Liberating Education: Part 2

With part one of "Liberating Education" the desire was to establish the idea that the mainstream idea of education, that being one with a materialist end in a consumer society, is ultimately destructive to the human person and society.  Like a child, tearing down is much more enjoyable than building up, so in an attempt to be a mature and responsible adult, I offer part 2.  In this post, I'd like to gather my experience into a contained pile of assorted ideas and attempt to build something positive ex nihilo.

Here I offer some strands of thought from my experience and life.  The first is the difference between school and education.  Education is a very difficult activity but the most noble one a human can engage in. As I noted in part 1, it is common, and absurd, to conceive of education as beginning in kindergarten and ending in either a high school or college graduation.  Education, though, is a lifelong pursuit of truth, of goodness and of beauty.  It is as natural for a human to learn as it is to breathe.  It is deeply human and is necessary to become a flourishing individual and a flourishing community - but here's the kicker - school is not.  School is the place you go to get educated, sometimes de-educated, but education cannot be limited to that time and space and it never has been.  There are countless stories of people who didn't fit into school and became the inventors and creators of many wonderful things: from medical breakthroughs like radiation to treat cancer, extending the life of millions to the entrepreneurial idea of space tourism, to the creators of facebook, youtube and google.  It is deeply inhuman to view education as applying technique A to subject B in order to produce, what inevitabably must follow, product C for consuming and producing material goods.  We are dealing with human beings not machines, though machines are preferable for their ease of management.  We are educations persons not products.  Education then, at its heart is a human thing, its a relationship thing, it is a lifelong thing.

This is the first and most important idea I have in regards to liberating education:  it has to do with being and becoming a better person.  Now if we conceive of humans as persons, not machines or units in an economic system, or as chemical reactions to manipulate and mold into a product, we need to speak accordingly.  Business metaphors such as "students as products" or "selling our school" are the wrong language and are deeply flawed.  Computer or machine metaphors to describe human intelligence or thinking are wrong and deeply flawed.  For example, "he's really good at processing information" contains the idea that the human mind is simply an advanced computer.  This, I suggest is false and dehumanizing.  We must, instead, choose to imagine humans as mysteries, dynamic and diverse persons, immortal souls, vast potentialities, unique beings with creative and imaginative powers ready to engage with the world in unpredictable and exciting ways.  In 10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child Anthony Esolen exposes this destructive way of thinking about humans in many ironic and entertaining ways.  Provocatively he points out that instead of the thinking of students maturing into adulthood, we should think of boys and girls growing into men and women.  Adulthood is gender neutral and scientific, but men and women, Mars and Venus, are different universes that are unique and mysterious planets to explore.  This vision and language is not the vision of human nature today, rather the prevailing ideas and stories that shape our understanding of our nature amounts to complex biochemical machines in a dying universe devoid of any ultimate meaning and purpose.  And we wonder why young men and women are uninterested in school and apathetic about life.

This message, that we are insignificant specs in a never-rending universe, a universe with no ultimate meaning is like Groundhog's day with Bill Murray, on endless repeat every day.  Student may hear "WE are all different and special" in a million pedantic and sentimental ways, but they then learn differences don't really make any difference.  Instead of encouraging wonder about the world around them, children are boxed up in neatly and tightly packed "pods".  Education should be elevating our nature, not pulling it down.  Another related idea to the prevailing view is the idea that there is nothing sacred.  Reinforced through shows like South Park and Family, school curriculum shies away from mystery and awe because that veers to closely into the sacred and religious.  No sacred spaces and no sacred times only meaningless moments passing by.  Moments to be filled up with busy-ness, usually entertainment that stultifies, makes passive, and interrupts the most meaningful moments we have - like evenings with our family.

The vision of education I'm offering here is not YET ANOTHER technique in the "marketplace" of education.  I'm inviting a  RE-imagining of education.  An education that looks at the student as an immortal soul, a mysterious and sacred person, worthy of respect and dignity.  So worthy that the purpose of education is to life that nature up to higher things, to contemplate great ideas and lofty ideals.  Not in order to manipulate and control, and certainly not for passing tests, but because in the act of education there is joy and meaning.  Human persons are free by their nature, given tremendous gifts and powers of imagination, creativity, ingenuity, individuality, and of course, the mysterious freedom to develop these powers into virtues or vices (words to be recovered).  These powers of the soul (a word to be recovered) are the key to liberating education - for this liberation of education becomes a liberating education because it is a lifelong process of becoming a liberated person.  A person that is free to imagine, to create, to build, to love, to flourish as a human being within a flourishing human community is a person liberated for the sake of humanity.