A Commitment to Keeping ‘Ideas in Play’

Adolescence is an arbitrary, contrived category. In past eras children were children until the early teens wherein, through some rite of passage, they were ushered into and took their place in adult society. Today there is no economic place for young adults and no rites of passage. We have, instead, created a holding stage that keeps young people in a limbo, into which children enter earlier and adults stay longer year by year.

—Joseph Chilton Pearce, Evolution's End

As an educator it occurs to me in my daily encounters with teachers, children, administrators and parents how clearly my ability to be ‘atheoretical’ or ‘apolitical’ is central to keeping ideas in play and rejecting the importance of fixed ideas and fixed subject matter. Over and over again, life in school presents me opportunities to grow and to learn how to avoid and to help students and teachers to avoid the entrapment of systems, blueprints or formulas.  To live into this, I must commit to an unwavering trust in children to learn, and I must acknowledge what I intuitively know - social change is the emancipatory potential of inquiry through the continuous reconstruction of experience;  self-directed acitivity, education for life and the common good.

From this perspective, “work” is best defined  through  its intrinsic connection to its inherent creative, community and collaborative components.  This self-directed  ‘work’  unfolds best  in learning communities where children  in their own way,  learn not only the concrete truths about the world, but the social truths as well.  These are the essential truths of people - people with many differences that must live and work together. 

When we keep’ ideas in play’ we empower learners and teach children  that the unity of expression, self-activity, and experience is the beginning not the end of learning –  life-long learning.