 Hi, I'm Jerry Mikulski and I'd like to talk about scarcity versus abundance in our schools as an example of how we tend to think scarcely when we could be seeing abundantly instead. So picture yourself in math class. Now math class is nominally an hour but really there's 10 minutes between classes so you're trying to get to and from the class. It takes 10 minutes to quiet down, maybe 5 minutes to take a roll, 10 minutes to go over the homework and other kinds of stuff. Maybe your lesson is actually 25 minutes if you're lucky and that's when you get to study math and that's about the essence of the lesson. Now you have to take it from a credentialed teacher, that means they have to have passed certain things, they have qualifications to meet. Your kid may not like this teacher and if they don't it's pretty hard to move around. They're probably not being paid very much, they probably need to have a partner of some kind who's got a better salary so this isn't really a great career path. Then they're teaching with an approved textbook that probably costs too much that shows one particular learning style and involves a lot of politics and how it was created which means it excludes a few things. There's all kinds of battles being done just sometime ask me about the Texas School Board but we're putting these kids in one-year cohorts artificially. We're separating the sixth graders from the seventh graders from the fifth graders so there's no cross-generational influences, there's no mentoring across grades, they're not able to actually contact each other and they can use whatever resources the school has on hand as their materials and there's no budget left so that isn't very much stuff these days. So school itself separates kids from real life, they're not only separated into one-year cohorts, they're actually separated from real-life stuff that's happening outside, it's like a petri dish. Schools are also designed like penitentiaries, you can't go off school grounds without permission in many schools especially in the more dangerous areas, there are fences and barbed wire and security and all kinds of stuff. If you want to get mad about this see the war on kids and we've got this weird lottery system to get into good ones unless you have plenty of money and I mean serious plenty of money to get into a good private school but otherwise it's kind of up to lottery and if you're in a bad school, bad luck. So here's a close-up on that war on kids documentary. Outside schools the world is different, outside schools there are things like danger and liability and controversy and consequence like when you're outside school your actions have consequences and they can have a consequence on your environment, you can actually affect the place that you live in the world. So that was all about scarcity and I'll come back and highlight it. So let's look at the abundance model, this scary term unschooling. Now you're probably familiar with homeschooling, you may associate it with fundamentalist Christians who thought that regular school was too secular but it's actually more interesting than that and it actually has a lot of different aspects to it. Unschooling is a bit of a scary term, people are also calling this free-range kids or edgy punks, there's a lot of different words for it. The gentlest term of all might be informal learning where formal learning with a capital F is, you know, texts, curriculum, teacher with a capital T, schools with a capital S. If you want to read really interesting stuff on this read John Holt's book instead of Education. But informal learning and hold this thought for a second doesn't just have to be about grade school, it can be lifelong. Everything we're talking about here is really lifelong. So informal learning, homeschooling, unschooling, free-range kids, all these they're learning from any object or question. Anything that comes up is in fact material to learn from. The cup of coffee in front of you right now can be a lesson for a year or for five minutes. You can learn at any time, you don't have to wait for math class, those 25 minutes aren't when you're going to pay attention to math. You can learn from anyone, your average cash year can teach you how to make change. All different people have different levels of knowledge and that you don't need to learn from some of this way far ahead of you. In fact, often that's the worst way to learn. You can learn any place, obviously, and when you're learning, you're connected to real life and its consequences. The entire universe is your text and your school. You can work with any objects that are in that world. And by the way, you can travel. You can go places. You can actually leave home and go find out what's going on. Your actions can have consequences in the world. You can fix your neighborhood. You can teach other people how to read. You can do whatever it is you want. That's all learning. So let's compare the two models. In the school model, teachers are scarce. Money is scarce. The subject matter actually is remarkably scarce. The curriculum is scarce because there are only these approved texts. Your time is scarce because you're constantly moving between things, bouncing around like a pachinko ball. And curiosity is scarce. We're constantly talking about how kids are incurious, how we have to stimulate curiosity. Is there any wonder that curiosity is scarce in this environment? In an unschool, everybody can teach money. Money helps, but it's less necessary. Actually, subject matter is everything. Curriculum can be any place in the world. Look at the Khan Academy. Look at everything else. Your time actually becomes abundant. And guess what? Curiosity is abundant because kids are actually really interested in figuring out how things work. Just watch your child before the age of five when you send them off to school. They learn all kinds of cool stuff without lessons, right? Kind of cool. So what are the problems? In the school system, there are legions of problems. The scores are down, morale is low in every part of the system, violence is rising, kids are depressed, they're under pressure. The way we try to fix this problem is that we actually turn up the volume to 11. We increase the school year, we add homework, we add punishment, we do all kinds of stuff that don't really seem to work. No child left behind is a perfect example of what doesn't work. In unschooling, the problem seemed to be socialization of kids. What's going to happen when they're all alone? Are they going to learn to get along with their colleagues? Control. Who's in charge of the kids? Who's telling them what they need to learn? How are they actually going to learn everything they need to learn? Responsibility. How are they going to learn responsibility? What's going on here? How are we going to measure quality if they're not being graded if we don't know what they're doing? These are all red herrings, really. And I can give you plenty of materials that'll convince you that these are red herrings. Unschooled kids turn out to be really good at human interactions. They turn out to learn self-control and responsibility in a way that hardly any student in the normal school system learns. The quality of their education is excellent. And what if we treated this as a norm and then started thinking about how to make it better? What if we gave kids tools and capabilities and places and tutors and all kinds of stuff if they wanted them that would take them new and wonderful places? That's a school system I'd like. So the assumptions behind these two school systems, and there are many really wonderful people in the official school system doing their best inside a system that is congenitally flawed, that cannot teach our kids well. And if you're reading this, you probably went to a real school and you're like, oh, that wasn't too bad. I kind of made it through. But you made it through with your curiosity intact as an exception because the system is designed to beat that curiosity out of you. The system thinks that the system is designed believing that kids are lazy and curious, unruly and stupid and really can't be trusted. They can't be let down the hall without a hall pass. That's a lesson that's coming to you. And in school, the fundamental belief that parents have is that kids are good, curious and smart. Not that they're exceptional geniuses, not that they're standouts, just that they will be interested in things and will want to go learn. So which of these worlds would you rather inhabit? Which world do you want to be in? Which world would you like your kids to grow up in? This is all part of a series called Seeing Abundantly, Thoughts about Scarcity and Abundance as we navigate the new millennium, which is a re-expedition part of the relationship economy expedition. Again, I'm Jerry Mikulski and thanks for listening.