It’s that time of year in Portland when I wonder what happened to the world. The cherry blossoms come in so quietly and suddenly under the blanket of gray skies and rain and then blow away before I feel like I’ve had a moment to let them take my breath away. The lilacs arrive in time for my youngest’s birthday, kiss her a wish with their scent and then wither on the branch. The fig tree outside my front door produces its first batch of fruit which we’ve learned to allow to the squirrels. One day comes without fail in late May and I swear that I just blinked and suddenly the world is lush with green all around. Everything is overgrown. The mint has taken up all the space where the tomatoes should be, the little green berries on the bush are waiting for the sun to turn them blue, the irises gone by, magnolia petals litter the sidewalks. The trees in my backyard are suddenly offering shade.
In her most recent essay, Sarah Kendzior writes, “Childhood takes a long time to go by so fast.” Like the early spring we waited for all winter. Something new has come, and I’m not sure how it got here so fast. I’m overwhelmed by the weeding ahead, wishing I’d spent more time preparing the soil for what I’d like to grow next. I imagine that if I’d done more when I had the chance, taken more walks in the rain, brought more lilacs inside to sweeten the air, that somehow, something would be better now. It’s so much easier to look backwards at the things we miss than it is to look forward towards the work we need to do.
It seems that’s true even when we know that the work we need to do is a condition for preserving the things we value, cherish, and love. That’s true even when we can imagine something better. Or we think we can.
Kendzior was writing in the wake of the Tornado that ripped through her neighborhood in St Louis this week. One moment she’s eating ice cream to celebrate her daughter’s graduation and the next moment that ice cream shop is fragments and shards. Things that we love, things that are beautiful and delicious and comforting end, leave, change. If we love, we will grieve, because we loved.
More than any other time in my life I can feel the urge to wish into existence that things be as they were. Evolution has ensured that we see the world that way. The stories, the reflexes honed over time by our nervous systems and the predictions, the assumptions, the expectations they afford, all conspire to create a longing for what once, we are sure, was better than this current feeling of not knowing, of uncertainty, that feels like fear. The feeling mingles with grief. But prediction error is life threat. So we return to what seemed better in order to imagine what we want to happen next. Which too easily becomes what we think should happen next.
This week, as the morning sunlight filtered into my home through the tender green leaves outside, I had two long distance encounters with the New York Times journalist, Ezra Klein. In one, he was discussing the book he wrote with Derek Thompson called Abundance. In the other he was interviewing Rebecca Winthrop, the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. Abundance is focused on many important public systems other than education arguing that things could be so much better than they are now - and not the kind of better that we remember when we think of how things used to be. He cautions, “Don’t let anyone take the future from you.” Loris Malaguzzi had another way of saying this: that we could be nostalgic for the future.
But in his conversation with Winthrop, Klein seems to have a different point of view - limited by assumptions of how teaching and learning must work at scale and fear over the uncertain future his own young children are facing, and not knowing what to do. He seems reluctant to claim a future filled with possibility for something better than what has happened before - or than what has led us to now.
Winthrop asks him what he wants for his own children and, in his role as accomplished journalist and intellectual, he deflects, almost as though the question is irrelevant to the conversation. Maybe because, as he says, whether children learn things that are “beautiful and fascinating” just doesn’t matter to whether or not they will get a job. So Winthrop invites him to consider that learning experiences need to “motivate kids to dig in and engage and be excited to learn” and that “learning to live with other people, learning to know yourself, and developing the flexible competencies to be able to navigate a world of uncertainty” must be within our imagined sense of what schools are for. To which Klein says, “I don’t know if you build a society off of people just enjoying what they’re studying.”
Oh boy.
Abundance for me but not for thee. I guess?
Winthrop works hard to persuade Klein that there is more to education and to the work of teaching than programs for knowledge transmission, acquisition, and compliance. She argues that in a time of uncertainty, the most important skills are that we learn to be “go-getters” and “wayfinders” who can “shift and change” and “constantly learn new things.” She says it is important to learn to be people who are “excited to learn new things because” that level of motivation is a huge predictor of outcomes.
But my favorite part of the interview comes when Klein suggests that Generative AI may be better than humans when it comes to teaching and learning. Winthrop asks: Better at what?
The way that Klein seems to hear her question is interesting, I think. It’s as though he doesn’t register the idea that there might be something worth parsing there. He interprets the question to be about whether AI is better in general at replacing the work of human beings - not the specific work of teaching. He explains by saying that If we assume AI will be better at so much of the work currently occupied by human beings, why would we not assume that it would be better at teaching, too? So Winthrop asks again. “But better at what?” And then she shows him a little more complexity by reminding him that we learn in relationship. “We’ve evolved to do that.” She acknowledges that one thing teachers do is skill development and knowledge transmission and she helps him here: “I think that is what you are talking about.”
Of course that is what he is talking about. The vast majority of people who talk about education are operating on the assumption that, as Winthrop points out later, “Schools are not designed to give kids agency. Schools are designed to help kids comply.” And the assumption with that assumption is that is how it is meant to be and that it has always been that way and so it cannot be and needn’t be any different. In spite of the incredibly poor outcomes on almost every measure, there is no different way to go forward. So even when Klein circles around to claiming that “the most important thing for human beings to be is as human as possible” he is unable to imagine what our formal environments for education might have to do with that. The only place he can go is backwards to a romanticized vision of some kind of classical, screen-free, paper and pencil classroom. Maybe that was better. Maybe we reach back to do more of what we already changed because what we are doing now isn't working, either.
The uncertainties of the future, given the problems we’re facing today, can be too much for the imagination to bear. Klein and Thompson identified this tendency to look backwards as they did their research for Abundance, and they have crafted a persuasive argument that offers the rest of us courage to move towards the new and the unknown. We shouldn’t expect that anyone can do that for us when it comes to education. That is work for those of us who know better.
Our nostalgia should be focused on the future rather than on wishing that what has gone will come again. In the preprimary schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy, they work to create Everyday Utopias which they describe as “the everyday-ness of being together, the strength of a way of organizing that is designed but light, knowledgeable but flexible; a special care for the environments and the way of being at school, the idea that schools are places in which culture is created in order to live into the habit of building days that work for everyone.”
If we want to understand this possibility, we’ll need to learn to live into it ourselves. And then we’ll need to tell the stories of our experience. We’ll need to keep trying to persuade people that schools are a place where more than knowledge transmission is always happening. We need to believe it ourselves, too. To “live into the habit of building days that work for everyone” is a proposal that relies on a kind of abundance that emerges only from a willingness to lean into uncertainties that require us to stay alive to new ideas, and to learn new things. This is the work we’ll need to do if we want to preserve what we cherish, value, and love the most, and move with it into the future. Consider the ways in which we are preparing the soil now for what we really hope will grow.
We welcome discussion on this post within The Studio community.
We encourage you to register soon for next year’s Leading Playful Inquiry cohort which is filling up fast, and which will become more expensive soon.
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