Learning, Unlearning and Relearning to wisely adapt.
Whole systems are changing rapidly. What kind of education makes sense now, for ourselves and our children?
Education is the greatest preventative medicine for any kind of illness.
If there that’s true, then the challenge has only begun.
Who chooses what we need to learn, when there’s so much to pay attention to and a lack of certainty about what matters?
What should be on the curriculum for the leaders of 2030? 2040?
What on earth will be relevant by then?
What will be happening on earth?
“Perhaps we should say that all our problems tend to gather under two questions about knowledge.
Having the ability and desire to know, how and what should we learn?
And having learned, how and for what should we use what we know?”
-Wendell Berry
If you walk down to the water in the middle of a calm night when nobody is out on the street, ask this question to the environment you’re in:
“How healthy is my culture, overall, right now?”
You’ll probably pick up from the absence of chirping wildlife and odd bags of consumer packages that it might be for the best this that current human systems are being interrupted.
Or depending where you live, you may have been fighting the cancers of deforestation developers to protect what healthy culture you still nurture, along with a minority of others.
On the whole, a whole lot of adults have been grinding a pantheon of absurdly unwell machines and corporations into a senseless and violently hungry global beast, and whether through neglect, malice, enabling or ignorance, many societies still teach many young people how to do the same.
We are now experiencing direct feedback at a broad scale.
How, in education, are we teaching collective responsibility?
Can we learn to be human in a way that is symbiotic with our living system?
Not literally everything needs to change, but there are very deeply running patterns which definitely do.
Those patterns are still being rewoven unconsciously into human cultures via current education systems and normative culture in workplaces and governments. Education offers a pathway for designing our cultures.
How can we tell what changes will have impact?
Start by listening to the children, the elders, and the learners.
We are all learning together and we all get to decide what’s important.
How can we learn how to learn?
Curricula traditionally sets the context well before meeting the learners, denying them the right to contribute in shaping their own life paths and seeding a pattern of passivity.
Our need for structure does not have to be oppressive, it can already begin the process of tending curiosity about what might happen if I try.
When we’re instructed how to learn, it may remove us of the opportunity to learn the deeper skills (and qualities) one needs to become a lifelong learner.
So a new approach to education must support the learner to make sense of the very structure which is shaping their learning.
Then once context arrives (as it always does), the influencing structures can be chosen to suit the terrain of the journey.
Even though older learners have lived longer, does anyone know what anyone will need to know in a world 10 years from now? Get real!
Resources that once would have been directed toward educators preparing a curriculum can instead be redirected into teaching the teachers patterns of culture, supporting their own experience of being a learner while developing their pattern language toolbox. Everyone is supported to learn and teach.
Co-constructing a Learning Environment
If one in the role of educator asks, “what is the environment in which learning is enjoyed?”, then we are given hints with which we might design a learning environment where interest groups self-regulate — finding and motivating each other by provoking new questions and discovering patterns.
It may take a while to realize our inherent power for choosing structures and the direction of our learning, but when we do become used to making choices about our own learning, we will find ourselves immersed in journeys which guide us on a path toward whatever temporary mastery is required to meet all of our needs in new climates — right from the basic to the profound.
Learning journeys can be structured in many different ways depending on the designers and the landscape (or context) in which the experience occurs.
All designers have preferences and patterns to negotiate and compare.
We learn from our environment and our community.
We also learn, and are shaped, by exchange.
We are the directors of continually developing senses; what context are we granted within which to discover ‘common’ sense?
It takes self-awareness to discover the values and qualities that matter to us personally, and these values create the foundation for navigating the unknown together. If we are at least supported to try, then whether through success or through failure, we are developing our inner wisdom.
I am becoming more aware of my preferences by observing what I have unconsciously learned. I am becoming aware of patterns by consciously seeking diverse experiences and making connections.
(‘Diverse’ could be transdisciplinary, intergenerational, cross-cultural, etc…)
From this learning, I find myself offering environments which evoke qualities that I have personally found helpful: curiosity, courage, imagination and a balance of personal and collective responsibility.
Toward that effect, I bring resonating questions, poetry, and elders’ inspiration to guide my learning; and I seek to be aware of how I am using language. I relate with my intellectual body as if I were dancing upon the foundational works and lives of thinkers, artists, flora and fauna, scientists, farmers, friends, and playfully provocative older folks.
Other people are out here, (re/un)learning together.
The ripple-on effects of the climate crisis and health pandemic are breaking down old systems; the ones we once learned do not work now —
meanwhile, explorers have been discovering and designing alternatives.
There are invitations to get busy replenishing the world.
Now it’s time to teach new skills for a new economy — and a new reality.
Now we can afford to move to smaller villages with far more space to grow food, fibre, fuel, fodder & a natural pharmacy (earning through remote work in a digital-knowledge-design economy),
Now we can connect with those who know sovereignty like nobody’s business.
And now we can no longer even afford to participate in whatever was the alternative; so, how will you figure out your future, and with who?
Can a new way of being human be found, through silences, symbols, and songs; raising leaders who can mitigate risk with their hopeful imaginations, linking in with the collective actions of networks; organizations; communities? —
Bringing our homes and our gardens together as a global neighbourhood?
Together, we can create anything.
Who knows better than you do,
How to “do you”, as a citizen of the whole living system of which you are both a part and a whole?
You can come to know yourself,
By learning how to listen to all of you and your interconnected being.
All your relations.
This moment is yours for the taking, so long as you are inclined to share.
In community, your success and your wellbeing belongs to everyone.
This is how we teach responsibility.
As for those who are still around to guide us — who have found, protected and created other worlds — let us celebrate and honour our wise ones.
If your local neighbours are active, and if you are mobilized; will you hold space for your people to design with you, invite your team together onto a learning journey?
Let us learn of great possibilities from each other.
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