Transformational Education

Wouldn't it be fascinating if education actually gave students practice at transformation?

Imagine that the first two years of high school and last two years of university are roughly what they are now, but the four years in between actually lead students through transformation. Along with - or even more than - the knowledge they gain they'll learn how to change themselves. Let me explain.

Year three of high school - year one of their transformation - students would go through something the equivalent of boot camp - or Navy SEAL training. The emphasis would be on physical transformation, on taking orders, on becoming part of a well oiled machine. Students would be run through grueling routines of rote learning, high-stress problem solving, intense physical conditioning, and experience a radical change in their fitness levels and levels of discipline.

Year four of high school - year two of their transformation - students would go through something equivalent to that of an initiate in a monastery. They'd go through long periods of silence, intense meditation, empty days and days full of manual labor or service, a giving of themselves to something higher, something more ethereal and experience a change in their spiritual and psychological awareness.

Year one of university - year three of their transformational series - students would go through something akin to a reality show make over. They'd be taught the latest in styles, how to negotiate and present themselves, be exposed to motivational speakers, given access to plastic surgeons, and taught how to make a profit, developing their economic and business selves.

Finally, in year two of university - year four of the big transformation - students would be taught musical instruments or art and be seeped in philosophy, taught to be skeptics, smoke unfiltered cigarettes, and have long discussions about the meaning (or lack of meaning) of life and question the system. They'd be made into mad bohemians who know jazz music and abstract art and realize that everything is made up - be in on the secret that the modern world is just a social construct.

Then, in years three and four of university, when they choose a major they will realize that this is way of being they are adopting AND they will be practiced at transformation. Even more importantly, having experienced these very different ways of being, they will actually make a choice about who they will be based on having experienced different ways of being. They will have practice at change and will know how it is done. Some may revert to the bohemian philosopher role or the good soldier role. Some may just create a brand new way of being.

Too much emphasis is put on the information we put into the container of a life and not enough is put on the transformation of the container. New wine into old bottles does little to change the world.

And for those of you who think I am joking, you obviously have not been paying close attention to what I write here. Think about it: rather than prattle on about transforming education, what if we instead emphasized transformational education?

Bernard & Maddie on Love as a Gale of Creative Destruction

It had been a long time since I'd seen Maddie. She looked bright eyed and greeted me with a wet kiss on the cheek. She had to be closer to 80 than 60, but her eyes shone in a way that made me smile.

"I have been thinking about love," her older brother Bernard announced in his inimitable way.

Maddie giggled. "Maybe if you hadn't thought so much about love you'd have done better with your three marriages."

"Well, there is nothing like being alone after three marriages to make a man think about love. Sometimes failure teaches you things that success can't," Bernard said a little testily.

"What have you learned," I asked curiously.

"Well, I don't know that I've actually learned anything. But in doing some economics reading, I found a phrase that sounded more like love than capitalism: gales of creative destruction. Schumpeter - an economist - wrote about how capitalism creates new industries like cars that destroy old industries like horse and buggies. Capitalism creates by destroying," he said. Bernard paused dramatically. "And I think that love does as well."

"You think that love destroys a person?" I said.

"The old you. Yes. You go into a relationship and the old you gets destroyed. In its place is a new you that works with this new person."

"That makes love sound exhausting," I said. "I think love is a very different thing."

"What?"

"I think we underestimate the power of getting to be yourself in love. I think that love is finding a person who gives you a place to be you. Love is comfort as much as it is excitement."

"I don't remember love feeling all that comfortable. It wasn't really a place where I could let down," Bernard protested.

"Well no wonder your marriages didn't last," I said. "That kind of love sounds exhausting."

Maddie laughed. "If you do it right," she said, "there is no conflict."

"Conflict between what?"

"The two kinds of love you're talking about," she said. "Love as a creative destruction and love as a place where you could be you."

"How does that work?" Bernard said with what I would have sworn was a pout.

"Nothing's more transformative than getting to be you. Getting to really be you," her eyes shone. "If you suddenly find yourself with a person who lets you be you, it does destroy the old you - the you that berates yourself, that spends more energy scolding yourself than enabling yourself. You think it isn't, finally, transformative to find someone who is the place where you can be you?" Maddie laughed at us. "You think that you are two are talking about different things?"

"Ron," she looked at me, "it is not that you are comfortable getting to be you. You make it sound like something comfortable, Ron, like as if it isn't a lot of work to be the real you. Or, I guess, you aren't left comfortable with the old you. Aren't left feeling comfortable unchanged. Love has about as much regard for convenience as gravity has for grace. You'll be happier. You'll be more alive. You may or may not feel all that comfortable."

"So you agree with me," Bernard asked with naked excitement. Bernard, like all of us, had this tendency not to be able to hear anything after he'd expressed an idea, except as it related to what he said.

Maddie looked at him with a tender smile. Her eyes seemed to water a little. She touched his hand. "Sure, Bernard. I agree with you. Love creates a new you by destroying the old you. It's not afraid to call the old you retarded or dis-associate with it. It feels a little destructive sometimes, but ..." she trailed off.

"So you've known this for some time," asked Bernard, quickly turning her agreement into hurt that she knew this even before he did.

Maddie laughed again. "Bernard, Bernard, Bernard," she shook her head. "I didn't know it the way you said it. But it makes sense to me, yes."

Bernard paused and then he asked her, "Who transformed you? It wasn't Jacob, was it?"

"It was me," Maddie said. "I finally learned to love me and that changed everything." She patted his hand again. "You should try it, dear. It would do you good."

Cool as a Construct: Transforming High School

One of my central insights to life came in high school. It is, oddly, a lesson whose import I still struggle to convey.

I attended three high schools and was, marginally, a part of a fourth. I attended high schools in Northern California, Southeastern Washington, and here in San Diego. People outside of California probably don’t realize how distinct is each region: the Bay Area is as liberal as Orange County is conservative; Palm Springs is as dry as Eureka is wet; Beverly Hills is as affluent as El Centro is poor. Living in different regions of California is like living in different states. I worked for uncles on farms in Montana; my Montana cousin was a day older than me and we spent time with his friends and classmates from this little farming community.

One thing was common to all these high school communities. Cool was essential to acceptance. If a person was not cool, they had trouble with all the rest. Athletic helped. So did good looking or smart or funny. But lacking an element of cool, all that was for naught. If your classmates thought you were cool, you were set. If they thought you were not cool, well, you may as well go kiss a rock.

By the time I got to San Diego, I had learned something about cool: cool was a construct. It was just made up. What made a person cool in San Diego – the affable easy-going “dude” of the surfers in flip flops – would have made that person alien and distinctly un-cool in Montana, where it was the ability to ride bulls, not waves, that commanded respect. My own sense of liberation probably went too far. I was a terrible student in high school. Atrocious. One semester, I remember my poor father wondering how I could have received 26 absences in one class. (Years later, I was consoled to learn that the amazing singer / songwriter Tom Waits did not just skip some of the same classes I did, but went so far as to drop out of the same high school from which I graduated. I felt somewhat vindicated.)

Knowing that cool is a construct is both liberating and, if one is not careful, alienating. I felt both. But it laid the foundation for a particular kind of worldview. When I was about 15 or 16, my English teacher couldn’t quite figure out a short story I wrote in which the protagonist, Butts Cigar, killed a parallel character from Russia named Buttiski and once he looked down at the corpse, he found a reel of tape that played the same instructions that Butts had received – a moment of existential revelation for Butts and a probably defeatist (or at least ambivalent) ending. The story included mention of parents and teachers as programmed programmers. The idea of programming was still nascent in 1975, but it seemed to me an apt description of the process of socialization.

Years later, I discovered the management philosophy of W. Edwards Deming. Deming stressed the importance of systems – in education or business or government. Deming pointed out that systems are just made up and that once they are, individuals too often focus their attention on performing well in them rather than on changing those systems. This insight seems to me both obvious and profound – as with any useful insight.

As a case in point, let’s go back to high school. (Please, says the reader. Let’s not.) Michael Kauffman used to sit on the board of the Deming User Group with me here in San Diego. I learned quite a bit from him about collaborative creation as an alternative to improvement. Michael continues to work with schools to transform the experience of education rather than improve it.

There might be no better example of the futility of improvement (rather than transformation) than the current mania for standardized testing. Three generations ago, my daughter might have been a teacher, nurse, or mother. A generation ago, her career options might have numbered in the dozens. Today, my daughter plans to be a professor of cognitive science – a field so new that the vast majority of her professors in the cog sci department do not even have degrees in the field. Never have we lived in a time of more options and variation. Never have we lived in a time of greater emphasis on standardized testing. Does no one else see this as foolishness on steroids? We don’t need to improve our ability to score on standardized tests: we need to transform how high schools prepare children for adulthood.

Michael recently posted about the drop out rate in high schools. As it turns out, the states report graduation rates with two sets of books: Mississippi, for instance, calculated their graduation rate as 87 percent in reports submitted to DC and in another exercise reported a rate of 63 percent.

His post shows how things are worse than reported. I think even this misses a bigger point: our education system has stable outcomes, regularly failing about 20% of the students it begins with. Given our emphasis on performance within systems, we have construed this to mean that students are failing. But a system that regularly “fails” such a percentage of students ought to be labeled as a type of failure. More emphasis on meeting the current criteria will not help this or result in transformation. Only starting anew at the state of the individual – each individual – offers hope to make the system work for students.

There are so many ways to succeed in life. We all know people who performed miserably in school but shame us in their business or romantic success. By no stretch of the imagination does school guard the single door to success.

One way to begin the transformation of schools is for communities to begin the conversation about what makes for a “successful” life. Generating a list of what determines success – determinants as varied as competence in relationships and adherence to exercise and diet plans to the ability to make money and influence people to a sense of meaning and engagement in the everyday – is to quickly point out all that is missing in a dozen plus years of education. Until schools do a better job of addressing the many dimensions of being human, they will continue to do a poor job of addressing the needs of more than 50 to 80% of their students. They “fail” the various kinds of students because they fail to address the various ways of being human. Changing this will require transformation.

After all, school is a social construct. Like cool, it is just made up. We don’t have to accept this. We can make up something new – something that better accords with the reality of what it means to be human in the 21st century.