When 9.11 happened, I treated it like any other moment of Open Space, any other gathering of attention in which nobody knew what would happen and everybody wanted it to go well. I looked for ways that I, myself just one little individual, but in a web of other good folk, could learn and contribute to the good. One result was that I pulled out a training program that had been in the drawer for four years, untried, and within a year offered that program on four continents.
As I watch New Orleans unfolding (or getting soggy and collapsing) I find a similar sort of activation rising. McKnight, quoted yesterday, leads me to Ivan Illich, who has been sitting in my drawer, so to speak for at least four years, probably since I met Chris Corrigan about that long ago. This morning, Wikipedia offers this intro to Illich:
Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. More Illich…
This starts to sound a lot like my own roots in Outward Bound founded by another radical educator, Kurt Hahn. Funny that I was visiting several of the old (and original) Outward Bound schools this summer in the UK. And not surprising that when, a couple days ago, I pencilled out my first draft outline of how I might do more to teach and support relearning in/of community, it too looked rather Outward Boundy. My notes on that, forthcoming under the working title of Ready for Anything, is really a list of webs. Imagine that.
Thanks for this important piece of my puzzle today, Michael. I’m disucssing employment with a ‘University’ system (not really a real university yet). My offering to them is to tend to, help accentuate, center attention on, hold and open space for the importance of interpersonal relationships within the organization and with the students/public…opening space for passion to fully rise to the surface and for the receptors of that passion to be available and listening, ready to integrate into a more expansive(and inclusive) whole.
Honoring “educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.”
THANK YOU,
ashley