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Education
"To be a teacher is to be a prophet, because you are not preparing kids for the world you grew up in, nor are your preparing kids for the world of today. You are preparing kids for a world you cannot imagine.
—Gordon Brown, MIT Dean of Engineering
Defining Questions:
What is the purpose of education (an eternal question that requires fresh answers)? How might our thinking about that purpose change in a culturally mature world?
How do we best educate for the challenges Cultural Maturity predicts lie ahead? For example, what does it mean to teach for a world in which ongoing change means there are often more questions than good answers? Where the critical questions most all have major ethical/moral components? Where understanding systemic relationships will necessarily be as important as understanding particulars?
How do we best understand human diversity—learning and personality style diversity, ethnic and gender diversity, age diversity. What are the implications of such diversity for how we educate and for the role of education in society's future?
The future:
Education sits center stage with regard all this chapter's concerns. Our success with any of them will be a product of our success with the future tasks of education. And while we can't predict exactly what the future will bring, if the concept of Cultural Maturity is accurate, we can say a great deal about what it might mean to educate for the best of futures, with regard both to what we teach—education as content—and how we teach—education as process.
Education's progress thus far with regard to the tasks of Cultural Maturity presents a mixed bag. Education is one of the places where we find the most heart-felt commitment to larger societal well-being. And innovation, much of it closely aligned with the vision of Cultural Maturity, has had an ongoing and respected place in education throughout the last century.
At the same time, education has often provided less big picture leadership than we might hope. A major piece is not the fault of schools. I would list the low priority modern culture gives the education of its children among our time's most damning Transitional Absurdities (and given the essential role education must play in any kind of healthy future, one of the most critical to rectify quickly). The educational environments we provide for our children are often inadequate by any standards, much less the more creatively demanding requirements of culturally mature education. (The simple fact of thirty-five students for every teacher in the average public school classroom makes much of the innovation the future most calls for exceedingly difficult.)
There is also much in educational tradition that can get in the way of needed changes. For example, education's intellectual roots can work against the incorporation of multidisciplinary approaches or approaches that apply multiple intelligences. And our traditional separation of moral education from public education makes it very tricky to give moral/ethical concerns the centrality of focus effectively preparing for the future will require.
The place we must start if we want to make sense of Cultural Maturity's implications for education is with education's Question of Referent. In a sense education's purpose has always been the same—and always will be. As T.H. White put it in The Once and Future King, the purpose of education was to "learn how the world wags and what wags it." Education's eternal task is to teach the skills and sensibilities needed to live aware and productive lives. But Cultural Maturity reminds us that what an aware and productive life requires is not always the same—and certainly not the same today.
The "right and timely" referent for modern western education has been to provide the literacy required for democratic governance and the skills needed in an industrial age. Go back farther and we find the moral bottom line of Medieval monastic education, or, even farther, the knowledge of ritual, hunting methods, and nature's ways essential to tribal existence. Each of these purposes was right for its time. And none are sufficient for the tasks ahead.
Answering education's Question of Referent requires us first to identify the skills and awarenesses our future world will require. Cultural Maturity articulates the future purpose of education very succinctly—though in a manner that requires elaboration to be of value. The bottom line purpose of education in the future must be to foster the capacities needed to live in—and create—a culturally mature world.
With regard to the content sides of education, as a start this means acquiring some very traditional skills. Learning that focuses on established knowledge—history, science, language arts, mathematics—should have no less a place in times ahead. Indeed we should find a depth and breadth of such knowledge increasingly essential—such is the raw stuff of mature understanding.
But it also implies the need for some very new skills and a fullness and maturity of perspective not before within our reach. Certainly it argues for bringing the future more fully into education's picture. Education has emphasized what is and what has been. I noted earlier that while we have all had classes on the past, few of us have had classes on what may lie ahead. If the task of our time is to assume a more conscious responsibility in the human endeavor, we need to teach in ways that better acknowledge possible future realities. Indeed, we need to make the basis for all we teach how it might affect the future. The present and the past become no less important in a culturally mature reality, but they derive their ultimate meaning through their relationships to what may lay ahead.
We should also see education giving attention to more specific, newly important understandings and skills. A critical new content area, certainly, will be in the use of new information technologies. Making our way in the territory ahead will be very difficult without a high level of technological literacy. The danger of a "digital divide" estranging major parts of populations is very real.
It is important to appreciate how the implications for education in information's emerging picture extend beyond just content for learning—and the particular pertinence to culturally mature education. I've described how the digital revolution can be a two-edged sword. With regard to education, it has as much potential to be an addictive diversion as an enhancement to understanding. But at the same time, if we can utilize it creatively and wisely, it should serve as a powerful catalyst for many of culturally mature education's needed changes. Computers and the broad information access available with the Internet can augment increasing individualized learning. And on-line education, or whatever lies ahead for more networked communication, offers that any person might learn from the finest teachers in the world—and from any place in the world. Present and future information technologies have the potential to turn the globe as a whole into an ever-more-vital learning (creative) system.
In the short run, this may cause some educators discomfort. In the same way that the democratizing power of the printing press challenged the church's monopoly on knowledge and learning, the information revolution challenges formal education's monopoly. The good news for educators is that the printing of books, rather than marking the end of religion, freed churches to do what they do best. Whether we like it or not, the future should teach us a lot—in ways both unsettling and exciting—about what formal education "does best."
Another new content area—that critical ethical/moral dimension—is worth special notice both because of its importance and because of the Capacitance and perspective engaging it effectively requires. I've argued that learning to tease apart complex ethical/moral quandaries will become increasingly important—and, more, that all questions become moral questions in a culturally mature reality. Grappling with difficult questions of value must lie at the core of future education just as grappling with such question will increasingly lie at the center of a meaningful life and a healthy future for the species.
It will require of education a considerable stretch. Structurally, it challenges the separation of moral education from intellectual education has been one of modern education's basic tenets (a corollary to the separation of church and state). It also challenges our more particular ideologies. Cultural Maturity proposes that liberal and conservative thinkers each have part of the answer. It acknowledges that liberal thinkers are right in warning of the dangers of narrow moral teachings and moral indoctrination. But it just as much affirms that conservative thinkers are right in arguing for a return to moral education. The reconciliation must lie in appreciating how the kind of moral education we need to "return" to is different from that of times past. Moral/ethical education that can help us in the tasks ahead must be about learning to discern with a new directness what choices are most life-affirming and what makes them so.
At the least this requires putting questions of value forefront in any learning experience. Culturally mature moral education also means having the courage to acknowledge moral quandaries that may be beyond either teachers or students to resolve. And it requires more specific stretchings from each side of the moral divide. It stretches conservative thinkers to look beyond culturally-specific codes of right and wrong. And ultimately just as challenging, it demands of liberal thinkers that they step beyond the deadening knee-jerk inclusiveness with which a simplistic moral relativism often responds to such complexity—being willing to push for real answers that work in a real world.
With regard to content, we can think of each of this book's seven defining themes as contributing additional important new pieces. Most often ingredients they add will serve as facets of learning more generally rather than content areas themselves. But if Cultural Maturity's thesis is accurately, skills implied by each of our themes be will be essential for effective future decision-making—and thus essential to teach about. Education for the future must prepare us to better tolerate and managing uncertainty, accept newly fundamental responsibilities, and better understand the workings of change. It must also help us develop a deep appreciation for systemic complexity, better appreciate limits, reengage aspects of ourselves that may have increasing importance in times ahead, and develop a newly conscious and sophisticated relationship to questions of truth of all sorts. These are not esoteric notions in real world application. We can weave them in age-appropriate ways just as easily into a high school class on government or a second grade segment on beetles.
The "how" of education is equally important—and more and more it becomes inseparable from the what. Cultural Maturity makes newly obvious how educational content and educational process have, in fact, always been linked. It also proposes that effective education in the future will require a more conscious recognition of this linkage and approaches that apply it in newly dynamic and sophisticated ways.
That need to be newly conscious and skilled in the use of new information technologies provides a key first example. But it represents only one piece in a rich interplay of systemically related elements. Our tool of identifying and bridging conceptual and structural polarities helps summarize additional major themes. Needed emphases extend from the inner mechanisms of learning to the structures of educational bureaucracy and the relationship of schooling to society.
Bridging teacher and student: We saw in the dialogue with Stanley in Chapter Three how bridging teacher and student directly encourages the kind of initiative, creativity, and responsibility future citizens will increasingly require. It also encourages an appreciation of diverse perspectives and learning styles. It models Whole-Person relationship. And the support it provides for education as inquiry helps make the educational process, separate from any answers, an antidote to today's crisis of purpose. (The constructivist movement in education is a good example of a contemporary effort in education that puts emphasis on this bridging. It focuses on students constructing their own worldviews.)
Bridging disciplines: That critical importance of multidisciplinary inquiry. Education that bridges across disciplines encourages systemic thinking. It stimulates contextual perspective by highlighting the different ways the same phenomenon may look from different conceptual vantages. And by encouraging really big-picture thinking it brings attention to the future's most defining questions.
Bridging intelligences: Culturally mature education is necessarily integrative not just in terms of content, but in terms of what we draw on in ourselves to address it. Attention to multiple intelligences is gaining increasing emphasis in contemporary education. We also see the growing use of increasingly sophisticated hands-on, "experiential" methods. Such multi-model education supports a creative, exploratory relationship to learning—and to life. It makes learning work for a broader diversity of students (different students are most adept with different intelligences). It highlights the roles of change and systemic interrelationship in how things work. And by making some of our internal complexity overt, it supports the development of Whole-person/Whole-systems relationships. (Cultural Maturity's argument for appreciating multiple intelligences highlights a fascinating additional benefit of new information technologies. They let us combine image, print, sound, even tastes and smells—all in an interactive context.)
Bridging cognitive styles: A related topic that is also gaining emphasis is the importance of appreciating learning style differences. Creative Systems Theory argues that we need to go further—to address underlying issues of temperament. The issue is not just that different learning approaches work best for different students, but that different students organize experience in very different ways. Learning about temperament differences is important not just for teachers, but as part of curriculum. Teaching students about learning/personality styles helps them understand their own (critical to both learning effectiveness and self-esteem) and to appreciate the richness that can come from collaboration between styles. (Cultural Maturity argues for the importance of such collaboration in mature collective decision-making. In Creative Systems Theory terms, such collaboration provides a way to bring the Creative Whole directly into the room.)
Bridging young and old: "Life-long learning" is becoming an increasingly emphasized theme in education. When education is about learning established truths, it is appropriately for the young. When truths are in flux, and especially when education exists to serve the creating of new truths, education must be a life-long pursuit. In the end, mature education is about "learning how to learn" and applying this throughout one's life. Our educational mechanisms should more and more serve learning at all ages and provide opportunities for creative interaction between learners young and old. (Our developmental metaphor suggests that people in the second half of life may contribute in important new ways in times ahead. Educational processes that support that contribution should gain increasing significance.)
Bridging school and society: We see a growing number of initiatives—such as "service learning"—that break down walls between schools and their communities. Studies of people who end up playing significant social roles show that most feel their greatest learning happened outside the classroom. This bridging links directly with that of young and old. It should be increasingly common to see schools conceived of as community resource centers where people of all ages can go to access information and where projects benefiting the wider community are seeded and developed. A culturally mature society must be a "learning society," one where a major part of how we measure the value of any activity is how it supports ongoing learning for the population as a whole.
We need to approach any changes in education with care. Traps lie waiting even if our efforts come from the best of intentions. They can have us fall off of either side of the creative roadway.
Efforts to address diverse learning and temperament styles illustrate. Critiques of standard educational approaches often argue that they are too rigid. A more accurate critique would note that they tend to work effectively for only a few kinds of learning—and for the twenty percent of students whose learning styles match that kind of learning. Step back and we see that same applies to most attempts at more experiential/alternative approaches. A strong emphasis on experiential education works well for certain kinds of learning and for the twenty percent of students whose learning styles match that kind of learning. It is just a different twenty percent.
When our critiques and advocacies fall short, most often they do so because they are not adequately systemic. Over time in education we've tended to see a back and forth in emphasis between more right-hand themes such "standards" and "back to basics" and more left-hand themes such as "experiential" and "student-centered" education. Cultural Maturity affirms and challenges both tendencies, paints—and embodies—a larger integrative picture. With regard to whether an effort succeeds at being integrative, in the end (as with innovation in all spheres) we have to turn more directly to questions of how effectively it increases Capacitance and to the degree is supports culturally mature sensibilities.
In talking about predictions Cultural Maturity makes for education, I am frequently asked a question that provides both important practical guidance and further theoretical insight. People want to know whether culturally mature approaches and content aren't premature for young students. Might they be better reserved for graduate and post-graduate education?
Cultural Maturity offers that the situation may be almost the opposite. The pertinent maturity has less to do with personal development than evolving cultural context. Because young students are making fresh entry into that new context, their minds are often better structured to assimilate it and contribute to its creating. Personal maturity and Capacitance are obviously variables—often huge ones—but very often students are ahead of their teachers when it comes to changes in underlying cultural sensibility.
A Thumbnail Summary: Cultural Maturity predicts …
—that education will move more and more beyond top/down models to emphasize student initiative, active inquiry, and life-long learning.
—that education in the future will be more interdisciplinary and concern itself as much with questions of purpose, pattern, and future possibility as established knowledge.
—that future education will put growing emphasis on differences in how we learn and know and the implications of both for effective decision-making.
—that education will draw increasingly on emerging information technologies while being always cognizant of the dangers as well as the possibilities such adjuncts to traditional learning present.
Thought experiments:
Cultural Maturity argues that the bottom-line purpose of future education must be to foster the capacities needed to live in—and create—a culturally mature world. What capacities would you include?
Describe an educational environment designed to foster these capacities. Include such variables as physical setting, curriculum, learning methodologies, the role of teachers and other "experts," and relationships between learners. Does your picture change for learners of different ages, genders, cultural backgrounds, or personality styles? Is it different for different learning content?
What happens if you make the system your learning design addresses not an individual, but a work team. What happens if you make it an organization? What happens if you make it society as a whole?
