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"Optimism" is the belief that things are going to turn
out as you would like, as opposed to "hope," which is
when you are thoroughly convinced something is moral and right
and therefore you fight regardless of the consequences.
- Vaclav
Havel
New Levels of Learning: The Hope of Humanity
Learning, Darwin now appears to have believed,
is the core drive of human advancement. What we now call biological evolution is
essentially a pre-conscious form of learning.
It is learning that has fueled the intellectual triumphs in the
run-up to every breakthrough in science. And it is only learning
that can guide us through the moral and spiritual logjams heralding
societal revolutions and planetary turning points, and onward
in the hope of human survival on earth. Learning indeed has always
been the central enabling problem-solving process. It remains
so today.
And yet, at the moment when we are almost ready to extend our
understanding of human destiny beyond our present horizons, horizons
now within reach if we only persist in our learning long enough,
the old cancer of self-serving small-mindedness returns. Once
again our continued survival comes under threat. Again our vision
clouds with fear. We lash out at an enemy and the earth. And our
capacity to reach for new learning is temporarily dwarfed.
Cancer on the cellular level involves a kind of cellular identity
crisis, cells attacking other cells for reasons the cells themselves
seem not to understand. Our continuing attacks upon one another
and against our natural environment resemble this disease process.
These high risk behaviors stem similarly from a fundamental confusion
about who we are. Are we the savages William Golding shows us
in Lord of the Flies, fated to burn up our earth
as his boys burn down their island?
Or are we like Janie Woods, granddaughter of a former slave,
who finds peace at the end of her own struggling journey toward
love and self-discovery in Zora Neale Hurston's Their
Eyes Were Watching God? Rather than allow her horizons
to shrink to the size of a small island and set fire to it, Janie
forges a journey of expansion, at the end of which she "pulled
in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the
waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder."
Whatever it is that her journey has taught her, Janie is not
left standing on a smoke-strewn beach on hunted legs to face a
world hopelessly destroying itself. Whatever Janie has learned
leaves her facing a horizon brimming with “So much of life
in its meshes!” So much life that “She called in her
soul to come and see.”
Who are we? Murderous savages with
high tech weapons? Or pilgrims on a soul voyage? How are we to
resolve this identity crisis? Isn’t this our essential dilemma?
“The
significant problems we face,” Albert Einstein observed,
“can never be solved at the level of thinking that created
them.” The only way to move through this identity crisis
is to begin operating from a new level of awareness. How to achieve
such a new level? The answer is not illogical. We reach new a
level of thinking only by entering a new level of learning.
Solutions arise in unlikely places. Mine have arisen in a high
school classroom. Seventeen years of paying attention to my teenage
students and their learning and contemplating what I see, of following
inklings as I create learning experiences for them and, most of
all, of listening as my students reflect on these experiences--seventeen
years and I believe I have stumbled to new levels, if not of learning,
then of understanding about learning. My guide
has been my students’ enthusiasm.
In June 2001 a sharply increasing enthusiasm among my students
for the earliest and most developed of the learning experiences
I have created with them, the Personal
Creed Project, finally stirred me to begin making notes. Something
was clearly happening that I needed to pay attention to. Might
it be possible for my students to experience such enthusiastic
learning all year? Could I learn to design courses to sustain
what I have now begun to call Two-Legged
Learning? Listening to the excited stories of colleagues who
have introduced the Creed Project to their own students, I tried
in what became early drafts of my book, The Personal Creed Project
and a New Vision of Learning, to describe all I was seeing.
When I saw the same enthusiasm in teachers who experienced a
mini version of the Creed Project in my workshop series for educators,
I began to realize that this kind of learning is possible for
all of us. Part Two of my book explores why the
Creed Project works (see A New Look Toward Learning). I now see
that this kind of learning can help us find personal answers to
our questions about who we are and how we fit into life's larger
pictures. This is the kind of learning that can help us resolve
our identity crisis. This is learning, too, that is inherently
satisfying.
This site, in addition to providing support materials for my
book and information about my workshops and presentations, is
an attempt to frame an expanded vision of learning worthy of twenty-first
century learners. If your imagination finds the thought appealing
that your life is a journey among the stars and planets of our
unfolding universe, I invite you to think of this site as a way
station in your voyage. As your fellow journeyer, I hope the information,
insights and resources here help inspire both of our cosmos journeys,
beginning right here and now at a simple website on a wayward
world, with what and how we learn.
Again, welcome to universe-Wired Learning!
John Creger
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