“Where Are Your Keys?” Means A New Role For Educational Institutions
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.
June 15th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Willem,
I’ve been thinking about these ideas lately and one of the questions I’m having some trouble envisioning something:
Do you see this as being the medium of Work as well as the medium of Learning? For artistic media, it’s easy to see that being very effective (and we are already exploring that), but what about other kinds of Work?
For example, for the actual work of experts, like diving into theoretical math for days on end or designing an empirical experiment etc etc, how does the egalitarian, collaborative process play in?
And what about labor? Farming, construction, waste management… are we looking beyond educational institutions? If so, how can these things be collaborative and egalitarian?
June 15th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Willem,
Great start. In terms of how this relates to our conversation, the role of the institution is to preserve some of the master-apprentice role, to perpetuate what is a genuine lineage transmission, and to provide a space and a vessel for the collaborative exploration to be safe-guarded.
June 15th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Julian:
Absolutely, I see WAYK as a medium of Work. Think of it this way; every culture of skill, like construction, farming, etc. has its own in-jokes, ballads, assumptions, axioms, and so on. Play/game-based learning already manifests itself in Work (not to mention the pervasive idea of “on-the-job training”). WAYK just does this intentionally and purposely, creating a work culture designed to accelerate productivity and learning hand in hand. One of the core techniques in WAYK: “Do Something”, meaning, you will learn faster if you actually do something/make something/accomplish real project-based goals.
Abdallah:
Yes! The master-apprentice culture then finds its home again, in this model, I think. That relationship has a place to come home to, when we change the system of interaction.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Reading this post made me very happy! As an unschooler, I couldn’t agree more. This blog is a great find, and I look forward to reading more!
July 20th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I like your vision of where education might go, one of the possibilities that you mention. Learning happens inside the person, not the institution. I have worked in a small two year college for the past 10 years. Occasionally, I see a light in the eyes of the students, but not too much.
The border between the student and teacher is nebulous and situational. I believe that a good teacher would also be a good student of his students. Where does one begin and the other end? This is the ideal.
I was reading about aboriginal hunters. They study their prey, becoming them. Moving and thinking like them. In this case their prey become the teachers.
August 11th, 2009 at 3:15 am
Beautiful comments! Thank you nodedog. I feel very simpatico about what you’ve said.
When prey becomes teachers, and the hunters students, who then becomes the prey, and who the hunter? Whose spirit eats who?
And who remains afterward?
A more beautiful, complex, richer being, surely.