zen – Mechanical Sympathy

Cultivating Genius & the Zen Teacher

A recent issue of WIRED has an article on student directed learning called: The Next Steve Jobs, which asks some hard questions about teaching and learning during an information revolution.

The idea of regimented learning in rows in classrooms is so obviously indicative of 19th Century factory thinking that it begs for change, but many traditional education organizations have so much invested in the status quo that they will spend all our time and money hammering people into system-serving standardized thinking. Instead of developing the skills vital for learning in an information revolution, we cling to politics and habits. Nowhere was this more obvious than in a poor Mexican school that wasn’t serving a genius in their mix.

You have to wonder how many of our students are marginalized and never see their own potential because we are wringing our hands about how not-average they are and how they don’t respond appropriately to being indoctrinated by an archaic education system.

The article leans on technology, brain science and student centred and directed learning to bring out real genius in a student who was otherwise disengaged. The brain research is fairly straightforward (though ignored by most education systems):

“The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.

Neuroscience has proven this again and again, but education stubbornly holds to an information limited, rigidly programmed learning system because these traditions support the political makeup of that education system.

“If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”

Mitra’s research still assumes a teaching presence that will bump students along when they run into repetitive habitual patterns. The key is a good leading question and then that dogged support as students find their own way to an answer. The urge to interfere in this process in order to make learning clinical and exact is great, and many teachers do this with the best possible intentions, but what they are actually doing is taking away the student’s opportunity to internalize learning.

Learning is a messy process, at its best teaching is a subtle presence focused on producing a fecund environment for fearless experimentation and research. An idea is only learned when it is internalized by the learner and that can only happen experientially. Any time you see a teacher talking at students there isn’t any learning happening.

Faith in the self direction of a learner is something we’ve tried to remove from every aspect of the education system. The system becomes the intent rather than the learner’s learning. Words like curriculum, assessment and standardized data become watchwords for how effective the system is as a system, it all has nothing to do with learning.

Many of the fads we embrace in education around self-directed learning are little more than smoke and mirrors – the appearance of self-direction in order to fool the student into engagement with otherwise rigid systemic need. This is exactly why a genius in a poor Mexican school couldn’t engage enough to show her talents until her teacher threw away the paradigm.

When the Pupil is Ready, The Master Will Appear

From a Zen Koan, anyone who has attempted to gain mastery
in something has probably experienced this to some degree,
but it doesn’t usually happen in the education system.

I always have my ear to the ground, waiting to hear from a student who wants something more than curriculum. On a good year I’m lucky to find one or two students who are looking for a career rather than a credit.

I came across this saying the other week and it got me thinking about that hope I hold out for ready pupils. Teachers are paid to deliver curriculum whether students are ready or not (though the good ones try to minimize this friction); students are mandated to be there. The option to be formally uneducated isn’t available in Ontario nowadays, we’ve institutionalized education into a mandatory process. This regimented system reduces student readiness to engagement and throws the concept of patiently waiting for student readiness out the window. That patience suggests a process where student learning is the main focus. Have we lost the freedom to patiently wait for student readiness to the systemic efficiencies of regimented grading?

That a teacher will appear when you need them to advance your learning is a wonderful thought. It suggests that teaching is implied in mastery, which isn’t the case nowadays. In a time before mastery was monetized, keeping it alive by passing on skills rather than maximizing personal income was a big part of mastery. Waiting on student readiness also places great value on the student, making their preparedness the priority in learning. Engagement isn’t an issue with the student who seeks a teacher. Perhaps the issue is that we’re buried in teachers nowadays.

That the teacher-student relationship has been subverted by the education system is old news. Historically, learning was an experience unique to each individual, usually prompted by innate skill and desire. Systematizing education might mean more people get educated, but not in with the same rigour and certainly not for the same reasons.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of systemic education is the externalization and abstraction of learning criteria. By setting standards and holding students to them we create a system that has measurable criteria for curriculum, teacher and standards effectiveness. We do this to create the appearance of academic credibility, so learning is not the focus of this kind of education, system integrity is. This modern approach to learning creates a strange distance in the classroom from learning which has led to such insightful comments as, “Those who can do, those who can’t teach.”

When the Zen koan that kicked this off was written a thousand years ago people who taught did so from their own mastery and were driven to do it to keep their expertise alive. Students were driven to learn from a radical sense of self preservation; their learning was central to their lives and livelihood. Teaching wasn’t considered a skill in itself, but was an important tool to keep mastery alive. When we separate teaching from mastery, as helpful as that is for school systems to generate curriculum, qualify teachers and graduate students, it leads us to a strange place where teaching and learning have little to do personally with the people in the classroom. Education has only evolved into this odd system in the past two centuries.

For the vast majority of human history education has been a bespoke experience, unique to the individual. It didn’t happen on a rigid timeline overseen by bureaucrats, and it often didn’t happen at all. When it did happen it was focused on mastery learning, which couldn’t happen until the student was ready for it. That kind of patience is missing from our classrooms and is one of the main reasons it feels so forced, and fake.

Imagining that pre-industrial intensely personal world of learning from our perspective way up here in the regimented twenty-first Century is difficult, yet it is how human beings learned for millennia. In that long ago world many people were left behind, but for the few who were driven to achieve excellence the master would appear when needed.

Suffering And Sacrifice in Eastern Thinking

A student used this as a graphic
text in an English Elearning course

I had an English student hand this in yesterday as an example of a graphics text. The assignment was to create three questions with answers based on the graphic text. This is a surprisingly quick way to assess a student’s understanding of a graphic text (well done Elearning Ontario).

But ya gotta be careful with the manga, it can get deep quickly, especially when you throw cultural differences into the mix. The student’s understanding of this snippet fell into a number of problems, not the least of which was the yawning gap between how a Christian middle-class, white teen in rural Ontario and the Buddhist, Japanese writer of the manga interpret suffering.

The student took “a painless lesson is one without any meaning” and focused on the lack of meaning. He suggested when random, pointless things happen to you, you should just roll with it; suffering just happens arbitrarily. I like how student’s analysis of a text often tells you more about them than it does about the text.

Incompetence: when students suddenly decide to try they
think instant success will follow because the only thing
preventing it before was their lack of effort. It turns out
that mastery requires a bit more than showing up once.

I wrote back suggesting that without fully committing to what you’re doing and suffering loss and sacrifice in the process, you never really learn anything. Only by being fully committed to your lesson, and possibly losing something valuable to you in the process, can you hope to truly learn. A painless, safe lesson is meaningless because you’ll never learn (keep) anything from it. It’s also useless because you’re not working at the ragged edge of your abilities, so you’re not doing anything you haven’t done before. Put another way, no risk, no reward.

The student didn’t seem interested in my interpretation. It fits a Western 21st Century teen’s world view to frame learning in terms of pointless suffering and minimal personal investment. By being an intentionally ineffective agent in an arbitrary world, you can blame everything except yourself for your circumstances. Your abilities are never in question because you are never the architect of any failure.

Eastern thinking is an ongoing fascination for me. I did my first two years as a teacher in Japan. This student’s graphic text was especially resonant because I’d just read this the week before:

The nail that stands highest gets hammered down.
What looks like cruelty takes on a different tone
when you consider how stress and suffering
are integrated into Eastern Culture.

Struggle for Smarts: How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning
From a Western perspective, struggle is “a sign of low ability — people who are smart don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.”

Like the author of that article, I saw Japanese students almost revelling in the difficulty of what they were failing at. That difficulty and failure is what made it all the more satisfying when they eventually found success. The Japanese don’t toss out suffering because it’s difficult, they use it to leverage learning and they do it in a culturally immersive way. What looks like cruelty to foreign eyes is actually a sign of respect from a Japanese perspective. If everyone is focused on doing their best then the rest will happen. We’re much more focused on the end result in the West.

They don’t say good luck in Japan,
they say gambate: do your best.

I studied Kendo while I was in Japan. In the thousand year old temple that was our dojo I was the only gaijin. For the first six months I couldn’t get anyone to teach me defence. My Sensei (a principal at the local high school) said I should be focused entirely on attack, if you think defensively you’ll never succeed. I liked the boo-ya Bushido samurai thinking behind this, but suspected it was really because the other students loved beating the hell out of me with a stick. I used to come home cross eyed from getting hit on the head, but I wouldn’t give up, I’m stupid like that, but it turns out that this stubbornness was what the Japanese enjoyed most about me.

I also played hockey while in Japan. I had all sorts of trouble getting comfortable with my team mates until we had a wedding party that never ended followed by a morning hockey game. We were a wreck, but seeing me in that kind of misery seemed to break down all the barriers. Did the Japanese like to see me suffer, or did they like to see me gambatte? It’s all about the effort, not the result in Japan. It took me a long time to see it from an Eastern point of view.

Resiliency and genuine, deeply personal learning are born of failure, Eastern thought embraces this. Western students, by contrast, preempt failure by refusing to fully commit to learning in the first place. When they fail they shrug because they know it isn’t their failure; you can’t lose if you don’t play. Our glorious sense of Western individualism is remarkably fragile. Isn’t this all about protecting egg-shell egos? Western education systems encourage this approach by presenting learning in the most impersonal, abstract way possible and hiding any failures. Safety nets abound ensuring that students can disengage from learning the moment it becomes difficult.

You’d never expect a Western school to take the weakest kid in the class and have them display their lack of skill in front of everyone as happens in that article, but then you’d not expect Western students to earnestly cheer the student when they overcome repeated frustration and see success either. I suspect Stigler is right, we frame struggle in terms of a lack of intelligence rather than recognizing it as the foundation of resilience and genuine learning.

That English student stepped in a surprisingly deep puddle with that graphic text.