The Element (33 page)

The fundamental theme of this book is that we urgently need to make fuller use of our own natural resources. This is essential for our well-being and for the health of our communities. Education is supposed to be the process that develops all resources. For all the reasons I have set out, too often it is not. Many of the people I’ve talked about in this book say that they went through the whole of their education without really discovering their true talents. It is no exaggeration to say that many of them did not discover their real abilities until after they left school—until they had recovered from their education. As I said at the outset, I don’t believe that teachers are causing this problem. It’s a systemic problem in the nature of our education systems. In fact, the real challenges for education will only be met by empowering passionate and creative teachers and by firing up the imaginations and motivations of the students.

The core ideas and principles of the Element have implications for each of the main areas of education. The curriculum of education for the twenty-first century must be transformed radically. I have described intelligence as being diverse, dynamic, and distinct. Here is what it means for education. First, we need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends the principle of diversity. Too many students pass through education and have their natural talents marginalized or ignored. The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages, and math all have equal and central contributions to make to a student’s education.

Second, we need to question the entire idea of “subjects.” For generations, we have promoted the idea that the arts, the sciences, the humanities, and the rest are categorically different from each other. The truth is that they have much in common. There is great skill and objectivity in the arts, just as there is passion and intuition at the heart of science. The idea of separate subjects that have nothing in common offends the principle of dynamism.

School systems should base their curriculum not on the idea of separate subjects, but on the much more fertile idea of disciplines. Math, for example, isn’t just a set of information to be learned but a complex pattern of ideas, practical skills, and concepts. It is a discipline—or rather a set of disciplines. So too are drama, art, technology, and so on. The idea of disciplines makes possible a fluid and dynamic curriculum that is interdisciplinary.

Third, the curriculum should be personalized. Learning happens in the minds and souls of individuals—not in the databases of multiple-choice tests. I doubt there are many children who leap out of bed in the morning wondering what they can do to raise the reading score for their state. Learning is a personal process, especially if we are interested in moving people toward the Element. The current processes of education do not take account of individual learning styles and talents. In that way, they offend the principle of distinctiveness.

Many of those whose stories I have told in this book would agree. For them the liberation came from meeting their passion and being able to pursue it. As Don Lipski says, “The main thing is to encourage kids to follow anything they have enthusiasm for. When I got interested in magic, I got great encouragement and support. I devoted myself to magic in the same way that I do artwork now. A kid may have a thing about baseball, not playing it but learning all the statistics of the players and knowing who should be traded to what team. It may seem useless, but maybe that kid will end up being the manager of a baseball team. If a kid is the only one in the class who’s an opera fan, that should be validated and encouraged. Whatever it might be for, enthusiasm is the main thing that needs to be developed.”

The Element has implications for teaching. Too many reform movements in education are designed to make education teacher-proof. The most successful systems in the world take the opposite view. They invest in teachers. The reason is that people succeed best when they have others who understand their talents, challenges, and abilities. This is why mentoring is such a helpful force in so many peoples lives. Great teachers have always understood that that real role is not to teach subjects but to teach students. Mentoring and coaching is the vital pulse of a living system of education.

The Element has implications for assessment. Education is being strangled persistently by the culture of standardized testing. The irony is that these tests are not raising standards except in some very particular areas, and at the expense of most of what really matters in education.

To get a perspective on this, compare the processes of quality assurance in education with those in an entirely different field—catering. In the restaurant business, there are two distinct models of quality assurance. The first is the fast-food model. In this model, the quality of the food is guaranteed, because it is all standardized. The fast-food chains specify exactly what should be on the menu in all of their outlets. They specify what should be in the burgers or nuggets, the oil in which they should be fried, the exact bun in which they should be served, how the fries should be made, what should be in the drinks, and exactly how they should be served. They specify how the room should be decorated and what the staff should wear. Everything is standardized. It’s often dreadful and bad for you. Some forms of fast food are contributing to the massive explosion of obesity and diabetes across the world. But at least the quality is guaranteed.

The other model of quality assurance in catering is the Michelin guide. In this model, the guides establish specific criteria for excellence, but they do not say how the particular restaurants should meet these criteria. They don’t say what should be on the menu, what the staff should wear, or how the rooms should be decorated. All of that is at the discretion of the individual restaurant. The guides simply establish criteria, and it is up to every restaurant to meet them in whatever way they see best. They are then judged not to some impersonal standard, but by the assessments of experts who know what they are looking for and what a great restaurant is actually like. The result is that every Michelin restaurant is terrific. And they are all unique and different from each other.

One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort. For the future, education must be Elemental.

The examples I have just given point the way to the sorts of education we now need in the twenty-first century. A number of them build on principles that educational visionaries have been promoting for generations—principles often seen as eccentric, even heretical. And they were, then. The views of these visionaries were ahead of their times (hence my describing them as visionary). But the right time has arrived. If we are serious about educational transformation, we must understand the times and catch the new tide. We can ride it into the future, or be overwhelmed and sink back into the past.

The stakes could hardly be higher for education and for all who pass through it.

Afterword

FINDING THE ELEMENT in yourself is essential to discovering what you can really do and who you really are. At one level, this is a very personal issue. It’s about you and people you know and care for. But there is a larger argument here as well. The Element has powerful implications for how to run our schools, businesses, communities, and institutions. The core principles of the Element are rooted in a wider, organic conception of human growth and development.

Earlier, I argued that we don’t see the world directly. We perceive it through frameworks of ideas and beliefs, which act as filters on what we see and how we see it. Some of these ideas enter our consciousness so deeply that we’re not even aware of them. They strike us as simple common sense. They often show up, though, in the metaphors and images we use to think about ourselves and about the world around us.

Sir Isaac Newton, the great physicist, composed his theories at the dawn of the mechanical age. To him the universe seemed like an enormous mechanical clock, with perfectly regular cycles and rhythms. Einstein and others have since shown that the universe is not like a clock at all; its mysteries are more complicated, subtle, and dynamic than even your favorite watch. Modern science has changed metaphors, and in doing so has shifted our understanding of how the universe works.

In our own time, though, we still routinely use mechanistic and technological metaphors to describe ourselves and our communities. I often hear people talk about the mind as a computer; about mental inputs and outputs, about “downloading” their feelings or being “hardwired” or “programmed” to behave in certain ways.

If you work in any kind of organization, you may have seen an organizational chart. Typically, these are comprised of boxes with people’s names or functions in them and patterns of straight lines showing the hierarchy between them. These charts tend to look like architectural drawings or diagrams of electrical circuitry, and they reinforce the idea that organizations are really like mechanisms, with parts and functions that only connect in certain sorts of ways.

The power of metaphors and analogies is that they point to similarities, and there are certainly some similarities in how lifeless computers and living minds actually work. Nonetheless, your mind clearly isn’t a solid-state system in a metal box on your shoulders. And human organizations are not at all like mechanisms. They are made up of living people who are driven by feelings and motives and relationships. Organizational charts show you the hierarchy, but they don’t capture how the organization feels or how it really works. The fact is that human organizations and communities are not like mechanisms: they are much more like organisms.

I was in a natural history museum a while ago. It’s a fascinating place. There are separate rooms devoted to different species of creatures. In one, there’s a display of butterflies, all arranged beautifully in glass cases, pinned through the body, scrupulously labeled, and dead. The museum grouped them by type and size, with the big ones at the top and smaller ones at the bottom. In another room, there are beetles similarly arranged by type and size, and in another, there are spiders. Organizing these creatures into categories and putting them in separate cabinets is one way of thinking about them, and it’s very instructive. But this is not how they are in the world. When you leave the museum, you do not see all the butterflies flying in formation, with the large ones in the front and the small ones at the back. You don’t see the spiders scuttling along in disciplined columns with the small ones bringing up the rear, while the beetles keep a respectful distance. In their natural state, these creatures are all over each other. They live in complicated, interdependent environments, and their fortunes relate to one another.

Human communities are exactly the same, and they are facing the same sorts of crises that are now confronting the ecosystems of the natural environment. The analogy here is strong.

The relationships of living systems and our widespread failure to understand them was the theme of
Silent Spring
, Rachel Carson’s hard-hitting book published in September 1962. She argued that the chemicals and insecticides that farmers were using to improve crops and destroy pests were having unexpected and disastrous consequences. As they drained into the ground, these toxic chemicals were polluting water systems and destroying marine life. By indiscriminately killing insects, farmers were also upsetting the delicate ecosystems on which many other forms of life depended, including the plants the insects propagated and the countless birds who fed on the insects themselves. As the birds died, their songs were silenced.

Rachel Carson was one of a number of pioneers who helped to shift our thinking about the ecology of the natural world. From the beginning of the industrial age, human beings seemed to see nature as an infinite warehouse of useful resources for industrial production and material prosperity. We mined the earth for coal and ore, drilled through the bedrock for oil and gas, and cleared the forests for pasture. All of this seemed relatively straightforward. The downside is that, three hundred years on, we may have brought the natural world gasping to its knees, and we now face a major crisis in the use of the earth’s natural resources.

This evidence of this is so strong that some geologists say we are entering a new geological age. The last ice age ended ten thousand years ago. Geologists call the period since then the Holocene epoch. Some are calling the new geological period the Anthropocene age, from the Greek word for human,
anthropos.
They say the impact of human activity on the earth’s geology and natural systems has created this new geologic era. The effects include the acidification of the oceans, new patterns of sediments, the erosion and corrosion of Earth’s surface, and the extinction of many thousands of natural species of animals and plants. Scientists believe that this crisis is real, and that we have to do something profound within the next few generations if we’re to avoid a catastrophe.