Learning to Be Free

By Steve Jubb

As a former coach, classroom teacher, mentor, father and grandfather with 40 years immersed in teaching and learning from children and youth, I remain frustrated that the education establishment does not better understand the central role of motivation in learning and why it is critical that we carefully cultivate it. Here are just three of the many reasons, from a global perspective to a pragmatic one.

1. We made a mess of the world and our children will have to do a better job than we did cleaning it up. It will take a lot of people caring enough to do the innovating, problem solving, creative thinking and hard work to turn things around. The messes will get bigger before they get smaller. (Click here to see for yourself.)
2. Many, if not most, of the jobs our children will do in the future haven’t been invented yet. In fact, many will invent their own jobs. (Click here if you didn’t know that. ) How are we preparing them to shape that unpredictable future?
3. We spend billions throwing answers at the heads of students who have asked no questions (or at least not the ones we want to or can answer). A learner’s motivation to learn is the most influential factor in learning efficiency. Yet it is at best an after thought in the public discourse on education policy and spending.

I hear many adults say kids just aren’t motivated to learn in school any more as if it reflected some mutation in their genes or some organic deficiency in their families and communities. But have you ever seen a toddler unmotivated to walk, talk or learn how take all the pots out of your kitchen cabinet? Have you not seen youth bent in rapt concentration over their iPods and iPhones, or networking with their iFriends on Facebook? Now there are some motivated kids!

The problem is that kids just aren’t that motivated to learn in school! Here, click this link and go back for a refresher course. Read my colleague Herb Childress’ “Seventeen Reasons Why Football Is Better Than High School” written a decade ago. (And you won’t ever need to ask me why I played football in high school and college.)

Humans are programmed to learn; it is our evolutionary advantage. Curiosity is innate, located firmly in the physiology of our brain and the hunger for experience that drives human behavior from birth. Learning is what we innately do, and what we do determines whom we become.

As Aristotle is oft quoted to have said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” It follows then that education isn’t only about freedom and curiosity. It is also a process of learning to constraining our natural impulses — learning the rules, procedures and norms that limit freedom but help us be together in the world, and, ironically, help make us more free. As blues guitarist B.B. King said, “The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”

A learner learns better when he knows how knowledge is created through disciplined inquiry, experimentation and observation. He has to figure out how to live, love and work within interdependent networks. He has know that he can work hard now for something better later. These constraints make the learner more powerful in the end.

As a learner grows older and pursues her perceived interests and passions, navigating the constraints imposed by other people’s interests and passions, the adults responsible for her learning currently tend to err more frequently on the side of the constraints. It is a reaction to scale, complexity and insecurity, I think, and perhaps to the unintended consequences of our historical choices. Consider the national trend in secondary schools to put two or three thousand middle school or high school aged children in a single physical space, for example. Having done that we have little choice but to deal with crowd control issues and the regulation of behavior as a prerequisite to learning rather than learning self regulation as an integral part of securing real value from the teaching and learning exchange.

Or maybe it is precisely because children are our future that we don’t let them lead the way — we focus more on control and conformity than nurturing the unique spirit and individual creativity that every child possesses because that’s much harder and more costly to do. It requires more and different resources (time, energy, relationships, caring) than we currently are willing to commit to children. Maybe our fear of what society is becoming compels us to exert ever greater control over what young people say, do, learn and think — a pretty fruitless approach I think. Whatever the cause, the longer kids stay in school the more boring and ineffective their learning there becomes.

But our children defy us — and they do become what they repeatedly do, as they get older doing it more and more outside the influence of positive adult communities. We’re better off giving them many more opportunities to do repeatedly the things that add value to their communities, themselves and to others. Guiding learners to participate fully in economic, civic, social and (now) global life in the company of adults is the best teacher of constraints and the best way to develop and maintain the motivation to learn. As author James Baldwin wrote, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

The voices of children and young people are invisible in the debates about No Child Left Behind and the future of education funding and policy. We adults seem so sure that we have their best interests at heart as we debate the merits of managed instruction, charter schools, vouchers, choice and all manner of piecemeal policies. But we miss the point.

Young people need to learn how by building their own networks of people through the exchange of authentic (mostly non-monetary) value. However, we have confined our children — with all the best of intentions — in a system that defers (until a young person’s mid-twenties) the freedoms and responsibilities of adulthood.

How can we expect our children learn only in schools? Modern schools are more often an environment carefully segregated from the experiences of real life — experiences that teach a person how to become an ethical and competent adult because they get to practice, undertaking the task of creating for others, and receiving in return, value for their work and the products of their creative interests. It is no wonder so many have become so passive within the context of school, and so under prepared for the requirements of adult life in a complex world.

Children are people now. They will help us change the world if we let them and expect them to do it.

“Take care of your family first, but then reach out to your neighbor, your block, your city, your country. Everybody wants change, but they want it to come by way of somebody else… If you wait for the government, you’ll wait a long time.”

Actor Edward James Olmos (1947- )