“Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.”
So apparently said Peter Kropotkin, Russian anarchist and geographer who lived from 1842 to 1921.
While cooperation ("the action or process of working together to the same end") and collaboration ("the action of working with someone to produce something") are subtly different things, it seems reasonable to conflate them to some degree when thinking the education landscape. Learning in formal institutions has in some places at some times evolved towards cooperation and collaboration. Most significantly, I've spoken to a number of tertiary academics who all say that their work is most often the result of collaboration, rarely is it the result of 'solo effort'. In our system however we seem to be deep into the paradigm that learning is an individualistic thing, one where we are assessed on our solo efforts, and our specific knowledge at a specific point in time. Our system goes through a fascinating transformation from cooperation and collaboration in the primary sector, to this individualistic approach at secondary and early tertiary, and then shifts back to the cooperative and collaborative approach at the more advanced tertiary level. There is no doubt that each of us benefits form direct instruction, and individual attention. There are many skills we need to acquire, and much knowledge that we need. 'Knowing stuff' is important, despite claims that this is the 'Google-able' age where with so much knowledge at our fingertips, we don't need to remember anything anymore.
I do believe that there is a consensus amongst educators that effective learning generally occurs when we are able to make connections with existing knowledge, and when we see that learning as relevant to the real world around us.
Engineering this in the secondary school environment is often seen as risky, fraught, and difficult to do, yet it's not only the key to deep learning, but also what we all most naturally do. It is made difficult because of the silo'd nature of knowledge and delivery in schools, and the silos in teaching/learning at tertiary level. The silo'd approach seems to be justified by the need to promote deep deep knowledge, and the view that learning is primarily basically content delivery.
This seems to fit in with the western tradition, possibly driven by the eighteenth century writings of Adam Smith on the benefits of specialisation. We have applied a market-led philosophy to learning.
Now don't get me wrong, I am very keen for my doctor, my dentist, that woman that designs the new road bridge, to have deep deep knowledge of their subject area. This sort of specialisation is great when we get to the sharp end of the training of doctors and engineers.
But this system hasn't always worked for some people. I suggest that it hasn't worked well for most. It was fine in our industrial era society when we needed to identify those who might be suitable for management, so that we could separate them out from the 'drones', the workers, who simply needed to turn up to work every day and undertake the same repetitive tasks hour after mindless hour.
Our new 'post modern' era however doesn't need this so much anymore. We need a society that maximises the benefits to society of all human potential. We need to harness the creative and critical capacities of everyone. Not only does this have economic benefit for us all, but it also offers quality of life benefits for everyone.
Why critical and creative thinking? Our world is besieged by problems of a type and scale that we have not faced before. There's an old wisdom that says that you can't solve the problems of today with the thinking that created them in the first place.
We are however locked into this paradigm of learning, believing it is best. What if it's not? What if we already knew of a better way? What if we understood that formal school learning is only one small part of our learning journey? What if we valued people sufficiently well that we sought to allow them to maximise their own life potential, no matter what that looked like? What of we believed that we could do better?
Maya Angelou is quoted as saying “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.”
What if we already know better? What if we understood that learning happens everywhere, all the time? What if we understood that the co-existence of multiple generations in our society presents us with an opportunity to accelerate learning by recognising the intergenerational nature of learning, in exactly the same way the Māori recognised this with their wānanga which were an essential part of their society pre-colonisation?
In their broadest sense, learning systems are a collaborative endeavour, not a competitive one, So ...
- What if we added to the school system with a coherent, connected, holistic, system of 'just in time', 'any where, any time' learning that harnessed the power of the multiple generations that co-exist in society?
- What would happen if we made the multiple learning opportunities more visible to all, if we made sure that the connections between the learning opportunities and those who create them led to the widening of the scope, the availability of and access to the learning opportunities that are available to us?
- What if we had a society in which, as a member, you had no doubt whatsoever that learning is 'the thing', that learning opportunities are everywhere, that your life can be enhanced by learning in whatever way, shape, form, or context that might be?
- What of we finally really valued indigenous knowledge, where indigenous knowledge took its rightful place alongside our western traditions, where we got the best of both worlds rather than writing off indigenous knowledge as superstition?
I almost hesitate to use the word, but is this what true 'democratisation' of education might look like?
I have tried to capture my understanding of the visionary work of Dr Cheryl Doig who conceived of Ako Ōtautahi - Learning City Christchurch (AO-LCC). Cheryl describes AO-LCC as 'a bloody good idea', and as I talk to her over a long black (the first of the day for both of us) I see someone committed to trying to re-imagine the future in a way that addresses inequity. She clearly has a heart for those who have not been able to speak for themselves. Cheryl describes herself as a 'futurist', and refers me to an article which she says captures much of what she believes and feels. The piece is written by Frank Spencer (no, not that Frank Spencer) who "founded Kedge — a global foresight, innovation, and strategic design firm which pioneered". The article can be found in full here. In the article Spencer says:
“The Official Future” tells us to “think exponentially, act incrementally,” beckoning us to utilize foresight in service of the ever-expanding present systems of quantifying, micro-analyzing, extracting, consuming, and automating. This way of futuring is at the heart of Epistemic Uncertainty. “The Emergent Future” instead challenges us to “think transformationally, act transitionally” to manifest futures-empowered landscapes of care, empathy, reconciliation, and love in our organizations, governments, and social entities, allowing us to align with much healthier expressions of our biological, psychological, and sacred experiences. Of course, this is not in line with the value proposition of our present systems, and most would deem such futures improbable at best and frivolous at worst. Nevertheless, challenges to long-held assumptions take place when individuals dive deeper and deeper into anticipatory imagination and provocation, and this opens the door to transformative realities that profoundly change the perspective of the foresight practitioner. Consequently, the possibility of these new worlds become an internal experience that can no longer be ignored. This is the future thinker’s dilemma.
The phrase “think transformationally, act transitionally” echoes again and again and again in Cheryl's words, and in my mind as I walk away from our meeting, and as I sit and try to make sense of this. So too in my mind is her description of AO-LCC's work in terms of what she calls 'social capital theory'. She tells me that there are three main components to this:
- Bonding - building connections within communities
- Bridging - building connections between communities, and
- Lifting - working with those who have the influence, to make a difference
Here is a link to an additional piece on the difference between bonding and bridging social capital, and some additional in depth reading on the wider field of social capital theory. I love this stuff, it's big, bold, 'ballsy' (what Ewan MacIntosh describes in the context of BHAGs - Big Hairy Audacious Goals), and it looks to ways and means of changing the system. I find the lyrics to Leonard Cohen's song 'First we take Manhattan' running through my mind.
Having read all of this so far you might still feel obliged to ask why. Why do we need to do this? My career in education has shown me again and again and again how much human potential goes unrealised, wasted, thrown on the scrap people along with the people within whom it resides. Often is fails to thrive because of social issues, substance abuse, social disconnection, the 'poverty trap', this is a complex issue which there is no one cause (just as there is no one answer, no silver bullet).
And there's the economic argument too. Failure to optimise participation in education (not just formal education) regardless of age, stage, or format, increases the gap between rich and poor. If you are rich you might well say you don't care. However OECD economic research suggests that the wider that gap, the poorer performing is the economy. If we allow the gap between rich and poor to widen too much, the wealth of the rich suffers as does the 'wealth' of the poor. This report from the OECD spells it out. Not all of the econometric evidence is that conclusive (IMF research offers other perspectives), but this seems to be enough to 'hang my hat on'.
So, "Ako Ōtautahi - Learning City Christchurch" - connector, visionary, revolutionary, hopefully a change agent that brings together the influencers in our city to highlight the learning opportunities that are available, and to enhance those opportunities through cooperation and collaboration, because after all - the whole is more than the sum of the parts. If we can do this, how much richer would our world be, how much richer if we saw the results of that lost potential, that creativity, harnessed in a way that enriched not only the lives of those involved but those around them? All it requires is that we shine the spotlight on the benefits of cooperation and collaboration, that we understand that there is a balance between acting in our individual interest, and acting in the collective interest, that we support and sustain each other. There is a place for both, and as I walk away from my meeting with Cheryl I can't help but go back to my own philosophical position in which in our current 21st century society we have swayed way too far towards a belief in the benefits of self self self and lost sight of the fact that human success is a collective endeavour.
As Kropotkin said: “Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.”
And the final word must be this whakataukī:
Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari kē he toa takitini
My success should not be bestowed onto me alone, it was not individual
success but the success of a collective
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