Reclaim the Wonder of Childhood

We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.

-James Hillman (1965) American Psychologist

 Resa Steindel Brown in The Call To Brilliance argues that education can be empowering to children and adults in ways that conventional school systems cannot dare to even hope for.  Current schools are fashioned to give children the knowledge they need to get a job when they are grown. But there is so much more to human potential that is completely untapped or even squelched by schooling.  Wonder, imagination and self-determination are the first casualties of public schooling.  Steindel Brown believes a passion oriented, individualized education can revive the most beautiful attributes of the human spirit, with children leading adults back to a place where possibilities are endless.

The child can lead us back to our innate brilliance with authenticity, integrity and passion, if we allow it. But we forget. We forget our own childhoods when all things were possible.

Marc Brown is taking these passion oriented educational ideas and organizing Passion Oriented Education (TM) which should be launching this month.  Groups of parents get together every two weeks to plan and discuss the education of their children and brainstorm together to improve their children's opportunities to follow their passions.  Each group has a leader and the children meet once a week for projects and friendship.  This model seems ideal for use along with Gifted Education programs.

A Faustian Bargain

All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country.  A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it.  But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

- William D. Howells (1913), American Writer and Critic

A literature-based education is the exact opposite to Standards-Based schooling, the public school reform movement that has defined the first decade of the 21st century.  Schools today work to collectively raise the standards, or scores, of American students.  The key word here is collectively.  The final end of American public education today is to raise collective scores. This is what administrators focus on and look to inspire teachers to accomplish:  higher standardized test scores.  To what end exactly?  According to educational consultant Ruby Payne , raising the real estate values of communities, is an important reason children should go to school and do well on standardized exams. 

Are we deliberately training a generation of under-educated, apathetic and literary ignorant people; that is, classic barbarians, so our homes will retain or increase in value?

That seems like a terrible trade, like nothing short of a Faustian bargain. 

Inner City Centers of Hope

We greet all students with the same basic recipe for success: high standards, stiff challenges, a chance to develop unexplored talents, and a message that many of them haven’t heard before–that no matter how difficult the circumstances of their lives may be, no matter how many bad assumptions they’ve made about their chances in life, no matter how well they’ve been taught to rein in their dreams and narrow their aspirations, they have the right, and the potential, to expect to live rich and satisfying lives.
-Bill Strickland (2009), Social Entrepreneur

At 16, Bill Strickland, now sixty, had an epiphany. The sun shone through a large window at his Pittsburgh inner city high school on a man in flow, sculpting a clump of clay. Strickland had never seen someone so engrossed in life and was drawn towards the light. He introduced himself to that sculptor and gained a mentor for life. With his mentor's guidance, the young Strickland gained a new, positive view of life and saw the world open before him. Four decades later, Strickland is deeply engaged in changing lives, opening up the world for other inner-city people, through social entrepreneurship. He runs the Manchester Bidwell Corporation and the Manchester Craftsman's Guild, both educational facilities based in Pittsburgh to serve mainly minority, poverty-ridden, youths and adults. These facilities are truly inspiring. They are well designed, both architecturally and educationally, to fill each student with hope and provide them the opportunity to work hard and learn much. Students may enroll in art and music classes taught by world class visiting artists. They may learn gourmet cooking skills or agricultural techniques. The list of offerings is impressive, but I think my favorite ideal of Strickland's schools is the life-changing personal attention and respect each student receives. The young people of Pittsburgh are extremely fortunate to have such an educational center only a free bus-ride away.
Bill Strickland's big idea is to expand his model to over 200 cities around the world. This is an exciting idea worth supporting.
To watch Bill Strickland's big idea TED Conference presentation, click on Bill Strickland's big idea . Enjoy and be inspired.

"O.K. Johnny, Explain Your Idea."

The Punahou School, set on 76-acres of hearty tropical grass with lush bushes highlighting startling flowers and huge banyan trees, is a truly beautiful school. The K-12 school, founded in 1841, feels more like a college campus and has an exotic mix of the scholarly and a laid-back Hawaiian-style. Barack Obama is the first U.S. President to come from Punahou, Hawaii's top independent school.
I recently sauntered through the Punahou campus and noted how fortunate students attending there are. Fresh fruits and vegetables are standard fare for lunch; windows are huge and most teachers leave their doors wide open. Elementary classrooms have their own little backyard for children to move in and out of; junior high students may choose to study Spanish, Latin, Mandarin Chinese or Japanese. But really, what makes these students extra "lucky" to be at Punahou is that each student is seen as her own person, full of potential, abilities and gifts to share with the world. Students at Punahou are there to gain skills to fulfill a bigger purpose, bigger than receiving a world class education. They are there to learn what they need to, to contribute to society and make their mark on the world. Their parents have big dreams. Their teachers have big jobs. The children know the school will serve them well.

President Obama experienced a quality education. Like many other U.S. Presidents of the past, he aims to improve American public education while in office. The job is huge. Some argue it isn't even possible at this point. Former public school teacher turned education activist, John Taylor Gatto says:

We must wake up to what our [public] schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.

Children at Punahou are expected to lead someday. Children in the typical public school may have different expectations. To begin real positive change in public schooling, the grand picture of its actual function must be created, written and burned into the memory of every citizen. The basis for this change lies in what is best in American culture. The United States arguably houses the most innovation friendly culture the earth has ever seen.

Could public schools channel the beauty of American flexibility and openness of mind to improve the individual lives of its citizens and even the entire world?

Could the function of American education be to provide humanity with hordes of great contributors?

Must American education differentiate itself from that of other nations?

Yes. Yes. And yes.

Barack Obama has said a lot about American public education. But the key, the gleam of hope in his ideas on education lies in his comments on assessment. Obama says:

I will provide funds for states to implement a broader range of assessments that can evaluate higher-order skills, including students’ abilities to use technology, conduct research, engage in scientific investigation, solve problems, present and defend their ideas.

Obama hopes American students will soon be taught and tested to present and defend their ideas. That is a different and truly American idea in education. Americans serve, not by being "good listeners" but through contribution.

More power to you and good luck, Mr. President.

Girlish Glee in London

And the school children, those alleged dysfunctional products of our greed-obsessed, low-serotonin, broken-homed, intolerably lardy, TV-ruined society, were in a snowy wonderland where there was no school, no rules and nothing to worry about. I've never seen London secondary school kids look filled to the brim with such girlish glee.

-Stuart Jeffries (2009), British Journalist

My skin still glows from the mild humidity of Hawaii's version of winter. Post vacation and back home now, I am somewhat grateful to live in a mild climate. Somewhat, I write, because I am an adult with things to do and responsibilities to execute, but still hold memories of pre-dawn February mornings on Long Island, huddled with siblings, kneeling by the stereo, hoping, waiting, almost like a second Christmas, for a general announcement of cancelled schools. Cancelled schools meant closed roads. By 10:00 a.m. neighborhoods across the island rang to the brim with childish glee.

So today, I happily imagine the children of London, who don't often experience Snow Days, and today complain to no one of their numb butts and faces, wet clothes and stiff knees. Cheers to snowy London!

Preventive Education

Too many current schools operate on a disease model of education, which is about
remedying deficits. Such a perspective makes the school environment unhealthy. Focus on compliance to a set of standards that are mostly disconnected from the students future needs and potential, rather than on the nurturing of personal and universal strengths, diminishes what passes as education to reactionary squelching of the human spirit and potential.
Psychologist Martin Seligman's idea that
"the prevention of mental illness comes from recognizing and nurturing a set of strengths, competencies, and virtues in young people--such as future-mindedness, hope, interpersonal skills, courage, the capacity for flow, faith, and work ethic" (Seligman, 2002), may be applied to education. Education is not only a door to opportunity because it gifts students with relevant skills but also leads students through that door to prevent intellectual depression by nurturing the best qualities of individual students and humanity as a whole.

A Green School

What do our president-elect Barack Obama, Steve Case (founder of AOL) and Pierre Omidyar (founder of e-Bay) have in common? They all attended high school in Hawaii, at the Panahou School. The school boasts a long list of worthies as former alumni, but that is not the only thing that makes the school newsworthy.

In the fall of 2005, for five balmy Honolulu days, a group of thirty individuals representing students, faculty, staff, administrators, trustees and parents, gathered to talk about improving Hawaii's top private school's physical environment. The Panahou's School ground's were already gorgeous, classrooms full of windows and lit by sunshine and many of the buildings historically significant, but this group gathered to discuss a deeper way to improve the school's environment; they were to define sustainability and come up with suggestions on implementation of a Sustainability Initiative. The group pondered long and came up with the following broad definition of sustainability:

Sustainability is...

• A world that continually maintains and improves the human condition, without negatively impacting future generations.


• A world populated by people who recognize that there are natural limits to resources, and who are mindful of the interconnectedness of things.


• A world that carefully attends to its environmental, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual resources, and that continuously advances learning and ideas.

The 3,7000 student K-12 school is openly centered on the belief that each child can make a difference in the world. And even though this "difference" made by each child is not limited to learning to live sustainably, a solid green-based philosophy makes sense.

In 2006 the Panahou School was rated as the #1 Green School in the United States by National Geographic. This success seems to have only fueled the school's desire to continue with their sustainability plan that extends to 2016. The long term plan includes improvement in student's meals; students are offered locally grown, organic Food, and reduction in paper use to move to more digitized school work.

This school certainly has the financial means to make all these plans a reality. They are a large school, and a model of what many other schools could be doing to improve the environment their students move in.

Learning Pods, Not Schools

Schools of the future may not recognize their ancestor as the twentieth-century public school. The elementary and high school of the future will be more like an excellent private college with a the heart of a library and the soul of a friendly coffee shop.

"For five centuries or more--and at a much quicker pace during the last five decades--Western societies have demoted human gregariousness from a necessity to incidental."

John Cacioppo, Psychology Professor (2008)

As the twenty-first century progresses the greatest need of humans will be to connect and form meaningful relationships with one another. Africa's extreme poverty may end. Radical religious zealots may all die off, natural disasters may be handled with ease and biological technology may extend human lifespans dramatically, but we will grow increasingly lonely without concrete places to meet, chat and laugh. Children will not need teachers to transmit information or acquire learning tools. But they will want inspiration and guidance from self-chosen mentorships. They will thrive making friends with people of all ages and across interests. The schools of the future will be open-sourced, well-stocked and thoughtfully designed to foster human connection. In fact, they may no longer even be called schools, but something entirely different that would better represent the places children spend their days.

Reconsidering Compulsion

Voting is compulsory in Belgium, Australia, Ecuador and Lebanon. It is not in the Netherlands, Great Britain and Venezuela. Most Americans would agree, voting is a good thing, a priviledge; but forced voting would be a hard sell here. Most Americans would also agree, schooling is a good thing. But schooling is on a different plane, it isn't just a priviledge in the United States, it is compulsory. What makes schooling so much more important to require, or maybe so much less likely to occur without, compulsion?
If I were planning my own utopian society, I would certainly favor a population with basic education over a highly democratic one. But isn't that freedom Americans have not to vote part of the democratic package? Shouldn't the freedom not to go to school be also? In my Utopian society, no one would have to go to school, but every single person would want to be educated: every single person would prize learning and the community would be resource rich, an eden for the body and mind.
The United States is cram-packed with resources. Many of the brightest, richest, most creative people on the planet reside here. Our material resources, from the Library of Congress to the local bookmobile, are everything our founders would have wanted for us and so much more. So, why do we need to force schooling?
The most amazing education humans have ever had, is literally a finger-tap away. So why compel people to check into a community building that insulates them from the resource-rich world? It is time to re-consider schools for what they are and what they could be, because in the world in which we live, compulsion should be irrelevant.

Famous People Who Liked School

10. Oprah Winfrey (American Talk Show Host, 2005): “For every one of us that succeeds, it's because there's somebody there to show you the way out. The light doesn't always necessarily have to be in your family; for me it was teachers and school.”

9. Ernest Renan (French Philosopher, 1883): “The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have given his life.”

8. Victor Hugo (Poet, Novelist, 1830): “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”

7. Andrew Wiles (English Mathematician,1993): “I loved doing problems in school.”

6. Luciano Pavarotti (Italian Opera Singer, 1990): “I was an elementary school teacher.”

5. Alphonso Jackson (U.S Secretary of HUD, 2003): "Progress for black Americans depends on good schools because education is the last great equalizer.”

4. Bill Watterson (Author of Calvin & Hobbes, 1987): “At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you’ll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own.”

3. Jane Addams (Founder of Hull House, Chicago, 1900): “America’s future will be determined by the home and the school.”

2. Bill Dodds (American Novelist, 2007): “Labor Day is a glorious holiday because your child will be going back to school the next day. It would have been called Independence Day, but that name was already taken.”

1. E.C. McKenzie (Author, 2000): "Schoolteachers are not fully appreciated by parents until it rains all day Saturday."

Famous People Who Disliked School

10. George Bernard Shaw (1925 Nobel Laureate, Literature): "My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."

9. Robert Morley (English Actor, 1985): "Show me the man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I will show you a bully and a bore."

8. Albert Einstein (Physicist, 1950): "It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the curiosity of inquiry."

7. H.L. Mencken (Journalist, 1935): "School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency."

6. Woody Allen (Playwright, 1989): "I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers."

5. Mark Twain (American Author, 1900): "I've never let my school interfere with my education."

4. Margaret Mead (Anthropologist,): "My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school."

3. Ernest Shakleton (Antartic Explorer,1905): "I do not know what "moss" stands for in the proverb, but if it stood for useful knowledge...I gathered more moss by rolling than I ever did at school."

2. Ivan Illich (Philosopher, 1990): "We have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school."

1. John Updike (American Author, 1975): "The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on their parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education."

The Real School Crisis

The main crisis in schools today is irrelevance.

Of all the institutions in America, schools have least adapted themselves to the free agent economy.

Daniel Pink (2001), journalist

I began reading Free Agent Nation by Daniel Pink last night and love his take on the irrelevancy of public education as it stands today. * Public education is ideally based on the fundamental principles of the American democratic ideal (i.e., concern for natural rights of freedom and independence for the individual, as well as responsibility towards society). But today's system really belongs to an era that defined democracy in an oxymoronic way: personal freedom through rule following and sticking to "a plan." Most people agree that some kind of reform in education is in order, but still, millions of American parents trust the school system enough to hand over their kids every day. It's almost as if most people are wearing front blinders, unable to see what lies ahead for themselves and their children.

*To read a review of Free Agent Nation: http://www.sohodojo.com/ribs/free-agent-nation.html