Thoughts on 2020, education, and evolution as we head into the holiday break

Every morning while I'm shaving, I listen to a motivational playlist I made on Spotify. This morning, Tom Sawyer by Rush came on. Funny how music can do this, but it kind of snapped me out of a rut I had gotten into in my mind over the past few weeks. 

This year has been a survival-mode year for many of us, me included. But I tend to forget that things will change for the better--we will adapt. New and better systems will evolve.

It is events like this that drive evolution. The theory of punctuated equilibrium says that biological evolution happens in fits and starts, driven by major events. Our culture and our systems are evolving. And our educational systems will evolve. 

And while the cognitive load has us all down for the count right now, our eyes need to be on that prize of new and better ways of doing things--ways that will be more resilient to future disruptions like these. 

A few come to mind for education: more authentic assessments that can't be cheated on, rigor that goes beyond memorization and simple application of concepts that can be googled, a focus on social, emotional and other so-called non-cognitive skills, a renewed focus on technical and vocational skills, and a focus on those ideas that really light kids fires--ideas that can compete with (or join forces with?) video games.

I think the same idea holds true outside of education. The past year has shown us all some major weaknesses in how we do things. Will we evolve? I think the answer is a definite yes. The only question is in what direction.

Change, after all, is the only constant in this world.

Dealing with the human race's bad decisions

Did you ever make a decision that you regretted later, but could not undo?

I'm guessing we all have, and at that point we have to just adapt. It's no useshould-coulda-woulda-ing our way into depression. Time to accept the things we cannot change, as the old prayer says.

The more I study the history of our species, the more I am starting to feel like humanity made one of these bad decisions a long time ago--actually, a series of bad decisions that stretch right into the present.

And it all started with agriculture, a "decision" that Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel has called "The worst mistake in the history of the human race." It was the first step in a long series of unfortunate and irreversible events that have brought us far from our evolutionary heritage and left us out of sync with human nature.

For one thing, we are not well adapted to the high carbohydrate diet that agriculture introduced. And according to Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, authors of Sex at Dawn, the agricultural revolution led to fundamental shifts in the way we live and relate to each other. Hunter-gather societies are almost exclusively communal and egalitarian, and agriculture led to private property, which had ripple effects even into our sex lives (women as property, for example).

And the industrial revolution was the agricultural revolution on steroids. And now we find ourselves sedentary, isolated, stressed-out, war-like, competitive and possessive workaholics while our genes are better suited to an active yet relaxed communal existence.

And it's not like we can just turn back the clock and start over. Like a species of bird that finds itself blown to a new island without familiar food, we must adapt or die. Or in our case, adapt or die of stress-induced cariovascular disease or diet induced cancer.

We can either change ourselves (and this isn't possible--yet) or we change our circumstances to better fit our genes. A better fit is what I'm shooting for. Ideally, not some boring compromise, but a new, out-of-the-box, ideas-having-sex strategy for living that gets the primal/ancestral gene thing going in the modern world. I'll keep you posted.

Against authority

This might seem strange coming from an aspiring school leader, but I'm really not much for hierarchical authority structures and top-down leadership.

And I think I'm in good company. I've been reading Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha's powerful book, Sex at Dawn, which lays out their theory of our ancestral heritage. It's a fascinating book, and has been playing a key role in my thinking as I think about a better fit between modern life and human nature.

Hierarchical leadership structures were non-existent in the world of our palaeolithic ancestors. Instead, Palaeolithic societies were decidedly egalitarian:

"When you can't block people's access to food and shelter, and you can't stop them from leaving, then how can you control them? The ubiquitous political egalitarianism of foraging people is rooted in this simple reality. Having no coercive power, leaders are simply those who are followed--individuals who have earned the respect of their companions. Such "leaders" do not--cannot--demand anyone's obedience."

They quote Adam Smith, of all people, who wrote similarly, "In a nation of hunters there is properly no government at all... [They] have agreed among themselves to keep together for their mutual safety, but they have no authority one over another."

In fact, Ryan and Jetha say that, according to primatologist Christopher Boehm, "foragers are downright feline in refusing to follow orders... 'universally--and all but obsessively--concerned with being free of the authority of others.'"

If this is the way we evolved--if it's in our DNA, then it sheds some light on the way we humans tend to behave. (Funny that my former boss, veteran science teacher Julia Sherman, used to say trying to get all of us on the same page was like "herding cats.")

And if this is the way we evolved, let's tap into it. Let's make our schools and classrooms less hierarchical, less coercive, less authoritarian, and more egalitarian and democratic, less about about control, and more about relationships and organic, self-organizing growth.

At the school-level, we might start with strategies like empowerment evaluation, distributed leadership, Hargreaves and Fullan's concept of collective autonomy, and in general, more collaborative decision-making.

At the classroom level, let's start by treating students less as subjects or subordinates and more like equals and collaborators in their own learning.

Still working on this, but I think this is key. Any time we can make our structures fit better with human nature, it's like like letting rocks roll downhill.