FootprintsintheWind.com

You pray
over and again
yet G*d has already
answered
“What shall I do?
What path in life?
Whom shall I choose?”
Yet you have been given
the devices to
discern and create
—between your ears
—in your heart
—among your people

:- Doug.

Whom do I serve?

:- Doug.

There is more that I do not know than what I do know. Always will be. Get used to asking.

:- Doug.

G*d you are larger than my ken. You are larger, and yet you are here with me. I must ever explore you, and yet you are here with me.

:- Doug.

What if we had reverse education, much as we have reverse mortgages? What if education arose out of the use of innate intelligence in an individual or a group? What would that look like? What does it look like?

Education is leading out. Can we lead ourselves and others out? Joseph Jacotot did his most significant teaching using this concept; so too Paulo Freire. Can we discover the world on our own? Where does learning come from? Does it come from our own efforts? Are children taught to walk, or encouraged? Surely we need the others around us for our learning and our very being, but the leading out we do for others merely leads them to the waters where they may drink. We learn. Teaching in the sense of pushing something in is a misnomer, a literal impossibility. Acceptance, taking in, is necessary.

So what does reverse education look like? A group of people set themselves a task, say to make the schools in their town more friendly to health and ecology and more sustainable. They begin by asking whom should they invite to the conversation. Then they begin to examine the ways the schools operate: the uses of papers and computers, the gathering of cars and buses at the start and end of the day. Soon they seek out alternatives to some of these practices: they research what other schools and towns are trying. From the moment they start asking questions, the leading out is underway. They find what they need to do that about which they most care.

:- Doug.

Conversations of Meaning and Matter

:- Doug.

There is something about what I want to bring to the world that is reflective, quiet but seeing deeply. That we cannot do in a one hour meeting covering 6 subjects: we need time to let things percolate, seep down, rise to the top, and filter. Maybe then we can begin to see.

:- Doug.

We are in this world together, so we do our best together.

:- Doug.

Making a world where people take responsibility for what they most deeply love: That means something specific: people working together like we used to work apart. It means finding and creating meaning. It means making a world that brings out the deepest best in people.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1010

You should stop and render aid
if you see another human in distress
even more so if it’s the whole of humanity
as it is today sick near to death
for lack of the human touch
of reflective conversation

Please pass it on.

© c 2010, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Knowledge and learning can come from the group, emerge there, be found to pre-exist there, be created there. Do educators—those whose root work is to lead out—work as much as they ought from this world view? If we do not take this world view seriously, how can we ever say we have led anyone out to the real world, a world surprising and creating and beyond our ken?

:- Doug.

All is movement. All is moving. Moving is all. Moving is all there is. So to stir up movement is to be in accord with the all there is. Or perhaps to work against it. So there is a vector here—direction and volume. Streams have vortices. Vectors and vortices.

:- Doug.

Dream a world where people say Look what we can do!

:- Doug.

Look what ordinary people can do.

:- Doug.

Take it bigger.

:- Doug.