I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn’t the faintest clue of where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The kids were far ahead of us on the precarious and narrow switchbacks which wound their way down to the River’s Edge. We yelled for them to take it slow and then shrugged and hoped the years of practice on trails would come through for them. Down, down we went while the turkey vultures spiraled up, up on the thermals. Finally our vantage point opened up to the spread of rushing water and the atmosphere shifted to a kind of slapdash Robinson Crusoe vibe. We picked our way through remains: stick forts, semi-identifiable riverboat flotsam, a jungle carpet of bur-cucumber — and tallied up our finds. Rocks were thrown, others pocketed. Logs were launched with great ceremony: grunts of exertion followed by squeals of delight. Finally, a particularly arresting treasure grabbed the attention of first one, then two and finally everyone in the group.
No you really have to look at it closer. Take a picture! Do you think it’s ok to touch? Animal, vegetable or mineral? Vegetable. Various commands issued forth from young and old as we negotiated the best angle to come at this fascinating object. No! Animal. It’s gotta be animal. Grab a stick quick! I want a picture with my hand so you can see the scale. Beavertail? Do they decompose like…like that?
As we continued to puzzle, another hiking party had made it down to our spot. It only seemed natural to invite them into the conversation. We watched patiently as they went over some of the same territory we had until one of them said what about a paddlefish?
Paddlefish.
Phones were pointed away from the object before us and up to the satellites to inquire of the Invisible Web of Knowledge. We lined up what we found. This was definitely a possibility. Our Pocket Encyclopedias also told us that these were called polyodon spathula by some, with the flat, networked rostrum, or snout functioning as a scoop or “spatula” for its feeding technique. We confirmed that this guy had developed this spatula plus a filter-feeding system in his native Mississippi River basin to eat plankton. That it had taken him about 125 million years to figure that one out, but hey he survived. (I knew he looked prehistoric!) We traded facts back and forth as eagerly as we had the limestone chunks and fish hooks earlier. They were living ideas, alive in our hands with the experience at hand and they were simultaneously millions of years old. That is magic.
What is it that makes for a successful learning experience? How do you measure it? What sort of conditions need to be present in order for “education” to take place? What does it mean to educate?
These are questions which have pestered me for years. Doubtless I will go to my grave gesturing with one hand into the empty air and intoning but what is education, really? (Call it an occupational hazard.1) But I have been freshly inspired to dig into these inquiries as I read Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971) for the first time. It is not for the faint of heart. What he has in mind is a very real and radical revolution. “Liberation could be bloodless,” he points out brightly at one point. Even for those of us who are squeamishly gradualist change-makers at heart there is excellent food for thought. Everywhere throughout one finds resounding affirmations for the embedded-in-life learning I describe with the paddlefish. Illich is firmly convinced that true learning cannot take place in schools as they currently exist but he’s unfailingly certain that it’s the birthright of every human being.
In school we are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with the amount of input; and finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates.
In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by “being with it,” yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
Chapter 3, “Ritualization of Progress”
Most learning…is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Amen, brother. I’ll consider his critique of current schooling more deeply soon, but for the moment I’d just like to linger over that idea that learning takes place thanks to participation and meaningful setting. When I think about the paddlefish now it is inseparable from the funky smell of decay around a river, the delighted shrieks of children, and the satisfaction of puzzling-solving with other humans. Though taxonomic knowledge and “facts” played a part in enriching our understanding eventually, this wasn’t where we began. (Nor could it have been measured after the fact by a certificate.)
I like to think there were at least three realities in place beforehand. Let’s call them Attention, Collaboration and Mystery. I suggest that genuine and enduring knowledge acquisition involves at least these three, though probably more. Exercise Attention. Invite (or incite) Collaboration. And assume Mystery.
Exercise Attention
I came to Lowry Nature Center in Carver Park Reserve for the first time on a class field trip at age eleven. I fell head-over-heels with the place. After that initial experience my Very Accommodating Mom would get up in the blue morning light a couple of mornings a week and drive me along the winding country roads out there. (Thanks Mom!) I knew that when we turned at the lone Dairy Queen standing in the cornfields we were close. I'd get out, binoculars thumping my chest, and head into the center looking for Kathy in her office. She was never there of course. She was outside with her hands on her hips and looking at her surroundings. Always looking, scanning, seeing.
Almost the first thing I was taught was to pull dead mice out of the freezer, put them in warm water to soften, give them a couple of snips, and bring them over to the two birds of prey kept on site for educating the visitors. One was a small owl. I think the other was a kestrel. Both were rescues. I had to focus my attention on the tiniest of movements to ensure they (and I) remained calm. (On that note I just read Helen MacDonald’s gorgeous H is for Hawk and though my experience with raptors was relatively tame it brought to mind the palpable mix of terror and excitement I had every time I opened those little screen doors. I was at Attention.)
Then Kathy would take me for a walk.
Once she taught me that the retina was thicker on the peripheral so if I could exercise that part of my eye I'd spot birds and critters more readily. She wasn’t only sharpening my eye. Sounds, smells, tastes, tactile experiences — these were all part of what she called Sensory Awareness.
How many different ways can you hold a bird in your mind so that the next time one came along, you'd know it? Their calls were at the top of the list of course. You could not quite smell a bird usually but you could certainly touch it, especially if you hung out with Kathy long enough. Bird-banding was a frequent activity. I learned from practice that if you hold a bird upside-down they go calm and sometimes even fall asleep. This gives the bander ample time to disentangle its delicate feet from the threads of the mist nets, encase its tiny leg with a small metal band and flip it over to let it fly. Kathy was so choreographed in her movements that she could nonchalantly pick up a bird mid-conversation, apply the band and release the creature before it even knew what had happened, tossing the number off to the person designated to keep the notebook. (Sometimes me.) That was another way you held a bird. In your memory. You faithfully recorded sightings year after year and built an understanding of their web of movements over the region. The exercise of Attention enables one to gather observations over a period of time in layers and layers.
Invite (or Incite) Collaboration
This is the point at which some of us need some major help. We do not want to appear ignorant and so rather than asking for help we struggle along silently or give up. Let’s stop pretending we know when we don’t, friends. Let’s cast off the “cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place” and our “unwonted, taught pride.” The joy and success of discovering more about the world and our part in it hinges entirely on this. I think of the hikers who gifted us with the name of the animal carcass we were staring down. They did not solve the entire mystery of the paddlefish (that one keeps going, as it has for over one hundred million years) but they gave a significant clue to unlock another room or two.
One of my best friends invited me into such a collaboration this past November when she suggested we wake up a couple hours before dawn and drive one state over to Crex Meadows, one of the spots known for hosting sandhill cranes during nesting and migration. We followed a few online breadcrumbs left in birding groups about where they might be still gathering this late in the season. We crossed our fingers that they’d still be around.
They were.
It was an unparalleled experience. One thing that strikes me after the fact is how collaborative it was. Firstly, thanks to my friend who initiated the adventure. But we also joined mission with the people we found Out There. We arrived pit-in-the-stomach-excited and also somewhat unsure about where to go. The car crept along alone on a narrow road through flowage marshlands eerily fixed into icy waves. We hoped for a person sighting as much as a crane sighting. Why?
They know. As my companion said later: birders, man. Soon we spotted the tail lights of a minivan and decided pull over. Here were two sisters, both wildlife photographers, and their mom tucked in with a blanket and kleenex in the front passenger seat.
Have you been here before I inquire politely. Every morning she replies wryly. She goes on to explain that her mother used to bring her out here and now her own daughters do the same. I can tell that despite her worldly-wise tone she has not lost the wonder. They tell us in hushed tones about another year when they were here for the Final Departure and 100,000 cranes took to the skies and left them alone and speechless. Later in our own drive around the reserve we get to watch as 3,000-5,000 cranes take to kettling in the air, chirruping with their inimitable calls, practicing migration. One might even say…collaborating. (I wasn’t able to capture that moment on video but here are a few hundred waking up and peeling off to go nibble in the farmer’s fields nearby.)
Assume Mystery
Before any learning endeavor, be it scientific, artistic, intellectual or skills-based, it seems good to begin with Mystery. What do I mean by that? I guess just a basic sense that I am small and the world is large. That anything I find might be provisional or foundational and either way it’s good to hold it loosely. That’s not to say there aren’t things to call True and False it’s just that those realities are necessarily interwoven into the mysterious unfolding of the universe. And if that sound a bit grand, I’m glad.
That way, whatever particular territory I find myself searching — riverbanks, prairies, sedge marshes or simply the probing face of my child — the truest background to all of it is a profound sense that I both know and do not know.
Meanwhile, here is Annie Dillard who is still staring at the Tinker Creek and thinking about the Present. She gets to Mystery better than almost anyone I’ve found so I’ll end with her words.
My God, I look at the creek. It is the answer to Merton’s prayer: Give us time! It never stops. If I seek the sense and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek. You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over. The creek is the one great giver. It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation. This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.
Here is the word from a sub-atomic physicist: “Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves.” Let me twist his meaning. Here it comes. The particles are broken; the waves are translucent, laving, roiling with beauty like sharks. The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.
Amen.
Photograph of Ivan Illich: Adrift Animal, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
I have been a teacher for my entire working life and only recently went on hiatus for familial and professional reasons.
"Before any learning endeavor, be it scientific, artistic, intellectual or skills-based, it seems good to begin with Mystery. What do I mean by that? I guess just a basic sense that I am small and the world is large. That anything I find might be provisional or foundational and either way it’s good to hold it loosely. That’s not to say there aren’t things to call True and False it’s just that those realities are necessarily interwoven into the mysterious unfolding of the universe. And if that sound a bit grand, I’m glad."
This is a good one, Abbey.
Sometimes I think what we call education (formal) should be called training. Necessary in life but secondary to true education.