Remember the first time you went away from home without your family?  I’d done scout weekends and that sort of thing, but the first extended time away was when I was heading to Air Cadet Basic Training in Trenton for two weeks in the summer of 1984.  Just before I left I saw The Neverending Story.  As a creative kid who was neck deep in Dungeons & Dragons and art, and whose dad kept telling him to stop wasting his time and take real courses that led somewhere, it resonated.


It’s been thirty-five years since fifteen year old me saw that film and an awful lot has happened in the meantime.  Having just watched it again, I’m stunned by how strange a film it is.  What I took as a high fantasy romp when I was a teen is actually a bizarrely meta (physical) narrative that would make a suicidally depressed Hamlet snort with amusement.  The film was directed by famed German director Wolfgang Petersen, and boy does das kopfkino it produces lay on the schadenfreude thick.

The film’s message, that your imagination can save you from the banality of existence, suggests that you need something more than rationality to justify your reason for being.  Or, back to Hamlet again, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  I find a great deal of comfort in recognizing the complexity of existence, though many people seem terrified of it and go to great lengths to simplify it.

The film’s thesis is that imagination allows us to withstand the pointlessness of existence and offers hope.  If you turn yourself off from the impossible it prevents you from holding despair at bay.  The scene in the film where Atreyu’s horse gives up hope and sinks into the mud of a swamp (of Sadness no less) is one of the most powerful in the film.


The quest that drives the story forward is the destruction of Fantasia, an alternate reality that exists as an expression of human creativity and imagination.  It’s being destroyed because people are losing their hopes and dreams, the very things that cause Fantasia to exist.




***



Viewing this film produced one of those strange lateral connections for me that science minded people put down to coincidence but artists thrive on.  I’ve just finished reading Michael Crichton’s Travels, an autobiographical book by the popular author where he reflects on his travels, both physical and spiritual.  As a hardening atheist (thanks to reading Dawkins’ The God Delusion) I found myself suppressing eye rolls as Crichton attempts new-age spiritualism again and again in search of something tangible beyond the science he started with as a Harvard trained medical doctor.  But Crichton’s canny speech at the end of the book offers an approach to the unknowable that I couldn’t help but agree with.


It’s worth reading Travels just go get to to the closing speech that he never gave.  It deconstructs a number of scientific prejudices that hard rationalists cling to even though they aren’t particularly logical, such as surgeries carried out to prevent a possibility of illness with no clear scientific benefit, or the long history of fake experimental results that are accepted because they support a current world view rather than the truth of things.  Hard rationalism is as susceptible to fantastic thinking as any other human endeavour.  Crichton’s final lines highlight the space he has made for human understanding beyond the limitations of rational inquiry:


“…we need the insights of the mystic every bit as much as we need the insights of the scientist. Mankind is diminished when either is missing. Carl Jung said: The nature of the psyche reaches into obscurities far beyond the scope of our understanding.”


Our rational understanding of things allows us to do many relatively mundane things in the real world, but our existence reaches deeper than that, and we ignore what we are capable of if we limit ourselves to the realms of what our remarkable but limited intellects can comprehend.  Put another way, there is understanding to be found in our being as well as in our thinking.

Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching had this covered 2500 years ago.  We’ve forgotten a lot of that wisdom in our information age.

In addition to critiquing science’s hypocrisy, Crichton also bounces back 2500 years to Lao Tzu (who I have a weakness for) and describes how the founder of Taoism understood how our rational minds and our irrational existence must work together to bring us into a fuller understanding of our place in the universe.  It’s powerful stuff, and a reminder that there is no simple (ie: only mind-based) answers to the big questions.  It takes all that we are to even begin to attempt answer them.  In embracing our existential intelligence we also come to a more balanced understanding of our place in the world.


***

With Crichton’s angle on how we frame the impossible in my mind, I was slapped in the face by The Neverending Story’s strident attack on reductive, ‘feet on the ground’ rationality in the face of the threat of non-existence.  The brief scene between Bastion and his father is stark and cruel, but I think it points to something obvious.  It’s never mentioned how Bastion’s mother dies, but the father’s unwillingness to acknowledge it in any way suggests a shameful death, and we all know which kind of death is the most shameful and must not be spoken of.


“When a visibly sad Bastian tells his father that he’s had yet another dream about his mom, he responds that he understands, but quickly adds that they have to move on, emphasizing that they can’t let her passing stop them from getting things done. And just when you think he’ll soften up and help Bastian process his pain, Bastian’s father lays into his son for doodling in his notebook during math class.”

Considering the metaphysical message of this film and that strange dialogue between father and son, I was left hanging on the edge of tears.  My Mum was upstairs the last time I saw this film.  She’s been dead six years this time around, but that sense of loss is always surprisingly quick to surface.  Her life as an artist was frequently derailed and undervalued, and her end was, I suspect, similar to Bastion’s mom’s.  The Neverending Story suddenly took on a resonance that it didn’t have before.


The evil that is destroying the world in The Neverending Story is The Nothing.  It is quite literally non-existence.  Bastion’s father’s brusque ‘move on and keep your feet on the ground’ advice suggests (quite obviously I think) that his mother commited suicide.  The entire narrative in Neverending Story is based around Bastion trying to summon his imagination to battle this existential disaster, something that Lao Tzu and Michael Crichton would both agree can’t be done with reason alone.  The film’s only weakness is it’s reductive imagination is the answer philosophy.  Imagination is vital in bringing you to a place beyond the rational, but populating it with make believe isn’t the goal once you get there.  Imagination is what allows us to see beyond the world around us and plumb those existential mysteries.

***

From Kermit the Frog pondering Rainbow Connections to Alice looking down rabbit holes, there is a lot of art that seeks to explore the limitations of rational inquiry and how it fails to answer the big questions.  Creativity is hard enough without tying your hands up with rational absolutism, so I can appreciate why many artists lean more heavily on the hidden intelligence found in existentialism for their inspiration; there is power in our being that cannot be easily explained.  

Our ability to reach down into our selves and gain inspiration and insight makes us powerful in a way that thinking never can.  For the Bastions of Neverending Story, travelling Crichtons and other artists out there, it’s something we should never let the hard rationalists of science ever try and trivialize away as flights of fancy.  There are truths in our being that can’t be found through rational inquiry.


Imagination by itself is a fine thing, but when it’s used as a means of opening the door to existential comprehension it really comes into its own.  Crichton describes how measurement always misses the quiddity of a thing, it’s inherently reductive to say anything can be completely understood through its measurements.  A wholistic, existential understanding, along with specific, rational comprehension, is the most complete way a human being can relate and understand the world.  Crichton’s closing lines encouraging us not to ignore and belittle the irrational – something that The Neverending Story also argues, though it gets lost in imagination for imagaination’s sake.


Valuing both rational and irrational human comprehension offers us a more balanced and effective way forward, and gets us into the vicinity of answering the big questions.  The trick is not to get carried away with imagination or rationalism and end up treating either one as the answer to everything.  As in all things, balance offers more insight.










Other notes:

Atreyu: If you don’t tell me, and the Nothing keeps coming, you will die too, both of you! 
Morla, the Ancient One: Die? Now that, at least, would be *something*.


Urgl: I like that, the patient telling the doctor it’s all right. It has to hurt if it’s to heal.



I’m not the only one picking up on the weird vibe this film is giving:
http://www.dorkly.com/post/75705/reasons-the-neverending-story-is-a-psychological-horror-show
http://nerdbastards.com/2017/07/25/7-facts-you-probably-didnt-know-about-the-neverending-story/
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/10/06/neverending-story-dad-bastian_n_8248450.html

From a 2018/the sky is falling/we’re-all-illiterate-because-of-technology point of view, the book keeper’s scorn when talking to Bastion, the pre-teen main character way back in 1983 (over two decades before smartphones) is interesting:

Koreander: The video arcade is down the street. Here we just sell small rectangular objects. They’re called books. They require a little effort on your part, and make no bee-bee-bee-bee-beeps. On your way please.



… and reminds me of the Socrates quote and that we’re most prejudiced with our own children.  It’s also a timely reminder that the tech of our time doesn’t define us any more than video arcades did in the ’80s.  I grew up in them and it didn’t make me illiterate.


The Way: https://terebess.hu/english/tao/chan.html

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The other week Alec Couros asked for predictions on what will come of this pandemic remote learning situation.  I find myself straddling this divide.  On the one side you have the powers that be who have no interest in changing a status quo that has put them in charge.  On the other you have technology multinationals and the branded teachers who support them wanting to use this situation as an opportunity to push a more technology dependent evolution in schooling.  In between them all are working teachers who are just trying to make this work.


Six years ago I found myself in Arizona at the Education Innovation (sic) Summit at the invitation of Wikispaces (who have since evaporated).  I say sic because it had very little to do with education or innovation and a lot to do with market share and the rollout of an inflexible digital delivery system (or LMS if you prefer).  There were a couple of comments from that conference that are resonating with me during this pandemic emergency response.  I overheard a senior VP at a multi-national tech company you’d have heard of that likes to ‘certify’ and brand teachers say, “with the new common core curriculum and the charter school push, this is our moment to strike!”  You could almost hear the drool hitting the floor from the predators who filled up this ‘education innovation’ summit.  This should sound strangely familiar to Ontario educators after this past year.

An opposing moment came as a round table of Ph.Ds talked about data exhaust and tracking the vast improvements that have happened in education and learning thanks to our adoption of digital technology.  The problem is that there is no such data.  Countries that adopted digital technology in learning early on show little or no statistical change in learning outcomes.  This is what happens when we adopt digital technology primarily to reduce photocopying budgets instead of applying pedagogy to leverage new communication mediums.


In the six years since that conference I’ve watched our school systems lurch toward the stake I claimed on the digital frontier, adopting wireless and cloud based technologies and expanding general student access to edtech, but the learning outcomes are seldom different because we have done little to improve digital transliteracy.  Students who struggled before tend to actually struggle more in the poorly understood digital cesspool of conflicting mediums.  Now that I’m teaching computer technology full time I see it happening on a province-wide basis; technology isn’t the great equalizer, it’s either hugely reductive or an invitation to chaos.  Instead of adapting and engaging with new mediums and developing transliteracies around them, we’ve reduced digital technology to a cost saving measure that doesn’t actually save any money.  We don’t teach digital fluency, we just magically expect it, and in the meantime we’re buying mounds of technology that almost no one knows how to leverage effectively.


At the end of 2019 a novel virus that we’ve never seen before began spreading across the world.  Unchecked it would kill millions and overwhelm our austerity riddled medical systems.  After a year of bullying Ontario education with absurd threats of mandatory elearning courses for all, COVID19 suddenly delivered the perfect opportunity to prove that it’s possible.  What’s happening with remote learning right now isn’t designed to deliver the best possible learning outcomes using the all of the digital tools at our disposal, it’s a marketing exercise.


I’m in a position where I teach digital technology to a self selected group of students who are much more likely to be connected, have their own technology AND (most importantly!) know how to use it.  In our first week of remote learning I’ve got eyes on every one of my students and a 100% engagement rate across all classes, but to use this as proof that elearning might work is the worst kind of skulduggery.


When this all kicked off I was keen to move quickly, take initiative and demonstrate what our digital fluency could accomplish.  While the rest of the system lost initiative in two weeks of silence, I had a number of students who were already crushing what would become the radically reduced expectations that the Ministry eventually worked out.  


Three hours of remote learning per week per course?  We spend over six high bandwidth face to face hours a week in class and senior students usually drop another couple of hours in on top of that.  Three hours of remote learning is a tiny fraction of this.  How tiny?  The introduction to networking piece we usually do in a blended online LMS and F2F grade 10 class on Cisco’s Netacademy takes one week to finish – I’ve given my remote learning grade 10s an entire month to do the same thing, and many won’t manage it, in some cases because the locked down Chromebooks they were shipped won’t install the software, in other cases because of a lack of space or time, and in others because without an adult present some students just won’t do anything.  There are so many reasons why this shouldn’t work, but we keep adding more reasons on top.


If we prove this works at all (and many are having trouble reaching even that lowered target), we’ve proven that remote learning is only fractionally as effective as face to face learning, which was why so many teachers fought this government’s callous mandatory elearning push in the first place, and that’s not even getting into digital divides, equity and digital illiteracy.  In a perfect case with carefully selected students with the tech, connectivity and skills required, remote learning is 25% as effective as what we usually do.  In reality it won’t even come close to that.


***

My ‘let’s floor it and show everyone what digital fluency can do’ approach changed dramatically over the first few weeks as remote learning finally rolled out.  Colleague Diane‘s comment in the union portion of our first online staff meeting (another impossibility – our union is famously anti-tech) began a shift in my thinking; this isn’t an opportunity to push elearning, it’s an emergency response.  How we name it might sound pedantic, but it isn’t.  Names carry implications, and even though Ontario’s emergency response remote learning is pretty much entirely elearning based, it shouldn’t be, as this article from the Broadbent Institute suggests…


“To roll out what has been a specialized program serving a minority of students to the majority of students in an emergency — sets up expectations against which we are poised to fail.”

“The provincial “Learn at Home” approach draws not only on a fantasy of eagerly connected students with ample resources, but also on a fantasy of home free from conflict and space constraints, supported by caregivers who can and will provide structure, motivation, and mediate learning between the teacher and their child.”


There is a lot of fantasy in how this is all unfolding.  Over the years I’ve often found myself surrounded by perfectly operational computers that were destined for landfill.  At one point I got our student success person on board and built free, Linux based computers to hand out to families in need – it was a disaster.  When you hand out unfamiliar technology that people don’t know how to use, they don’t know how to use it – how’s that for a stunning revelation?  We’ve just done logistical backflips on a system wide scale in Ontario during this remote learning crisis to do exactly that.  How bad is digital fluency in Canadian society?  Worse than you think.  The belief that ‘digital natives’ who are familiar with habitual use of technology somehow have mastery of it is just another fantasy we can’t be bothered to dispel.

The remote learning push will be what it will be, and what it ends up being will be nothing remotely close to what it could have been thanks to our wilfully oblivious approach to digital divides and transliteracy.  We’ve done what we always do: drastically simplify a complex situation for appearances, but it’s to be expected when a critical service like education is run by politics.  Handing out books to illiterate people isn’t going to prompt a lot of reading – but that’s exactly what we’re expecting with our sudden onset elearning plan.


Other pedagogically focused educators I look to when reflecting and adjusting my teaching have also emphasized the importance of re-framing this situation away from a digital technology marketing opportunity.  Zoe and Brenda have both emphasized the importance of a compassionate, considered approach rather than driving for curriculum consumption. Alanna’s blog post on social media distancing with students changed my mind about trying to recreate a classroom environment by driving for video chat access.  Knowing that my students are digitally skilled and connected, I was frustrated when I didn’t have quick pickup from my seniors, only to discover that the quiet ones had suddenly been pressed into 40+ hours a week of reduced minimum wage work and were sorry for not doing the 3 hours per class that private school Stephen, who didn’t need a job in high school and most certainly never balanced a full time reduced minimum wage job during a pandemic, has decided is appropriate.


***


Would I like to see us adopt a coherent digital skills curriculum with specifically identified and developed skills?  Yes, I would.  I’d like us to become authors of educational technology rather than just consumers or branded representatives of multi-nationals.  I seek a nuanced, transliterative use of digital technology and an adaptive, self-aware pedagogy that leverages these new mediums of communication to maximize learning outcomes for everyone.  I’ve been advocating for a digital apprenticeship for our students and staff for over a decade and I don’t see that changing, but using an emergency situation to push that agenda is inappropriate, and what we’ve done in terms of expecting miracles from it has cast a harsh light on our myopic approach to digital transliteracy to date.

The irony of this crisis is that it has improved digital transliteracy in one of the hardest to crack bastions of the education system.  I’ve seen staff who I would never have imagined on video chats, and doing that while they’re also having to integrate unfamiliar digital tools in a live learning environment (such as it  is).  If Alec is still looking for a bright side in this, maybe this will be what comes of it; that more educators begin to understand the possibilities of digital transliteracy in learning.  Maybe then enough educators will know enough about it to create a sea change in how we approach our digital divides, because it sure ain’t coming from the top down.

Related Material:
ECOO 2011 Presentation: Dancing in the Datasphere – we cling to outdated concepts of information and communication even as a digital revolution envelops us
ECOO 2016 Presentation:  The DIY Computer Lab – differentiating technology use to raise digital fluency
2017:  The Digital Divide is Deep & Wide – access to digitally enhanced learning is about much more than just technology and connectivity
2018:  How To Resolve Poor Technical Fluency – courses that teach digital transliteracy are few and far between in Ontario classes, yet every class uses digital tools…

Digital Fluency: it kicked off Dusty World and is a recurring theme in it (because it has never been addressed)

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