Building a World

                Democracy is an evolutionary and aspirational project.  Democracies are continually faced with the need to redefine and redirect themselves as the conditions of their existence change.  One of the structural failures of our democracy has been our inability to create and sustain an educational project that fulfills this need.  We have settled on an educational system that promotes class stagnation and political inaction.  The potential is there to do more, but the debate over our schools is mired in the tired and failed language of individual performance and testing.  We have adopted the attitude that reading an isolated text on your own and answering questions about it is enough.  An educational system that is capable of sustaining and invigorating a democratic society has to have as its main goal the building of democratic practices that allow democracy to adapt and flourish.  We’re doing exactly the opposite.

                I’ve written before that, following an earlier critique of our nation, that education has become ‘extractive,’ working to funnel public money and energy into the hands of the rich.  Another way of putting it might be to use the image Ramon Feenstra uses and say that education has been kidnapped, it no longer produces democratic outcomes and is strangled by a managerial class of politicians, business leaders and bureaucrats that all want schools to support their goals.  Dewey thought that education and inquiry were at the heart of an evolving democracy.  We have moved over time to an educational system that promotes a sedentary instead of a dynamic image of the world.  We’ve constructed schools to teach kids the way it is instead of engaging them in the possibility of what could be.  We stifle instead of grow their creative energy, and then wonder why they seem so unenthused to be there.  Education is not a factor in economic and social mobility (not that there’s much of that going on anyway), and it creates the undemocratic and unnatural feeling that learning is something done for someone else’s interests.

                Maturana says that we ‘bring forth a world,’ it isn’t just sitting there as an objective reality.  In the process of bringing forth a world, we have to conserve and tend to the transgenerational links that allow us to evolve while preserving our social and structural couplings to a world that sustains us and is in turn sustained by us.  Hannah Arendt wrote that the ultimate goal of education was preserve and celebrate a common world of our potential.  You can’t develop a standardized test for that.  You can’t farm that out to a state committee on outcomes.  It has to be woven into the daily fabric of interactions that reinforce the importance of the democratic values we want to work toward.  Every word and every action is both important and impossible to undo.

                The transgenerational trust is broken.  We are not passing a sustainable, let alone a better or more promising world.  We’ve treated our time here like we were in a temporary rental that was going to be someone else’s problem soon, so why fix it.  There is no process or institution in our world that could do more to address this than education, but only if we stop the madness.  The imagination that it takes to dream a new world and bring it into being is there, but it’s buried under a curriculum designed to fail instead of promote that dream.  Kids will learn to read and do math – maybe they’ll even learn it better if it’s their idea.  Education is a conversation that unites us to ever changing and evolving people and circumstance.  It can’t be so scripted that it shuts out insight, experiments and joy.

                Instead of sending our children off to ‘learn’ what the world is all about, we should be sending them off to build and play.  If we knew the answers we wouldn’t be where we are now.  They certainly need help and guidance, and we need our faith rekindled by their faith.  Democracy requires participation in the most active and creative sense possible.  It’s more than a tweet or an Instagram or a blog post.  In order to build and grow a democratic world, schools need to redefine their goals and change their practices.  Schools need to be part of what brings us together and not an instrument for segregation and marginalization.