Thoughts on the “ecology of education” 

In any period of rapid social change, like we are now experiencing, society seems to split between those who focus on meeting tomorrow’s challenges vs. those who work hard to protect the traditions of the past. Quakers tend to be part of the first group. So I asked myself, to what extent is formal schooling as presently structured, an anachronism? The recent increase in home schooling is, I suspect, an adaptive response to perceived change in what is needed to prepare our children to successfully meet the challenges of adulthood in our time.

Before the Internet, specialized information was a primary need for advanced education. Now everything you could possibly want to know is immediately available on the Internet to anyone. While 90% of people still get hired based on their technical skills, about 90% of those fired, are fired due to lack of relational skills. While public schools have been reluctant to teach values and relational skills, schools like Scattergood, sponsored by value based groups have been better at adapting to this increasingly recognized need. While home schooling probably does a good job of communicating specific family values to the next generation, my experience is that it often is a bit short on teaching relational skills. Since most people still get hired based on technical skills, it would not be wise to fully walk away from passing on some basic technical information along with a balanced comprehension of the myths (Joseph Campbell) that guide ours and others’ societies.

Since the focus of this group is “what do we want to pass on to our children in the 81% of the non formal learning environment”, and recognizing that a high % of our children will not attend Scattergood (though Scattergood’s presence provides a vivid paradigm of what we hope to teach our children), my thoughts keep returning to what can my monthly meeting do more effectively to help all of us be more intentional about what our children learn.

I think it was Jeff that mentioned queries. I was quite impressed with how well they presently focus my attention to what is important for meeting the challenges of tomorrow. I like Jeff’s idea of always working to develop the new queries with the objectives we are seeking to fulfill clearly in mind, though my commitment to chaos theory suggests we may actually have done best by listening to the Spirit and letting that guide our evolving task of updating new queries. I felt our Penn Valley first day school gained a great deal from their recent study of queries and reflecting on what they might want if they were developing new ones.

A recent issue of Time magazine looking toward the 21^st century drew my attention to a significant anticipated shift in the economic basis of our society from the technological to the biological. With the breakthroughs in mapping the human genes now taking place, they predict that the economic transformations of these new possibilities will be greater over the next 20 years than the Internet has been in the past 20 years. With Iowa being an agriculturally based economy, the impact of these transformations portend dramatic life style changes, both positive and negative, for our area. If we choose to be proactive in adapting to the challenges of tomorrow, this might be an impact we want to consider. What was important to teach the next generation was astoundingly different in an agriculturally based economy than in the industrial economy or the information and service economies. I have to think the shift to the genome-based economy will call for whole new ways of living and relating to one another, just as each previous shift has done. Wish I knew what they were.

We no longer live in an authoritarian age where students had little choice but to soak up what the authoritarian “parent figures” were dishing out.

With the internet, there is more of everything available at every students fingertips than any 10 people could ever hope to absorb.

My guess is our task is not to be dispensers of information, or even wisdom, but rather for us to focus on how to encourage students to acquire a passion for whatever we believe will hold them in good stead as adults.

The discovery principle probably needs some of our attention. I really want to avoid a focus on content. I believe it to be a very attractive dead end. I’d rather focus on how we wash away the seeds of rebellion planted by our futile attempts to continue living in an authoritarian age and how to light the spark that inspires our youth to become self starters, turned on to charting their own unique creative and abundant life.

I’m convinced the information explosion of the Internet revolution dramatically changes what needs to be taught at all levels. Rote learning used to be important since professionals were the source of information not readily available to the general population. MD’s are now scrambling daily to keep up with the latest research brought to them by their patients. This information explosion has most professions on the defensive, trying not to look dumb. The apprenticeship part of a medical education is now most likely the most valuable part of the whole enterprise because that’s where they learn relational skills.

Scattergood seems to be in touch with the importance of relational skills, which are being more widely respected. As I mentioned above, I like the saying, which is close to the truth if not exact, that “90% of people get hired based on their technical skills, and fired due to their lack of relational skills”. The most satisfying teaching experience Ginger & I ever had was in a church setting where we contracted with about 700 people over about an 8 year period to commit to 2 hours a week over a 2 year period for an experiential in depth study of “caring and relational skills”. I never would have dreamed the experience could have been so liberating to the participants and us. As you know, the teachers always learn more than the students.

Perhaps the long term calling of IYM is to focus on an ever emerging “ecology of education” using Scattergood as our laboratory.