There is an intelligence to life that we are mostly unaware of. If we think about our bodies: we do not extract our own energy from the food we eat, we do not extract our own oxygen out of the air we breathe, we do not control the electrical pulses that our brain sends to our hands while we type, we do not control how our muscles repair themselves when we sleep. And that is just within our bodies. We do not observe the inner workings of the water cycles in the hydrosphere, or how the weather cycles are effected by solar winds, or how trees extract nutrients from the soil and distribute it across it’s enormous size. Nature has a mind and will of its own. Our awareness only extends to our current task, we are only aware of 0.001% of the world and we block out the rest, lest we go crazy with information overload.
Homo Sapiens are 160 000 years old. Living organisms are even older. Evolution has journeyed through billions of years of change, growth and adaptation. Packed into our human bodies are billions and billions of hours of human culture, social interactions and rules and animalistic instincts. When we are born, there is a unprecedented amount of knowledge that we have stored in both our physiology and psychology that we are unaware of. Who teaches us to sense frustration in the person we are talking to? More than 70% of our communication with others is non-verbal, “sensed” through almost invisible physical changes in the other person.
This brings us to the thought of the day: “Are we experts on how learning works?”
Young people are born with an immeasurable amount of knowledge and abilities, in particular the ability to learn. We do not need to be taught how to learn. As teachers we should not for one second think that we have comprehensive knowledge on how learning occurs. We should let learning happen rather than trying to manufacture learning. Learning happens through play, inquisition and experience. It is a combination of interest, expectation and hard work. Think about other animals in their juvenile years. Learning happens through play fighting, through testing themselves against their peers. Learning is a fundamental to our evolution. Or rather evolution is fundamental to our learning. Learning is as natural as breathing. You do not have to be taught how to learn. You just know how to do it.
Students want to learn. Students want to make something of themselves. Students want to be contributors in society.
As teachers, our responsibility is to create the spaces where learning and growth happens rather than trying to manufacture learning through force. Evolution has taught us to learn better than any teacher can. We just need to let it happen. I’ll end with a beautiful passage from a book called The Prophet by Kahlil Gabran:
Speak to us of children
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children. And he said: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
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Love, Cliff