Imagine different schools. Imagine them not as a thing that adults do, but as a place where children go.
Stop there.
Imagine this place at the center of a community, and during the day, when all the adults are doing their adult things, the children are sent here, a public space, like a park, but with a roof and stuff for when it rains and snows, and a kitchen so they can eat during the day, and bathroom facilities so they can…you get the idea.
But then just stop there.
What if that’s all that schools were? A place where children go.
At a place like that, there would be one lesson and one lesson only: this is how you get along with other people.
Everything else, I think, comes naturally, and by everything else, I mean the only things that matter in education: curiosity, passion, and drive.
Children are (neurotypically speaking) naturally curious. They have to be if they want to survive. All emotions, including curiosity, are outgrowths of our evolution, and so to understand them, the best way to think about them is to ask, “How does life benefit from experiencing [curiosity]?”
Curiosity is a motivator, like fear, love, and lust. It drives life forward. Curiosity has its dangers. It causes life to approach the future with wide-open eyes instead of balled fists, but still, it drives life forward; it causes it to grow.
Curiosity starts from outside of us; we experience it as a *drawing out*. It is as if the unknown object of our curiosity is pulling at us, but is not just a movement towards the unknown; it is accompanied by *a desire* to learn more.
Because it originates from outside of us, curiosity is not something we can control. But it is also not something we *need* to control because it causes us to grow. All things being equal, curiosity is, to life, a net benefit.
Life benefits, too, from passion, and so passion, too, comes naturally (to neurotypical children). Passion is like a golden moment, when everything lines up perfectly and your intentions match your results, and they continue to for an extended period of time.
Passion calls attention to itself, and it creates in those whose attention it captures a strong sense of joy, sadness, and/or pain.
The power of passion can get out of hand, and when it truly takes over, it’s always a sight to see…regardless of the outcome.
The experience of passion is why life continues. It gives life meaning *to itself.* Life *wants* to survive; it doesn’t just *need* to. The reason it wants to is because life has experienced passion. Passion is what connects us to the world — the marriage of intention and result, of directed stimulus and desired response. Without passion, we are disconnected, alienated from that which *seems* to lay beyond us. Without passion, we would exist in a state of true solipsism. Life can not long exist in such a state; the world will have always its say.
*Drive* derives from evolution as well. Drive is “a negative state of tension” between life’s desire to survive and life’s ability to survive. This tension creates in us a purpose; it gives us direction: to return ourselves to *a state in which* a negative state of tension does not exist, a state in which we possess all that we desire.
Of course, such a state has hardly existed: life evolved more than once, and so life has hardly known a reality in which all its desired resources were secure. A lifeform without an innate sense of *drive* could not survive in a closed-loop system such as Earth, which means it, too, must come naturally.
With curiosity, passion, and drive, each of which come naturally (to neurotypical children), every child will grow up to find their own way.
Which means the only thing we really need to teach them is how to get along with other people.
I can hear the arguments now, but most of those arguments result in the school systems we have already, the ones where children are prepared to exist with the economic reality of capitalism.
And that’s fine, I suppose.
But a world that exists under an economic reality of capitalism runs counter to the desire to have every child learn to get along with other people.
Capitalism is one way life believes it can escape the closed-loop system. It is a mindset born from that desire to *escape.* Capitalism does not make life *reach for* something; it makes it push against others to get out of the system *first.*
The newborn capitalist is someone propelled by a severe negative tension, a state where *desire* transforms into *need*, creating, in the process, the *need* to consume: to escape the negative tension, life must ingest every resource it can acquire, fuel for its emergency propulsion out of the negative tension.
Capitalists are not born happy, and they rarely leave a community of happy neighbors in their wake.
But counter to their intentions, the capitalist can *never* escape the close-looped system that evolved here on Earth. Every capitalist who has ever lived is dead; and every capitalist who has ever lived has brought the Earth closer to ruin. There’s no escaping that.
If *the closed-loop system* is to survive, we don’t need to create an entire new generation of capitalists, nor do we need to create another generation of humans who are willing to live by the rules of the capitalists’ economic reality.
If we want to teach our children how to get along with other people, we have to start by teaching them that people are worth more than their labor, and that, as recyclable elements in a closed-loop system, all of us are worth as much as and as little as everyone — and everything — else.
That’s the main lesson. That all of us are equal: we all deserve everything and we all deserve nothing.
Everything else comes naturally from there. Mathematicians will be curious about numbers. Football players will be driven by the desire to push through something or to stop something from pushing through. Writers will be curious about words. Bankers will be curious about money. Biologists will be curious about life.
But everyone, everyone, will come out of school understanding that all of us — all of us — are equally deserving. That’s the wisdom founded in the ideals of America. That’s all we have to teach: the wisdom of our community.
Nature (and the wisdom of other communities) can take it from there.