The Beginning Of The Beginning: An Introduction To & Some Thoughts On Education

Education is a topic I think about a lot and it’s something that I’ve wanted to publish something on for years. Even though I’ve written on the topic and recorded audio and the like in private, I’ve never really published anything of any significance on the topic. The basic reasons for this are probably that a) the topic is very complex and not easy to make sense of in general, but certainly not in one or even a few sittings and b) because it’s something that I care a lot about and I want to make sure that I do it a justice and capture what I want to say about it properly. All of that said, why is this paper different from anything else I’ve attempted to create on this topic? The short answer is it isn’t. I’ve decided that because of the absurd complexity of this topic I’m going to have to be comfortable with being wrong or inaccurate and conveying ideas imperfectly, because I think we stand to lose more by saying nothing at all. In essence, I think the nature of this problem is such that no one is really properly qualified to talk about it in all of its many facets, and because of this I think it’s more important to just try to sketch out ideas, without being excessively fearful of mis-communicating. This all in mind, I hope that you can suspend frustrations for me getting something wrong, particularly if you think I’m on to something directionally. Preamble over, let’s jump into this intellectual buffet.

Being that education seems to not be best thought of as some monolithic system or structure and possesses so many parts, there isn’t a super obvious starting point with this stuff to my imagination. Since this is the case, I’m going to favor analyzing the partitions that I’m closest too and engage in a style that just plays around with things that move me in some particularly moment. Likely what I will try to do, is make these posts a kind of series living in an “education” category where for each part I will discuss one such thing that I want to get into. This will keep each part somewhat distinct from one another, and can hopefully prevent my thoughts from getting jumbled together from overthinking too many things at the same time. All that said, for this part, I’ve decided to talk about something I want to dub,”exclusionary practices vs inclusionary practices”. The reason that I picked these weird sounding terms is because I think they do a good job of identifying what concepts each of them holds, once one understands the gist of the ideas I’m gonna share. To define each of these briefly, “exclusionary practices” holds the value of, “anything that shows a bias towards excluding”, while “inclusionary practices” of course holds, “anything that shows a bias towards including”. I understand that this is a very basic definition and the reason for that is because it is meant to describe a wide range of contexts, rather than one narrow thing. To flush this out a bit, the reason that I used the word bias, despite it’s usually bad connotations, is that we want to figure out what the valence of some practice is rather than always claiming that it’s optimal or perfectly neutral. Even if it’s possible to have some basically neutral practice, in my mind much of the things that we do fall into the category of either exclusionary, or inclusionary. The other important thing is that whether something is one or the other depends on who is included or excluded. However, what I’m really talking about, are practices that tend to shrink group size of usually “talented” people, rather than those that tend to increase group size, at least over time. So what am I actually referring to here? Without becoming too narrow, what I’m trying to illustrate, is that it seems we have systems or frameworks that are more focused on creating special clubs of narcissistic geniuses, rather than creating environments that want to draw from a bigger, more interesting, and dynamic talent pool, and actually nurture untapped genius in a greater number of students. In this way, we can have an effect, even when we don’t mean to, of decreasing the number of people that could experience “high-level improvement” or making meaningful progress at a fast rate.

To say more about this, there is one such instance where the application of inclusionary and exclusionary practices (which I will abbreviate as IP and EP for the rest of this article) is useful though perhaps not straight forward. If we examine the thinking of a an idea like, “no child left behind” which is a way of thinking about teaching an approaching teaching that is fairly common in but not limited to the United States, we run into a complex case of identifying and sorting out IP vs EP. Even though the stated goal of not leaving anyone behind sounds at the superficial level like it would fall into the category of IP, it can very often have the effect of leaving everyone behind. My model for this is something like, if you’ll bear with me for a moment, the bottom of the class maybe gets brought up to the middle(if you’re lucky), the middle stays where they are, and the top gets bored and deteriorates from the lack of, “food for thought”(see what I did there?). In many cases we deal with the top of the class by giving them extra stuff to do, pushing them into a different room, or encouraging exploration on their own outside of the institution. While these solutions aren’t necessarily bad, I sense that our problem stems from trying too hard to create a perfect system for everyone, which in turn creates a mediocre system for anyone. So how am I proposing this issue be addressed, since I’m here writing an article on the subject? I think a good starting point is rethinking fairness and perhaps revisiting the age old equality of outcome vs opportunity conversation. As long as it is the case that someone who is behind, can catch up or even get ahead by their own merit, we shouldn’t allocate too many resources on forcing them to become a butterfly, particularly because there are other people in the class. Those resources that go to them, are the currency you need to accomplish anything, and if you spend them poorly, that’s it; we don’t get more by blowing the magic horn of plenty. Time, money, energy, passion and all of these currencies are finite resources that we should be interested in allocating to the greatest positive effect.

Since it may seem like I’ve talked a lot of shit, I want to say that none of what I’m saying is any kind of attack on the current way that things are done. What I’m trying to say is that if there are better ways of approaching the things we are doing, especially in something that is as freakin’ important as education in affecting quality of life curves, then we probably want to do that. I’ll appeal to my former statement about suspending frustration and the like while I share these ideas, because yes, I understand that what I’m saying is not objective, but that’s because there isn’t really a way that it could be. What I want to offer here is a passion that reminds us of what it’s like to imagine the great possibilities given the ingenuity and work, that has been displaced by cynical thinking about what is currently the case, or what is likely. Pretending to be a skeptic while you tell others what can and can’t be done, while you do fuck all to help make things better, is exactly what I’m trying to avoid. Let it be known I say that with love, not with frustration in particular. I want to paint a scenario for you where we set high standards, that aren’t meant to make people depressed and anxious or be exclusionary, and bring everyone in the class up. The bottom explores there passions and finds a reason to work and engage in the class setting how they might already outside the institution, the middle is inspired by the top and learns what is possible, and the top can actually be rewarded for being good and putting in work, without creating an odd culture of shame about being powerful and competent. Competence is a less inflammatory word for “powerful in (x1……xn) areas”. The best in the class would love nothing more than to hear the thoughts and interests of their fellow classmates and imagine and learn together, not be separated in an elite club that may become an echo chamber. Note, I’m also not saying that being in a room full of people at or above your “level” is bad, it’s very positive if done correctly, my point is that segregating people based on past performance and putting all of a kind in one space, nerfs the ability to have a healthy, natural, diverse environment where we can intelligently acknowledge hierarchies without it being a negative thing. The other really important thing that learning in this different way might allow, is for people at various levels to get into their learning processes and share frameworks for approaching various things. I think what we often fail to realize, as I touched on in my piece on “talent v hard-work”, that a process for approaching learning is largely what will determine how quickly or effectively you actually learn. This idea that, “you have it or you don’t”, is beyond lazy and not a mindset that should be getting played out in school. People of potentially disparate backgrounds, interests and/or ways of thinking, what have you, have the potential to massively accelerate the learning of others through discourse, that is often not actually allowed to happen for many reasons, some of which we covered, or simply not encouraged.

However, just this piece of education itself is a tremendous topic and I suspect I could continue to write for hours on end, but I think I will leave it here for now so as to not overload this article. As an aside, I’m sure there are typos or “mis-writes” as there likely often are in my articles. This is a one man show, not to offer an excuse per se, but my passion has the potential to make my language a bit spaghetti at times so I hope you’ll overlook it.

As always, I hope that this provided at least some useful models or takeaways and hope I wasn’t too fiery on this one. Be well.

Orion Aeneas Webster,’

FourthEyeBlog author