Education Builds Community

You Can Do It - Here's How

I woke in the middle of the night with these words on my lips, “I’m not trying to teach, I’m trying to build community.” The simplicity of that statement struck me immediately, stirring my slumber for nearly two hours as a gibbous moon glid past my window, moving squares of thin silver light across my thoughts.

Crunch, step, crunch. The sound of footsteps on gravel. As I made my way into the moonlit sage, a dusty cosmic green, I did what I often do: watched. Looked. Listened. There is a joy in these silent morning hours, a clarity that rings like a tiny silver bell.

Heighten your senses, dear child. This creature in which you reside has a wisdom that transcends its words.

Nevertheless, here come the words: A child’s education is an opportunity to build community for the whole family. A strong community exceeds the value of any individual educational structure or approach. Crafting this community, therefore, could be seen as the essential goal of a child’s education. It becomes the network (a foundation or background) upon which a child’s learning and growth can proceed, often without prompting, allowing for individual autonomy and growth.

I recognize that I’m stating this with moonlight and inspiration, rather than research and data, so let me be clear – this is my hypothesis. But it’s an informed hypothesis, based on years of teaching, many years prior to that of my own schooling, my experience with community structures (including, but not limited to intentional communities), as well as the community of parents, elders, craftspeople, readers, writers, artists, teachers, and neighbors I’ve been cultivating and learning beside for years. Most of all, it’s the children.

If we understand a child’s education to be the reception of a certain range of knowledge and skills, then it’s easy to see the error in my hypothesis. However, if you’re like me, and you believe a child’s education lies primarily in the discovery of her own skills and wellbeing, then I think my statement rings with integrity.

One of the challenges facing humans, and therefore generations of students, is that we’re learning crucial life skills – like reading, math, and vocation – from organized systems of well-trained strangers. Most of us adults are the product of this useful and effective educational approach, leaving us intelligent, wealthy, and sometimes lonely and insecure. Depression, anxiety, and self-doubt are major problems now, whereas few of us are hungry or cold. Yet we keep teaching ourselves and our children to strive for knowledge and growth in an environment where a teacher’s expression of love or care is often construed as unprofessional, immoral, or even criminal.

I think we’re at a turning point. Today, it is possible like never before to draw that same excellent education into our children as rigorously and skillfully as we want while still giving them, and us, the opportunity to live and grow within the community in which we reside. What does this look like?

It looks like groups of children forming around families that choose to collaborate on their children’s education. It looks like learning centers – both physical and digital – that provide access and know-how to those parents. It looks like grandparents, retired professionals, and skilled persons of diverse backgrounds making themselves available because they freely choose it.

I’ve been doing this, sort of accidentally, for years. Others, including other parents and teachers, have helped me. In some ways, this is small and unremarkable. We’re just people doing people stuff. But what’s really exciting to me these days is that I’m increasingly aware of, and connected to, hundreds and perhaps thousands of groups (comprising millions of students) across the country that are doing similar things in cities, suburbs, and rural settings. This educational approach is dynamic. It’s diverse. It’s producing all kinds of highly-developed and unique programs – and people.

Many of these parent-teacher-student groups (micro-school is a name with growing use) are pursuing education on their own terms. As such, plenty of them would disagree with me, a fact which makes me smile. But for my particular taste, I believe the message with which I woke this morning has the potential of being what I like to call a kernel – a sort of touchstone or seed that can be stated in few and simple words but when prodded with time and experience leads to varied and diverse growth.

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War & Peace - Performed May 4th @ 4pm

Tickets and info at Taos Center for the Arts

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So let me state it again: A child’s education is an opportunity to build community for the entire family. Rather than defining a child’s learning years by the curriculum (or knowledge) they are to obtain, it’s now possible to see it as the building of a network of family, friends, and neighbors who support that learning, and not just in the child but in the entire family.

I live and breathe this every day. Obviously, I have a lot of good fortune here. It’s also fair to say that I worked for it. I want this for myself, and I want it for my daughter. I know what schools teach. I attended them. I excelled in them. I want that for my daughter, but I want her to learn how to acquire it within the community of people that she knows, trusts, and loves – and also beyond. This is what I mean about building a network, a community, a web of knowing. We all know this exists. It’s already here. We just have to access it. Consciously.

I don’t think I could overstate this. Instead of accessing learning from one regulated source, I want my daughter to look at her entire town, her neighborhood, her city as a learning opportunity. I want her to kick those doors open, ask questions, look for what she wants. This kind of education doesn’t need firm boundaries and walls. It’s a learning structure that transcends location and formal relationships – much like synapses in the brain, fungal networks below the forest floor, or a spider’s web built in the empty space between towering blades of grass.

It's a form of learning that takes place and erupts within the person. This is the natural state of Homo sapiens. It’s what our ancestors were doing for thousands of years. We developed all our fundamental skills and intelligence over 60,000 years ago, when no one in their right mind would have been learning from a professionalized stranger. We are organisms that learn. Today, the richness of our global culture provides vastly increased access to excellent learning and knowledge, but what we’re missing is that social structure of trust – in our hearts and minds. That’s my hypothesis at least.

Please don’t mistake me to be criticizing the public education system, or any of the wonderful social institutions that have given so much to our families and friends. Criticism is never my point. I celebrate school and learning in all its methods and ways. I’m merely suggesting that we have a real opportunity today to build the network of life and growth that we truly want. We can have the education (including all the same skills and knowledge and stuff) as well as the people and community.

But we have to build it. It isn’t a plug-in option. It can only arise from the people who wish it, pick up the shovels, and get a little dirty. I make mistakes constantly. This is a biological reality, not merely a social or human one. Without those of us taking steps to broaden our options and expose ourselves to new ecological niches, we won’t be able to share it with our families, friends, and the rest of the world. We’ll merely keep it to ourselves! I don’t wish this. I want health and wellbeing for every child on the planet – because that’s what will provide the community upon which our learning organisms can be successfully self-trained.

I’m saying a lot of words, so I apologize. Let me end with a few examples. Today, my students are learning farming techniques from an organic seed-farmer, deaf culture and sign language from an American Sign Language interpreter, knitting and craftwork from a doll-maker, mindfulness practices from a Taoist priest, and anatomy from a licensed massage therapist. I’m an engineer and an acclaimed storyteller. Most of these people share their time with us free of charge, because they’re neighbors, parents, friends, and community members.

This is not a top-down instructional method where adults are teaching skills to children. It’s a mutual, web-based method where the adults are gaining life-experience too. We gather because we like each other! Learning erupts spontaneously in such settings (though yes, skilled professionals are often teaching specific skills and subjects). But I venture to say that every adult, like every child, is walking away from these lessons and moments feeling like they have gained something. This is commonly spoken to me.

Today, we’re developing relationships with the Taos Center for the Arts, learning not only theater and storytelling, but lighting, staging, and even marketing and promotion. Simultaneously, I’m encouraging the kids to explore the information and skills they themselves want to pursue. My students are only 10-12, but in the coming years I want to increasingly invite them to find local experts and craftspeople, lawyers and historians, geologists and environmental scientists. These people are all around us! My experience is that when approached respectfully and with patience – almost universally they want to give back (or forward) to the children in their community.

This network of learning – which of course includes parents and friends – is so rich that it provides me and other parents with new resources and tools. This is what I mean by building community “for the whole family.” It’s not just kids that are benefitting.

We support each other when car accidents happen, when grief and death occur, when finances become tricky. Holidays and seasonal events. This sharing of community and life is what I believe children (and adults) really want. The wealth that families sometimes accumulate can’t replace the care and love we need as creatures. I’m not suggesting we have to choose one or the other – wealth or love – just that we start building a sense of community back into our children’s education and growth. Real community. Not buzzwords.

What’s more, I’m suggesting that this learning style is not merely for the children, but for all of us. It is the very method by which we adults who know we’re missing something, who are craving community, can find it. Can build it. Can relax a little and breathe in our hearts and souls. Learning together - this is how you can do it.

Heighten your senses, dear child. This creature in which you reside has a wisdom that transcends its words.

A child’s education is an opportunity to build community for the entire family. This simple statement, this kernel, has the potential to unlock a great deal of good in the world. That is my hypothesis. The end.