bit. I haven’t quite understood why; certainly I want folks I converse with to feel free to tell their own stories and speak about their experiences.

Marshall Rosenberg, developer of Nonviolent Communication, helped me to understand that one can violently appreciate just as easily as condemn. To call me “right”, “perfect”, to grade me with an “A+”, implies that you can also grade with an “F-”, and call me “wrong” and “flawed”. The dark side of positive labels rests uneasily behind the euphoria that such labeling produces.

So how does this apply to agreement or disagreement?

If you say you “disagree” with me, than that indicates you’ve heard me, understood my story, and come to the conclusion that it doesn’t match your own attitudes and opinions well. But what if you don’t understand my story? Only I can say whether or not you’ve heard me; only I can say whether or not I feel that you have gone the distance in understanding me so that I can relax and allow that you have a good grasp of my experience.

In other words, how can you disagree with something you don’t understand yet? You must understand it before you can agree or disagree.

But then, what about when you decide that you agree with me, before you understand me? Has this ever happened to you, where someone responds affirmatively to an opinion of yours, then takes off running, saying all kinds of (in your mind) off-base things, that they think express your opinion too?

So, do agreement or disagreement even matter? They seem so extraneous to the goal of understanding each other. Do we mean anything else by these words, other than the ham-fisted application of judgement and labels?

And what about those conversations where you argue for an hour, and then at the end realize you both “agree”? The waste of energy and emotion over…what?

I’d like to hear about your experiences with agreement and disagreement. When have they helped? Hurt?