Tag: Isaac Graves

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An Interview with Kirsten Olson

The following interview is shared with you by both Kirsten Olson and Isaac Graves. To learn about this interview series and reproduction, citation, and copyright information, please click here. To find out more about Kirsten Olson and her work, click here.

Kirsten Olson

Kirsten OlsonIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Kirsten Olson: Community is a group of people with whom I share values, aspirations, and understandings. Community are the folks who invite you to play, and take risks and also keep you in line and challenge you. Community for me happens in lots and lots different places, across many different domains of my life. The commonality is there’s a sense of play, and invitation, and sharing, and also of accountability and challenge in meaningful community to me.

IG: How does community play out in your life?

KO: I have many different communities, some of them are family community, spiritual community, many different work communities. In terms of educational work, some are transformational reform communities, some are practitioner problems-of-the-work communities, some are policy communities. One of the things  I wish for is that there were more intersections between all these communities. In our sector we are so silo-ed and unaware of each other, in terms of our understandings of the work, our approaches to the work. So finding more commonalities and mutual understandings is something that I wish for and hope. At IDEA that’s the project that we are working on.  

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

KO: Both a sense of being at home and also being invited to learn in them. I think a sense of hospitality in community is critical, and also the excitement of learning along with other people and exploring new ideas and solutions. That's very, very meaningful to me. I try to find that in all the communities that I’m in. Sometimes it’s harder than other others.

IG: What's missing in community?

KO: It would be easier for us to create real change in the sector if there were spaces for us to have reasoned conversations with each other about what we agree and disagree on. I wish there were more places that we met to exchange our ideas and learn, rather than to fight with other, or “other” each other, or mischaracterize each other. Fighting and othering is a stance lots of people are in and that is tremendously unproductive for us. People tend to feel very, very passionately about the transformation of education in ways that sometimes make it hard to hear other people whose point of views are really radically different. So an ideal community to me would be a place where people could come together to hear each other and to know each other more. 

IG: What is an ideal community to you?

KO: Hmm, is it a virtual space? Yesterday I was talking to one of my friends who works at Education Trust, which is a policy think-tank in Washington, and then I had a conversation with someone who is at a Free School, in the same day, and a public school superintendent and emailed with my IDEA colleagues. Where are the places in our sector in which all those elements can get together and understand what parts of the project everyone is working on? Not that we all have to agree with each other, but understand what everybody else is doing and to try to hear about why they’re doing it with less passion and castigation and sense that "I know the best way" or "what you have to say has no meaning to me—you don’t operate in the same accountability world that I do." All those various ways that people “other” folks are unproductive. Of course there are real philosophical disagreements about how people learn, the conditions under which people should learn, and what the outcomes of education should be. But we don't have places that foster powerful discussions around those differences. It’s a pretty fragmented and un-cosmopolitan world. 

So, how would I imagine this ideal community? I think we just have to start doing it. That’s the project that you are working on at your conference. So, the more we are producing folks who know about what’s going on in lots of different parts of this sector and can speak to each and are translators—the better. And the more places we have to come together to talk about things the better, too. 

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

KO: Seven things describe democratic education to me. It means shared authority in the educational enterprise with the positional authority of adults mattering less than it does in conventional educational settings. It means real thinking, so that achievement is related to real outcomes, and assessment and evaluation is related to people’s work or thinking. The work students do is organized around student interests much more than it is in most conventional educational settings. There’s kind of negotiated content: students negotiate with whomever the educators are about what they are going to learn and how they are going to learn it and how it is going to be assessed. There’s a push in the enterprise to increasing independence in the learner and also interdependence—that learning requires both of those, and that both of those capacities really be nurtured and intensified. That rigor is increasingly defined by students: students can begin to own the process by which you make the work better and that that is deeply apart of the democratic enterprise; is it’s shifting authority for judgment of what good work is away from adults onto the learner, him or herself. And high achievement is available to all, that the purpose of school is not to sort and track kids but that there’s a mastery orientation to learning in which everyone can be successful and cognitive difference is welcome. And so my last piece is that difference is seen as sustaining and helpful. Intellectual, social, and cultural difference is seen as critical to the lifeblood of a healthy learning environment. What are the outcomes of these things? To me, much, much more powerful, engaged learning, more meaningful learning for everyone. Educational places that people actually want to be. That was comprehensive and wonky, wasn’t it? 

I’m finding all these videos to try and demonstrate what I want to talk about. So I found this fabulous 1953 video about democratic classroom practices. It’s one of those "everything old is new again" pieces . . . we seem to be in the same conversation every four or five decades whether we wish to be or not. I realized that back in the day, in 1953, there was much more interest and receptivity to some of the fundamental principles of democratic education than there are now. The current No Child Left Behind and the kind of reform era that we’ve been since the early 80s have actually flattened the meaning of education. Attainment of skills and knowledge that will make us competitive in the global marketplace seems to be all that school is about in the conventional settings now. The idea that school was really about producing people who were engaged with the world and cared about the world as citizens was a much more acceptable set of ideas and attitudes in 1953 than it is now—which is astonishing considering the relatively repressive climate of the 1950s. It’s just really interesting. 

IG: How does education play out in your life? 

KO: Well, education is at the center of my life. And there’s two pieces to it: passionate learning myself. One of the things I love most about my life is that I can be in really, really fun learning projects with other people through my work. Whenever I am doing something with somebody, and we are trying to learn together about how to do the work better—I love that and find it incredibly exciting and enjoyable. Second, a lot of my work is about figuring out how to help kids who are stuck in stultifying, uninteresting institutions get to do some of the same kinds of fun learning projects that we as adults often get to do in our work. The schools I’m in, in most of my work days, have almost nothing to do with that kind of really passionate, joyful learning that is at the center of my work life. And so the starkness of that contrast is there for me all the time. Why would we do this to kids? What is our purpose in that? Ultimately, what will be the consequences of the particular regime that we are in now? So, that’s part of it—this alive, playing, incredibly fun part of learning has always been so much in contrast, for me all of my life, to this institution that we call school which seems to me to have almost nothing to do with that. There are places and things called school where that can happen, but the almost active disregard for the pleasure of learning—you know schools are really not institutions that are organized around pleasure. Pleasure is almost embargoed. The contrast of that really drives a lot of what I do.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about your work in education?

KO: I have been passionately consumed by the problem that I just named, which is the power and pleasure of learning in contrast to the institution in our culture that houses it, for a long time. I’ve been in that problem since I was maybe in the first grade and I am still learning lots of new things about it and finding new ways to understand that problem. I always say to my undergraduates when I ask them to write a paper about the purpose of education: "what you’re really writing about is: what constitutes a meaningful life? What do you think is really important to live for?" That is at the center of education. That's why the questions it involves are so profound and complex and important to wrestle with, even though we don’t do a very good job with wrestling with them. But they really are about: what do we want to live for? What do you think is meaningful? What is the nature of human life? How much control and authority do people need to learn things? What are the consequences of that control and authority? I find all of that really, really interesting. Then, how to take those big thoughts and make them practical—like what do you say in the faculty meeting tomorrow about the problems of this particular school that we’re working in. 

IG: What's missing in education?

KO: There is tremendous under-appreciation of the complexity of learning, of the complexity of emotion, and cognition, and spiritual inclinations that learning involves. There’s way too little respect for learners themselves. Learners, for the most part, are treated like cattle on a feed-lot and at a factory farm—and schooling is a crushing spiritual enterprise. In many ways, deliberately so. The individuals who work in schools are often crushed individuals themselves. The failure to appreciate the complexity of the enterprise of learning is just profound and underlies so many things that are wrong with how we do school. I’m very much with John Taylor Gatto. I don’t think that’s a mistake. I don’t think these things are accidents. We have the system that we have for particular reasons. The issue is that that system has become dysfunctional and the new story has not been born yet.

IG: What is an ideal education to you?

KO: There is no ideal education. That is a mistaken idea because in terms of education, what is considered valuable and important is intimately connected and related to your community, and your social class, your ethnicity, your geography, your parent’s aspirations—what you think is meaningful really comes out of a particular context and education is about expressing that in some way. What I’m committed to is I think there needs to be more real and coherent choices for the millions of kids who are in school right now who have no choices. What I see is a monolithic educational system that is largely about control and lack of choice—and again I would say deliberately so. Our job is to create many, many more viable alternatives for communities and for students in lots of different kinds of ways. Right now, in spite of growing interest in different kinds of schools, they still largely don’t exist—choices don’t exist. Especially for people who are not high social capital, who live in isolating neighborhoods, urban and rural, there really aren’t choices. Greater consciousness about the effects of school—the ways in which conventional school flattens us, and devalues us, and cheapens us something that people are largely not conscious of. I think that a more ideal education would cherish this complexity and hold that as much more sacred.

IG: What do you think people should know about the relationship between community and education?

KO: We have moved from a world where your community was about where you lived, where you grew up, whom your ancestors were and are. Community now is be morphing into something that is much more global, much more boundary crossing, and in some ways much more self-created. That’s just one of the promises of the world that we live in now. So, that’s also a challenge to community. You know there’s a real tension there. But there are enormous possibilities for people to collaborative all around the world to produce educational environments for folks that we could never have created in the past. That is going to happen. I think that’s tremendously promising. I could now really conceivably work with my son in New Delhi and my colleague in Melbourne to try to create some kind of new educational model. And we could go pretty far in describing what that is, beginning to put the pieces of that together, making that meaningful and having other people know about it in ways that we really couldn’t before. I see that is very promising—hopeful. But the old institution of schooling cannot survive under these conditions. And I'm okay with that.

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An Interview with Ron Miller

The following interview is shared with you by both Ron Miller and Isaac Graves. To learn about this interview series and reproduction, citation, and copyright information, please click here. To find out more about Ron Miller and his work, click here.

Ron Miller

Miller, RonIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Ron Miller: A community is a group of people who have a meaningful shared experience. It could be based on where they live or the kind of work they do or ideals they hold—in each case there is some common experience that forms a bond. Of course some such experiences are much deeper and more significant than others, and so the qualities of a community depend on the situation.

IG: How does community play out in your life?

RM: In a community of peers I can talk openly. I can express myself and people understand me, even though my thinking is pretty far outside the mainstream. In the community where I live, there's an underlying desire to accept each other because we're sharing a place and want to be comfortable in that place, to feel at home.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

RM: Probably the sense of solidarity or camaraderie. It's hard to go through life feeling alone, especially when you are doing more radical kinds of work. If you're fighting against the system, it's nice to have allies and not feel that you're entirely detached from the social world. And having community, a sense of place, where I've been living the last few years is a precious experience in this over-developed, over-technologied, mass  culture. I love the feeling of living in a small Vermont town, recognizing people and being recognized wherever I go.

IG: What's missing in community?

RM: In most places—less so where I'm living now but even there to some extent—there can be a lack of connection. I think a lot of people are very busy these days or we're preoccupied with our own private affairs. There is so much distraction, online and everywhere else. I've found that if I don't make a very deliberate effort to reach out to people, we don't get together very easily. In a truly strong community, our lives would more naturally overlap.

IG: What is an ideal community to you?

RM: A blend of commonality and diversity. There's enough commonality to be the basis for collaboration and mutual understanding, but at the same time,  there is a celebration of people's differences and welcoming everyone into the community. I think it's pretty easy to have one or the other, but to have both is kind of the challenge.

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

RM: Well, it naturally follows from my definition of an ideal community. It's an approach that respects every person, that honors diversity, even while it builds a sense of community where everyone feels that they belong. Everyone has a voice and can participate as they are, be themselves. They can pursue their own learning interests and inclinations, yet they are challenged to go outside themselves and accommodate others' needs and perspectives as well.

IG: How does education play out in your life? 

RM: I tend to be very intellectual. I love intellectual stimulation, so education has always been nourishing to me, whether it's formal study for degrees or just my own reading. I get a lot of satisfaction from expanding my awareness of the world.  And then I have always loved to share that sense of discovery. I'm essentially a teacher; that's been my major aim in life. 

I've loved teaching college and graduate students, younger children, and retired adults. I even enjoy being a tour guide or giving directions to a visitor.  Although I retired from my work in alternative education, I'm coming back to it in a way because I'll be running a community learning center in our small town. I just can't stray too far from being an educator!

IG: What do you find most meaningful about your work in education?

RM: I think I'm gratified by how I've been able to think outside the box, to discover or create new ideas, a different framework for understanding what education is. I guess my work has been meaningful to a certain number of people. None of my books have been bestsellers, but to the extent that they have inspired a few hundred readers, it was certainly worth the effort. I'm mostly talking about work I did work or decades ago. What is currently most meaningful are the informal classes I've been teaching, mostly to retired adults, on American history. I've got my own little group of followers who love these classes. And I love the research preparing for them; I completely immerse myself in the topic.

IG: What's missing in education?

RM: For myself,  I have made my own education so if there's a gap, I tend to fill it pretty quickly. What's missing for education for the world, for kids today, is what I wrote about for 30 years. What's missing is a sense of the wholeness of our humanity. Education is defined so narrowly as academic achievement, the acquisition of a list of bits of knowledge, and it really needs to be an expansion of human consciousness, which is much more then adding different knowledge.

IG: What is an ideal education to you?

RM: An ideal education is one that allows every one of us to find the best within us, find what our potential is and what our calling is, and to grow into that and to express it, and contribute to a society or culture that also nourishes us.

IG: What do you think people should know about the relationship between community and education?

RM: I don't know how to even think about education without the context of community.  The dominant definition of education as individual aptitude, as a system for testing everyone to see where they fit on a mechanistic scale, is such a narrow and impoverished view!  Genuine learning is a social and cultural activity and community is essential to it. What can it even mean to learn something, to know something, outside of a social context?  That is a view that treats human beings as information processing machines, a view I find revolting.  All real education is community-based, and wise educators are ones who recognize that and work with that reality.

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An Interview with Nikhil Goyal

The following interview is shared with you by both Nikhil Goyal and Isaac Graves. To learn about this interview series and reproduction, citation, and copyright information, please click here. To find out more about Nikhil and his work, click here.

Nikhil Goyal

Nikhil GoyalIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Nikhil Goyal: A community is a group of people linked by a common bond.

IG: How does community play out in your life?

NG: I’m part of several communities. One in particular is the Under 20 Summit Community, a group of young people under twenty years of age who want to change the world. I interact and collaborate with many of these people on a regular basis.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

NG: Working with people are committed to similar purposes. 

IG: What is an ideal community to you?

NG: An ideal community would be an environment where you can engage with people that have similar and contrasting views and are from all walks of life. It’s so important that you have a lot of diversity in the types of people that you're working with. In a community you might find a new opportunity, a new person to connect with, an network that you could work with perhaps.

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

NG: In my mind, democratic education would be defined by: the learners, themselves, having full autonomy and control over how, where, what, and when they learn.

IG: How does education play out in your life? 

NG: I’m a self-directed learner. I’ve curated learning experiences through the Internet, conferences, books, lectures, and various platforms.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about education?

NG: Freedom to learn without coercion or interference.

IG: What's missing in education?

NG: The voices of the learners.

IG:What is an ideal education to you?

NG:  An ideal education is one where I have the resources, tools, and mentors at my disposal.

IG: What do you think people should know about the relationship between community and education?

NG: I believe the city should turn into a learning ecosystem, where public spaces, like libraries, makerspaces, and museums are transformed into places of collaboration, problem solving, and creativity.

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An Interview with Rick Posner

The following interview is shared with you by both Rick Posner and Isaac Graves. To learn about this interview series and reproduction, citation, and copyright information, please click here. To find out more about Rick Posner and his work, click here.

Rick Posner

Rick PosnerIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Rick Posner: Oh, wow. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. As a matter a fact, the talk I gave in Florida, at this conference—this symposium, was really about self-directed communities and what a difference it made in my life. And I think you certainly talk about the Yiddish term: mishpoka, which means family and it means more than family—it means tribe, it means sense of belonging to something greater than yourself. Gosh, community is such a missing link in this culture of ours, in this country. There are so few people who have had any real experience with community. I have to talk about it personally because, I think, for me it’s been a search for family and belonging that I’ve been engaged in my whole life. And so when I came to the open school, it gave me all kinds of new views of community. But I think, to me personally, it means belonging to a family—it means what Studs Terkel said about schools as communities. And he said: school communities—why can’t schools be places where people help each other become their fullest selves? And I thought—when I heard that, it was right before Terkel died, it was a radio interview on PBS or NPR, and it was just so meaningful for me to hear that… powerful, really. This idea that communities—real communities, not artificial communities like, I hate to say it, but most conventional schools create these artificial communities with school spirit and what they really do is divide their communities into sub-communities, and not in a healthy way—but real communities: putting people together in a democratic way to help each other become our best and fullest selves, I really believe that. And I didn’t have much experience with that coming from teaching in conventional school settings for so many years. So when I came to the Open school, it was really sort of a shock to me at first. Like most people who didn’t have much experience with real community, I was a little skeptical and a little cynical about it at first. It took me some time to realize that I was being accepted as a valued member of a community—and it was a wonderful feeling when I finally came to the realization that I belonged to something. It was a great feeling for me. It was very liberating kind of thing. So, I think that’s what community means to me.

IG: How does community play out in your life?

RP: I sort of addressed that second question already, but I think community plays out in my life as a way of synthesizing things—making sense of my world and my own identity. By that I mean that, community crosses lines for me, or has come to do that in my life. I think there was a time when I compartmentalized my life into: professional relationships, personal relationships, family, friends, you know what I mean? …separated stuff in my life. I think the way community has played out in my life is by helping me synthesize, bring together these different compartments into a whole. It’s been synergistic for me. And I think that’s what community should do. Not that there should not be some lines between your personal and professional lives, but there should be some transition points too. …so that you could make sense of your world. And I think that’s what a good community does, and that’s what it has done for me.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

RP: You know I think it’s the feeling of having a group of people that believe in you, and believes in your value to the greater whole. That you are valued, needed, and you have something to believe in and you have some people who believe in you. I think that’s the real value of a sustainable feeling of community. And that’s the other point, is that this isn’t something that just goes away when you graduate school or when you get bar mitzvah-ed or you get married or you leave the family—this is a feeling that you have throughout your life of belonging to something. And that, that’s the real value of it. You have this sustainable mishpoka, family or tribe that you belong to and feel valued by.

IG: What's missing in community?

RP: Yeah, you know I think in this country you can isolate yourself and not even know you’re doing it, very quickly. Some of it is just logistics. I grew up in Milwaukie: the city of neighborhoods. In other words, you could walk down the street and see people and meet people and talk to people. People walk to your house. A park is a block away, you go to the park, you play baseball with families and friends. That was an usual experience, and it was a great place to grow up because of that. But once I left and came out to the wild west, like you did, and you’re in the wide, open spaces and you’re in these pockets of people, you can’t walk out on the street anymore you have to get in your car. I miss that sense of accessibility to community and community life. And as much as I am attached like to the open school community, and what it’s done for me, I still feel a literal distance sometimes. And you have to be more creative and more intentional about bringing the community together when you can’t just walk down the street. Yeah, and now that I’m retired from the school, you know, I really miss that everyday engagement and connection that I had as a teacher in a vibrant community. It’s been hard for me. I’ve struggled with that a little bit.

IG: What is an ideal community to you?

RP: Ideal community would be to find a balance between the different parts of your life, but have the foundation of that tribal community-feeling underneath everything. It’s hard to explain. I think it’s a sort of a cycle-emotional feeling that I have about community that I want that foundation of belonging without the pressures of having to be there all the time, and be engaged all the time—especially when you get older and you become sort of an elder of the community. That’s one thing I’ve been really dealing with is: how do I transition into this role as an elder? What does an elder do? And I think in an ideal community, an elder doesn’t just sit back and dispense wisdom from the rocking chair but sort of gets to pick and choose how they want to be involved in the community. But I think that the ideal community, for me, is something that you never really reach. There’s no—you can’t reach this top of the pyramid, like Maslow’s self actualized kind of thing, but it’s something that you strive for. I think the ideal is to have that foundation—to know it’s always there, to know you can always go back home somewhere, to re-engage, to rejuvenate, and to re-attach if you need it. It’s like having a healthy family—that’s the ideal: a healthy, supportive family that you can go back to. 

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

RP: Well, you know, I think it really means—you know I keep going back to Freire and some of his work and breaking down those hierarchies that we are so addicted to, especially in education. This idea of control and being controlled and having to control somebody and looking at the opposite of—or the feeling of loss of control as some kind of Lord of the Flies situation where students run wild and it’s all chaos and anarchy. So, finding a balance with sharing control and being able to talk openly about giving up and letting go of some of that control with the stipulation that you’re going to have some adult guidance in your community. Now, you know, the open school in the old days made all of their decisions by consensus and you can imagine how crazy that was—but how wonderful it was too. How wonderful and engaging and—well somebody said real democracy is like pulling nose hairs, you know? And I think of that a lot because in the early days in the open school, god it was excruciating but it was also exhilarating. That was my ideal democratic educational setting, was when you would just argue the hell out of something and work it to the point where you would have to have buy in from everybody. That was my idea of real democratic education. Now, over time we all know that especially public schools, public institutions get pounded down, they become a little more conservative, they become a little more conforming over the years, and part of it—we had a big open school become larger, it was harder to do that in larger groups with governance meetings. It went more to a representative democracy in some ways and we’re back and forth. So for me, the purest model would be the consensus model. The compromised model would be one person-one vote. That’s really the way it came down in my days at the open school. These days I think it’s become more of a representative thing and I’m not so sure I like it but in the old days, I’m telling you it was pure democracy. That’s what I would like to see—smaller groups that would have consensual decisions. 

IG: How does education play out in your life? 

RP: You know if I had to diagram my life, and I think I have been doing that a little for the last 5 years, I’ve been in traditional psychoanalysis and nobody does that anymore. You know on the couch, Freudian psychoanalysis where the guys behind you and you’re on your own, very self-directed kind of process. And you know what it is—it’s a personal journey, it’s a journey, it’s a self discovery journey and what I keep coming back to is you do sort of diagram your life and you try to put the pieces of your life together and make meaning of it. And for me, education is always right at the center of it. Everything sort of revolves around the idea of being self-directed but being self-directed in a community of learners. Whether it be family, friends, or work—it all revolves around teaching and learning. I think it’s been a very important centerpiece in my life. So it hasn’t just played out, it has been the fulcrum of my life. But it’s taken me awhile to understand that and to realize that it’s sort of the driving force in all the different parts of my life and I have to credit a lot of people for that—you know, my parents. My dad was a real self-directed, curious, vibrant learner. My parents took a lot of chances with their lives, and did a lot of traveling. And then, I caught that bug. I had the guts to make some good decisions when I was young about what I wanted to do with my life and it all gravitated towards education. You know what else I have to give a great deal of credit to is the influence of African American culture on my life. I’ve been doing a lot of writing and thinking about that lately. It’s been a great influence on me as far as education goes, and it’s played out—it’s been a very important part of my life. The spirit, the soul, the joy, the sorrow, too, of African American culture and history has been very important for me. That’s sort of been in the center of this education part of my life because, you know, I was the one who took kids down to the Delta and did the Blues trips and took kids to New Orleans for the Jazz Heritage Festival and did all the civil rights stuff. You know, taking white, middle class kids down to the Delta was like taking them to a different country. My mom would always say: “What the hell are you doing in Mississippi? You hanging out with the rednecks in Mississippi now?” I said: “No there’s more to it Mom, there’s to it than that.” But, education—it’s all wrapped up in the middle of my life. Thank god for it.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about education?

RP: Again, I find most meaningful the idea of synthesizing things in your life. I find that education is a vehicle and a center point for making sense of your life. And forming your identity as a learner who has courage, and foresight, and the guts to make decisions on your own, and the joy of learning new things—it brings everything together in your life. That’s what education does. And that’s what it should do. It should be a way of making sense of your life. …and I think that sense of personal power that you get from belonging to a community of learners and being a life long learner yourself—it’s a sense of power, not in an egotistic way but in a human way. I think it makes you more human.

IG: What's missing in education?

RP: Well, you know I think you know and I know what’s missing and really it’s—I hate to be abstract about it but it’s heart and soul. That’s what’s missing. The idea of a well-rounded education—which I find traditional, if you go back to the Greeks and you know if you talk about the word traditionally and go back historically—that’s the traditional education, educare, right? The Latin root of the word does not mean to fill up; it means to draw out from. That’s what educare means—that’s the traditional sense of the word. We have lost that sense of what it means to be educated. Now, we’re finding out what we’re missing because our students don’t have 21st century skills. They keep talking about 21st century skills now… none of those skills are on the test—critical thinking, creativity, collaboration—none of these skills are on the test and what we’re doing is we’re teaching the test now. I think we’re playing into the hands, I don’t want to get too political here, we’re playing into the hands of the private sector. I really believe they’re licking their chops at this giant market out there for vouchers and privatizing education. They still haven’t changed the law, No Child Left Behind, with all schools being 100% efficient by 2014. I’m sure they want to—I mean we all want to, I’m not sure the private sector wants us to change that. I think it’s a way to discredit public education, but I don’t want to get too conspiratorial about it. The truth is we’ve taken the wrong turn. We need to head back to what the traditional really was—you know, I don’t call the schools outside of the Open School traditional schools; I call them conventional schools. I think the Open School, and places like that, and Justo’s school in Puerto Rico, are more traditional. The old one room schoolhouse where you pay attention to kids, there’s cross-age learning—that’s traditional. I would say we’re the ones who are traditional. They’re the ones who are conventional. I think that the shit’s hitting the fan right now. It really is and as I said, the time is right for looking at some of these things. But we’ve definitely gone the wrong way.

IG:What is an ideal education to you?

RP: An ideal education for me would be an education of the heart, soul, mind, and spirit. I don’t know if you do yoga or not or if you’re a yoga-ite, I am. I go twice a week to yoga. I practice yoga and I’ve done it for about ten years now. And what yoga has taught me is what education really is. It’s an education of mind, spirit, body, and heart. And an ideal education is just that. It’s a focus on social, personal, and intellectual issues in your life. It’s being able to understand how to form meaningful relationships and maintain relationships in your life. An ideal education, again, is a synthesis of the different parts of your life into themes that make sense to you as a person who lives in a democratic—supposedly democratic society. That’s what it is for me. It’s a sense-making engine. 

IG: What do you think people should know about the relationship between community and education?

RP: I think they need to know that it’s essential that—and you know I tried to stress this point at the self-directed learning symposium. Self-directed learning is not independent learning; it’s interdependent learning. One of the greatest self-directed skills, ironically, is knowing when to ask for help when you need it. I mean, a lot of people say: “Oh that’s giving in, that’s not very self-directed.” No, the idea is that community and learning need each other to thrive. You need a supportive community and you need a community where you can at least make some positive personal connections. Remember in the book I have that V-shaped model, you know it starts with the advisor and the advisee and then it goes out and up to the greater community and the greater world. That doesn’t work without a supportive community. They’re essential for each other. Even if your community is a relationship with one other person, it’s better than nothing. I will be very honest with you—a lot of kids have nothing these days. They have nothing. Did you see that thing in the paper a couple years ago? It said: “25% of Americans feel they have no one to confide in.” That means 1 out of 4 people you see on the street have no one they can talk to about anything. That is frightening. So, what I’m saying is that: the community part of this whole thing is essential. Even if it’s a small one-to-one community that it starts with—sometimes it ends there. It’s better than nothing and it’s chipping off some of that lower level of Maslow’s pyramid—whereas so many kids these days are just stuck at that lowest level of the pyramid. They don’t even have basic securities then, they have no one they can talk to. So, yeah, I mean they’re essential for each other, they’re reciprocal really.