Thompson's Story

We learn, deeply learn, when there is a personal purpose that creates personal meaning.

I used to drive my Dad crazy. I remember the day he had enough.

Let's start here, pondering how it is that wonder unfolds. We wonder – that is at the core of our being.

Light can't escape from a black hole. We sense that the traditional education model, one designed for another economy, is no longer orbiting a star, but instead, what now feels like a black hole – a star extinguished.

Before we further explore Descartes let's take a moment and reflect on the impact of a new technology that set the stage for his time, that of the modern printing press – a technology that gave individuals access to printed books at an unprecedented scale.

Descartes felt that our intellectual authority was a divine gift. In fact, he believed that it was through a special gland in our brain, the pineal gland, that we had a direct connection to God, a connection that gave us the right to God's authority.

While the Western Ways of Knowing, birthed by the Enlightenment and based on intellectual rationalism, has become preeminent we would be amiss if we did not name two others ways of knowing that are powerful and valuable in their own right, what we could call the Eastern Ways of Knowing and the Indigenous Ways of Knowing.

As the 19th century was dawning, there was a sense, first voiced by artists and scientists in Germany and then in England and the rest of Europe, that there was something more mysterious to life than that which could be directly measured through instruments.

We hear the word 'genius' and we think of those of exceptional intellectual or artistic prowess. These are individuals set apart from the rest of us, we who trudge through life with what are deemed 'normal' capacities.

Yes, this is a story about reimagining education. But before we get there, we have more of the cultural backstory to tell. A story that now leads us into the Industrial Age – a period that laid the foundation for our current education paradigm.

When our current education model was developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was designed to produce a workforce for an industrial economy.

We see a new creative economy emerging around the globe, one that is being empowered by computer technologies.

It has been said by some that we are at the dawn of a new era, one that might be called the Creativity Age.

For someone so little recognized today, one can't underestimate Whitehead's impact.

No longer bound to the constraints of a reality defined solely by causal relationships in a physical realm, Whitehead flung open the door to the potential of an unbounded imagination.

Influenced by Whitehead, Alonzo Church introduced lambda calculus in the 1930s, creating a framework that allowed mathematicians to develop abstractions of poetic meaning that felt magical.

Borges, a leader of a literary movement called 'magical realism', was exploring that creative potential which emerges then the boundaries of imagination and physical reality blur.

It's with David Bohm's writings that appeared in the 1950s that we begin to fully sense the potential inherent in Whitehead's speculative philosophy.

The work of the neuroscientist Karl Friston has transformed our understanding of the brain. But the impact of his work is taking us much further, leading us to a deeper understanding of the very nature of learning.

Wow, that was a lot. Let's take a moment and reflect on what we just learned as we briefly plunged into the thinking of not only Church, Borge, and Bohm, but also of Friston.

When Jami Fluke and I started our partnership together, we defined an Audacious Aspiration, that of unleashing the Creative Genius of every student in her school.

Jami knew that, when the delegation of twenty five Australian educators came to visit her school, there would be little time to share a very complex story.

No one expected it. When Covid hit Oregon in March of 2020, we were woefully unprepared. At the middle of March with three days notice, our schools were closed, just as spring vacation was about to begin.

It has been said that our current education paradigm turns learners into students in the process that destroys innate curiosity and just produces, in the end, 'compliant learners'. Unfortunately, compliant learners are woefully unprepared for the complexity of the world they will be entering.

The essential experience of creative learning is the feeling of emergence.

We are curious about this experience of learning. Why, we wonder, is this joy so powerful and becomes an experience that has a deep impact? A feeling that can't be unfelt.

Earlier in this story, we introduced the thinking of four people who might, we hope, illuminate what is going on here at a deeper level. The last person mentioned was Karl Friston, the neuroscientist.

We are left wondering, what does this story mean as we ponder the Audacious Aspiration of reimagining education?

As we end this story, it may be helpful to recall the words of Lao Tzu, spoken some 2,500 years ago: