Learning to Learn from the inside-out

While I honor the good, honorable and heartful intentions of our best teachers I also believe that 'education', as we typically think of the process, is FUNDAMENTALLY MIS-ORIENTED, and as a consequence, destructive to our children's core capacities for learning.

Education is, by its nature, from the outside-in. Learning is, by its nature, from the inside-out.  Generally, pervasively, our education systems proceed as if there is something more important for learners to pay attention to than how they participate in their learning. Yet, there is nothing more relevant to how well learners learn (about anything) than how well they participate, from the inside-out, in their learning - how 'present' they are in the flow of their own learning. Teachers who connect with their students intuitively know this: 

The greater one's presence in learning, the greater their capacity for learning about what is present.

The greater one's presence in learning, the greater the growth of their capacity for learning.

The greater one's presence in learning, the greater the growth of their presence.

Our challenge is this: Education, systemically, functions as if getting something ‘right', in relation to its methods of evaluation, is more important than whether children are present and participating in their learning. In the name of teaching us about ‘things', we are unintentionally but nonetheless pervasively and insidiously, teaching children that their ‘presence' is not important to their learning. 

We need to develop a new "general relationship" between learners and who or what they are learning from. Its central intention is that learners learn to become conscious of how they are learning - learn to develop their own subtle participatory "sense" of learning - learn that the compass with which they can orient themselves, regardless of the subject, emerges from their own learning needs - their own impulses of uncertainty and curiosity, their own fluctuating "sense" of meaningfulness.  We need to help learners become clearer about, and more discriminatingly trusting of those impulses - to learn 'read' the inner instrumentation of their own personal learning process.  

Such a new general relationship is not only the most profound thing we can do for our children's general capacities for learning (and well being), it is also the most practical thing we can do to help them learn about any particular 'subject'. 

Until we understand the deeper significance of learning - see that learning is the one area we can all agree on as relevant to everything - realize that it is our capacity for learning (not what we have learned) that is our greatest 'asset' - we will continue to misdirect our educational reform energy and ever better improve a system whose primary lesson is:

'your presence is not required - your authentic ambiguities are irrelevant' 



David Boulton
http://www.implicity.org