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Interesting and rich conversation last Monday evening on, among other things, the pros and cons of various kinds of structure in education and on related early findings in our "experiment in ... co-constructive inquiry."  What struck me in particular was a significant amount of discomfort generated by a "somewhat unstructured" educational environment that began with a presumption that education itself was imperfect and invited discussion of the nature of its imperfections.

Concerns about negativity, about achieving nothing more than rehearsing old ideas,  about the impossibility of reaching consensus about an "ideal world" (much less achieving it), of getting lost in diversity and diffuseness, and about the hazards of working without a net, "floating in infinity with no ground beneath us," are all perfectly understandable.  They are, though, themselves also all worth thinking more about in the context of an inquiry into both education and the brain.

People getting together under circumstances even less structured than the present one, and having exchanges that yield novel outcomes satisfying to most or all of the people involved are, I suspect, actually the norm rather than the exception in human life in general.  Kids get together (or used to?) to play "make up" games; adults "hang out" together.  Such gatherings often involve a certain amount of griping and frequently yield not only a sense of satisfaction but also new ideas and avenues to explore in the future.  And no one worries about whether "ideal worlds" can be created, nor about whether everything said is coherently related to everything else, nor about "floating in infinity with no ground beneath us" (though that may in fact be what is going on).

What intrigues me is that a particular set of concerns and anxieties doesn't arise in all contexts but does in some, in a classroom context in particular.  What this suggests is that we tend to bring to classroom contexts some distinctive set of expectations and an associated set of concerns about ways that either we or those around us or both will fail to live up to those expectations.  In the interests of trying to better understand education, it might be worth trying to make explicit both the expectations and the reasons why we fear they won't be met.  And in the interests of better understanding the brain, it might be worth asking how those expectations and anxieties arise, what is involved in their construction.  And how, once having arisen, they influence subsequent behavior.  More generally, it might be worth exploring whether these concerns and anxieties are inevitable or might be otherwise.

For the sake of the record, my own expectations for our particular classroom context are no more (and no less) than that there will emerge for me (and others) out of sharing of perspectives new and useful ways to think about education and the brain.  My own starting point is that all existing human institutions (to say nothing of understandings) are imperfect in one way or another, and that while there is no "ideal" state to be reached, one can use an identification of imperfections to get things locally "less wrong."  I also tend to presume that "floating in infinity with no ground beneath us" is such a fundamental feature of the human condition that it is not worth noticing, unless/until there is a need to respond to someone's assertion that it is actually otherwise (cf Intelligent design and the story of evolution: no need for drawing lines in the sand.  An update and Two cultures or one?).

Recognizing and accepting that we have nothing to work with but ourselves and each other, our past experiences,  our constructions from them, and the resulting dreams for the future, seems to me not only an adequate but an appealing place to work from (cf Writing Descartes and Fellow travelling with Richard Rorty).  We may not ever get it "right," but we will always have open possibility in front of us and all the needed wherewithal to contribute meaningfully to shaping what comes next.  Maybe that's the point of education?  to enhance peoples' confidence in and abilities to contribute to shaping the future?  Maybe "postmodernism" isn't the end state but rather a useful take-off point, allowing us to make better use of human diversity for conceiving and trying to implement possible futures?  

Along these lines, it seems to me important to emphasize not only the looping capability of the brain, as we discussed it in class last time, but also a creative contribution to that looping, an ability to try out things that are influenced but not determined by the past.  It is because of the existence of a certain "intrinsic variability" contributing to our behavior that there can be new things under the sun. For more on this theme, see Making sense of the world: the need to entertain the inconceivable and Inverting the relationship between randomness and meaning ...

"the same conditions that leave us vulnerable to the unpredictable and uncontrollable also give us the freedom to influence our own lives and the universe in which we find ourselves.  In a "meaningful" universe, either one designed by someone else, or one fully governed by impersonal laws, our role is, at best, to discover the purpose of the designer or to decipher the laws. In a "meaningless" universe, we have the room to conceive and reconceive meaning ourselves."