Notes From The End Of The World As We Know It 11: Education at the End of Life as we Know It

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

The other night, my children were having the most delightful and intelligent conversation. My son had not seen his sister in a while and he was so excited to be sitting at the table with her again. And, as usual, when he is excited or happy, the words flowed at a torrential rate. He was telling her about his latest favorite thing, which was to be read Greek myths to. As he was sharing various points of interest, he blurted out: “And you know, ate, how silly this Pygmalion was? He fell in love with his own statue. His own statue that he made! How ridiculous is that?” This was my just turned six year old son who, later on, with similar explicatives, explained how sad it was that Prometheus had to be punished for stealing fire for the people. With this, my son and his 20 year old ate engaged each other in a conversation on the tragic and ethical issues explored by these myths. In truth, that conversation wasn’t as profound as I’m making it sound. Most of it sounded more like: “I know! That’s so sad right?” and “Why would anyone open the box? That’s so dumb!” But the reason I thought that this conversation was so intelligent was not because my son knew his mythology. That’s not a sign of intelligence but of exposure to a certain culture because of one’s class. Rather, the reason I thought that this conversation was so smart, was because my six year old was able to pick up on and analyze the elements of high tragedy in the myths and comment on them from his own perspective.


I am starting with this story because my son is not so manifestly smart in school. You see he goes to a traditional pre-school where they are made to sit on a desk and follow a rather fixed curriculum. It’s a wonderful curriculum, mind you. But it is a very traditional one and pushes all the children to learn standard things according to a standard plan and does not really allow them to explore learning with their various intelligences. This is why my son, who can discuss Greek mythology and argue against the necessity of hell if God is a loving God, is not one of the smartest kids in school. For the longest time, they were even reporting that he did not complete sentences when at home he would be using words like “ridiculous” correctly and as part of complex sentences. Thus, my son hated school even if he loves seeing his teacher and classmates.

I remember when I was in school how I too was not very happy. More so than my son because, in the old days, teachers thought that threats and fear were their best tools to coax learning. So I always felt like a dunce because, despite the threats and the fear, I could never get the lessons as quickly or as rightly as the other kids. I was always in the middle, insignificant and never feeling particularly bright or capable. The kids on top had tutors, driven parents who either drilled their students constantly and/or brought food to school for the teachers on an almost daily basis. I was there to passively get knowledge drilled into my head. My happiest time in school was play time or, later, illicit smoking breaks. I don’t think traditional school suited me because one was either one of the herd who was asked simply to receive information and skills, or one excelled because one was driven and tutored to empty excellence. In the end it was never about discovery.

When I got to the university, all of a sudden, learning was so much fun and was so wonderful. It was so because, by this time, I had learned not to care about grades. I never actually did care about grades when I was in primary and secondary school because grades only made me feel mediocre and worthless. But when I reached college and started studying literature and philosophy, I was allowed to forget about grades. The less I cared about grades, the more I learned to learn and the higher my performance was evaluated—a fact that seems ironic to most, but not for people who know what learning is genuinely about.

I remember how it felt when I first discovered learning. It was when my literature and philosophy teachers first started talking about literary and philosophical works as living works to think about, to engage with, and build upon. Parmenides’ poem was a living testament that invited you to immerse in the first articulation of Being. Brilliantes offered a world of symbols and feelings that allowed you to explore your own. Later, my history teacher taught me that the pasyon was a framework for a whole revolution, and we could sift through the thought of Bonifacio and Jacinto for its traces. For the first time, we were invited to think and not to repeat. For the first time, dead people stopped being dead and we could see with them, feel with them, love and hate with them, imagine new worlds with them, and then we were invited to think our own thoughts in response. How wonderful was that? If study time in my youth was spent crying over homework that didn’t mean anything to me, this time I could not get enough of reading assigned texts in college. I believe that my daughter experienced the same kind of liberation when, from a traditional school, she was allowed to experience creative learning in a UN high school and later in the university where I teach. Learning, all of a sudden, was exhilarating because it was discovery and liberation. I was truly led out of the cave and I was basking in the living light. Certainly, this was not all the time because we had our share of uninspired teachers. But when the teachers were good, we soared.

Because of my own experience of liberation, I want to tell my son when he comes home from the school where he is not so smart not to worry. “
High school and grade school are meant to be like that—a cave of dark learning. There’s no other way to learn the basics but to sit and memorize and give back what your teachers want you to learn. Ate had to go through that and now she’s learning better things in college.” But then, I am beginning to hear about progressive schools. They say that in these schools, there are no grades and children are taught in a way that does not put a premium on what they can memorize but on how they can discover knowledge on their own. They are not stuffed into large classrooms where they are anonymous and uniform, but each one is encouraged to discover and realize their own special talents. In these schools, their learning rhythms are respected.

Just last month, my wife and I visited the open house of one such school. And we were so surprised to meet the children there. They seemed like such nerds. Not the annoying kind who were in your face because they needed to let you know what they knew so that you would think they were special, but the kind of children who were so obviously smart because they had learning and were excited by it. The kids did presentations on things they discovered in school and as they did, they spoke like a different breed from the children herded into traditional schools. They had knowledge that they genuinely understood—knowledge that empowered them because they knew how they got to it and why it matters. They seemed like products of a system that respected their creativity and capacity to participate in their own education. Because the school does not run according to competitiveness and the measure of grades, the students seemed to be into learning for the sake of wanting to know and to understand. They were independent learners that early. They obviously came to knowing because it was fun or it was important to them or it fascinated them and, therefore, they could and wanted to share it. There on the tables and floors of the school were eager children able to explain why ocean currents run the way they do, how plants depend on their roots for sustenance, and how proportions can be derived from a circle. A friend whose son studies in that school told me how her grade five son and his friends once obsessed about explaining the Euclid’s theorem and ended up spending some nights and days working on it.

I am excited for my son to study in a school like this after three years of dwelling in the cave. I can’t wait for his mind to be set free not just at home but also at school. I can’t wait for his independent, inquisitive, brave and adventurous mind to be affirmed by someone other than philosophy professors and his family. But more than this, I am excited for my son to be in a school where he will learn to be a leader in the age of the end of life as we know it.
As we come to the end of life as we know it, we will have to re-imagine civilization. Things we took for granted will no longer be the same. How we eat, how we manufacture, how we plant, how we are sheltered, and how we earn our living will have to change. We will have to rethink the meaning of development, of success, of the good life, of comfort, and of affluence. Who will lead us in this dreaming, this recreating? Will it be the children of the cave who were taught that learning is pleasing and conforming? Or will it be the children of the light who were taught to explore the wider world according to their passion and imagination? Will the children who had to be driven by competition, pressure, and the need for affirmation lead us? Or will it be the children who were empowered to discover, taught to cooperate in birthing knowledge, and inspired to challenge themselves to break boundaries?

My friends say that traditional schools are good for some children because strict structures make them flourish and progressive schools for others. I believe that. I am just glad that there are alternatives that will nourish the other children whose minds are dying to be set free because they will be facing a time when the structures we know will break down and better worlds will need to be built.