In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students—and adults—become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching.
from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, et al.
The alternative to social control through schools is the voluntary participation in society through networks which provide all of its resources for learning… Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life, that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow her to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if she cannot get in the door.
from Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, as quoted in A Pattern Language.
Education, with it’s supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producrs, consumers, spectators, and “fans,” driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve “education” but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves.
from Instead of Education by John Holt
Over the past year I’ve been part of and close to the growth of two organizations in Baltimore seeking to make some of the changes described above, Baltimore Node and Baltimore Food Makers (Foodmake.org). Each serves a different set of people, each has different goals, but both are seeking to encourage learning by doing and by creating connections to people.
The first, Baltimore Node, is a hackerspace. A hackerspace is first a physical location in which tools, primarily electronic and technical in nature, may be stored and used. At the Node, 24/7 access is available to members and access is available to anyone in the community on a regular schedule. A hackerspace is also, more importantly, a network of people geographically centered in a city or region (Baltimore in our case), who share a specific interest in expanding their knowledge of technology and specifically putting that knowledge to use. People who are interested in learning and doing, not just talking about doing. All hackerspaces are unique in their specifics, but these two definitions are at the core of every hackerspace.
The second group, Baltimore Food Makers, is a loose confederation of people learning how food moves from the farm to the table and taking control of that process by growing and making their own food. The introduction on the home page sums it up: “If you have a skill you want to learn or share related to gardening, home food processing, or cooking from scratch, speak up! This group exists to connect people who want to learn with people who have skills they want to share.” Through monthly potlucks, field trips, demonstrations, and discussions, information is passed freely from those who’ve done it to those who want to do it.
New Educational Institutions
Node is not a school, or even a new kind of school, because it is many things a school in our society could never be. Free access, open relationships, no coercion, all action and direction coming from the members. Baltimore Node is an organized place for learning, but it is not a school.
It is not necessary that the people teaching be professionals or even experts. It is also not necessary that the people learning become licensed or certified in the area they are studying. The system is working when those seeking knowledge find what they are looking for.
We see this in small ways in the world, already: I need a phone number for a local dentist, I consult a phone book; I have an issue at work, I go to a coworker; I need to know when the parachute was invented, I go to Wikipedia. Node and Foodmake seek to cause these teacher-learner (resource-seeker) relationships to form intentionally, on a longer time scale, and in a less transient fashion.
My goal is to turn dependency on an institution, which in many cases is a very modern phenomenon, into dependency on a community. I want people to be less dependent on traditional schooling, the government, grad school, and big agriculture; and more dependent on their family, their friends, their neighbors, their community gardens, and the geek that lives one block over whom they’ve never met.
I don’t want to harp on what is good or bad about my culture except to say this: the potential still exists to be a nation, a city, a neighborhood of people who seek out knowledge and an understanding of how the world works so that we can rebuild what is broken, improve what already exists, and invent new solutions to the problems staring us in the face. All this we can do without being told it needs to be done.
But, Node and Foodmake are not where my network stops. I don’t expect they ever will be for anyone. Groups like Velocipede Bike Project, the Free School, BMore Smart, BmoreConnected, and even Ignite Baltimore and TEDx MidAtlantic are seeking to unbuild the walls between people so that real relationships, real networks of learning, can form.
What’s next?
1. Don’t put your hope or your faith in the big institutions.
Your education is no guarantee that you will find work to do, or that you will know how to do it when you find it. And it’s disheartening, but the government and associated institutions that worked at their most creative to get us into our current mess are not, by definition, creative enough to get us out of it. It may or may not be a universal truth that collective greed is stronger than collective wisdom, but it is true in this case.
This probably won’t look like fighting the power as much as it will resemble a step towards independence. Don’t waste energy tearing things down when it’s so much more fun to build new things.
2. Seek fellowship with people who know what you want to know and are doing what you want to do.
“Fellowship” is an old word and tricky to define. I like to think of it as an unspoken commitment between equals to make an effort to grow together. I don’t just mean grow closer to each other, but that each person would independently grow, encouraged by the other.
This is occasionally as formal as a workshop or a potluck, but is more often informal. Physical presence in a location, attention to another person (put away the electronics), or an effort to maintain relationships across distance are all valid forms of fellowship, valid ways to build a network.
3. Share what you know.
Be conscious of the fact that you know things other people might not. You know things in different combinations than anyone else, and have insight others don’t.
There are two ways to share what you know.
1. Sit around and wait for someone to ask.
2. Find people who are interested and invite them to share first.
You can probably guess which I prefer.
There are many opportunities to share what you know without being a big-T Teacher (http://is.gd/6EbET, bottom of page 22). The Node is open to anyone leading workshops. Baltimore Food Makers is always looking for people to lead skill sessions at their potlucks. The Free School is open to all proposals, regardless of your qualifications. Ignite Baltimore accepts speaking proposals from anyone and only filters because they have more speakers than time to let them talk. You have a unique set of skills, experiences, and passions that no one else has. There are people ready to hear what you have to say.
The problem is that it’s a rare thing to be asked what you know, to be invited out of the blue. Your knowledge can best be put to use if you create sharing opportunities. So what does it mean to create a sharing opportunity? For the Node it looked like 10 or so of us meeting (thanks to a single open invitation on Twitter) and realizing we were all excited to start a hackerspace, but hadn’t been invited to do so. So, at that time, we invited each other. The best way to start sharing your knowledge is to ask others to share theirs and to listen carefully.
I’m not saying push yourself on people, ready to pounce when they stop talking, always thinking ahead to your turn in the conversation. Instead, be open to the fact that you may not be the smartest person in the room. Start the conversation by asking others to share, and be open to sharing if that opportunity arises. You won’t be able to share anything until you’re trusted. Nothing kills trust like inconsiderate smash-and-grab style conversation (I need to work on this one).
My wife started Foodmake not with the goal of telling as many people as possible what she knows, but of getting those people to tell her what they knew. The group’s success is in part based on that flipped relationship. Not, “come here so I can tell you something”, but “come here so you can tell me.”
