Until recently, I used to think of education in terms of how to participate in it or improve upon it. Finally, with this year, I can say I have taught every grade something K – 10, the first year of college, adults, adult ed., and graduate school, that is, I have taught every grade K – graduate school, except grades 11/12 and the upper two years of undergraduates.
About seven years ago, I gave an eighth grade class of mine an assignment to create another shape for government–something not in a pyramid that mimicked, in its way, the top down power of kings or the Catholic Church. One kid had a government model shaped like a skateboard. I sort of feel like doing that with how we are educated, how we learn:– a total reshaping; a lot is researched in terms of working within the model we have; I am not sure that the future of our country, and, maybe the world, doesn’t depend on our coming up with another model than our current model/s for schools. I mean, have you, ever, really stopped to think about:
How until just about a hundred years ago, kids were rarely segregated out by age rather than by aptitude and skill-set?
What if kids could move on to higher ed. simply when they reach a certain aptitude rather than a certain age?
How, until maybe thirty years ago, if you were fine person, smart in your own way, adept at talk or with your hands, you could still make a decent living? How, more than ever, high-level reading is an essential skill now? I say this not to make anyone anxious, but, more to suggest, and, if that weren’t so? What would you do instead? I think of a few students I have now (first graders) for whom reading may never end up being their “thing,” and how they are fine people, but through no fault of their own, they may be even more up the creek by the time they hit the job market than someone even hitting the market today.
I am also back to– what would it take, really, for a community to be semi-self-sustaining? I mean, really, do people think you are going to be able to attract high tech into the former industrial mountain areas of West Virginia? Rust-belt Michigan or Indiana? And, if local folks are bright, and go to college, they almost never return to their communities. Is that really what we want out of life? To be dependent on outsiders and outside sources and other economic factors to dictate the terms and whereabouts of our lives? I think again:
What skills do we need in a community to be semi-self-sustaining? What would it take, for example, for a town like:
Bluefield, WV to be semi-self-sustaining in food, shelter, energy, and also have enough goods produced to contribute to a wider money economy and to pay state and federal taxes?
Or, Gary, Indiana?
Or? Or? Or?
What if some foundation were to come in and fund a pilot project that would make a local community as self-sufficient as possible?
What would the folks in the community need to know? How would education change if self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship, and sustainability were its goals? If there were a blend of skills from food production to high tech communication within the same small community, or, maybe, even within the same people?
I often paraphrase Jung that if you want to know a culture’s psychology, know a people, then look at what they create. Our culture is becoming more and more disembodied, more and more cerebral in the skills we need. What if a community responded to the needs of industry, second, and its needs as a community, first? Not as in communism, which has in common with capitalism that the first concern is material. But, if the community sets its own priorities with a concrete plan for revamping whatever would need to be revamped to get there?