Learning is Messy

Learning is Messy

Long gone are the days of the idyllic classroom of straight rows, students sitting in alphabetic order and quietly working with pen and paper, with teacher firmly planted in the front of the room.  The assumption that we are blank slates to be written upon is naive at best and insulting at worst.

Learning is messy, all the great educators from Socrates to Dewey to you have known this.  It is impossible for a human to have an exclusively original thought devoid of any past experiences.  Our design does not permit it. We are wired to have an experience, make mistakes or unintended advances and learn from those and other experiences we have had in our past that enable us to apply those lessons.  Meaning the only path to education is fraught with a ton of detours. So why is this controlled chaos such a problem so so many? In short, it is fear.

Education and the academic institutions are and should be, our most dangerous centers of disruption and creativity, not centers of conformity and stagnation.  If you accept John Dewey's vision that our education system is the incubation source to an ever improving and evolved society, then it must be taken that boundaries and problem-solving approaches must be at the forefront of all of our student engagement.
-From The Superintendent's Rulebook (Routledge, 2018)