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In the midst of my wild teenage years my father made an audacious claim. Allow me to share my experiences. “Son”, he said. “You have been my most important teacher”.
Immediately I felt a wave of responsibility. How can the grain of sand inform the beach? How could I be my own father’s teacher? And what was it to be a teacher?
I recalled my years of open classroom schooling when our teachers guided and supported our engagements with the surrounding world. Those irreplaceable experiences allowed a critical reflection of my later educational experiences. The next stop was a military academy, followed by the university. For nearly a decade at the academy, with rare and thus wonderful exceptions, the shepherds herded cadets into rooms devoid of life’s beauties and distractions. I experienced how classrooms are designed to facilitate the memorization of facts, obedience of rules, and repetition of dead-end experiments. Creativity was confined to the art studio. By high school graduation cadets were, among other things, eminent scholars on passive learning, and the methodology of strangling curiosity and poisoning hope.
Throughout my life, my mother’s artistic spirit and my father’s critical perspectives have provided a sanctuary for reflection on my schooling. For the first time I began to consider and then reconsider my relationship to institutions of learning, an institution’s relationship to the community, and the community’s relationship to Earth. Over those years continually pondering my father’s conviction evoked my imagination, stirred my curiosity, and empowered my intellect. If I, the young, naïve son, were to be regarded as a teacher by his father, the wise, aging professor, than the world around us was truly standing on its head. A decade later, Eduardo Galleano affirmed my conviction when he published Upside Down, a radical program of study for the “looking glass world”. But at 11 years old questions come in pairs. What was it to be a student? Education is a complex phenomenon.
The internal questioning persisted. Eventually, I settled into an idea that comforted me at 12 years old as it does today at 22. I wrapped myself in the essential ingredients of education. If teaching could be a sharing of experience, then learning could be considered an experience of sharing. The simplicity equated the lessons of our English teacher, to the experience of hearing bird songs. Inanimate objects were teachers alongside the eminent scholars on particle physics. While English class helped students express ideas with words, bird songs opened the mind to the majestic complexity of non-human language, and boulders demonstrated the concept of permanence and determination. My young idealism was lucid. I felt emboldened by this all-encompassing conception of education. Holding to those reigns stirred my ambitions to imagine a place were education was a communal activity, an activity of individual empowerment, community service and ecological thinking. Thus began my re-envisioning of education.
Education was freed from the confines of schools. Teachers became guides in an experiential journey. Children learned everywhere, and from everything. Communities were filled with young engaged learners learning with teachers, not from them. Students learned from and served community needs simultaneously. Observing birds by the streams feeding a local lake, conversations with the homeless man on the corner, calculating the height of the trees at Otis Ridge, appreciating the grandiose modern architecture of the Empire State Plaza, studying the bright stars above Camel’s Hump, arranging pottery fragments unearthed in a back yard, eco-system rehabilitation at an abandoned port, turning an unused lot into a community garden, were all experiences that eagerly volunteered an educational bounty.
Although adults always reminded the youth to “stay in school”, as a teenager I was not aware of the global context of “schooling” How an acute global situation was intertwined with local institutions and experiences of education was beyond my years. I was not ready to understand that the obstacles of progressive modes of education were both within us and around us. In time I would learn.
Undergraduate work at New York University in a College of Interdisciplinary Studies led to a BA in cultural ecology and 6 Masters credits in environmental education. Over those years I accumulated a variety of working experiences that informed my thinking on education. From leading wilderness trips with youth through Vermont, to assisting research into the potentials of inquiry-based science in New York’s failing public schools, to teaching hands on ecology and botany to school children at the New York Botanical Gardens, to leading service-learning projects with urban middle school volunteers, my awareness grew of the deep seeded problems in modern American education.
Admittedly I developed an outsider’s perspective. From working in unique and experimental educational environments, the limitations of formal educational environments boldly stood out. Teachers I encountered often acted as colonizers, noble trumpeters of rational thinking and social conformity, while their students re-enacted the role of curious primitives lacking in the ways of civilization. The flow of knowledge was assumed to be unilateral. Eliciting questions ensured the accuracy of the information absorbed by the students. Particularly disturbing was the detachment of most lessons from the human and non-human community in which all life is located. At times education occurred like the handling of a corpse. The subject matter was dead, and your imagination was needed to reconnect this corpse with the living world. Even within the university education was alive in the streets, and carried dead through the halls.
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Daniel Roth
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Hello richard | Dec 19th, 2011
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