If this page in front of you represents all of the knowledge that is available today, how much of it do you know? For me, the period at the end of this sentence is probably too big to represent accurately the range of my knowledge.
To make it more confounding, the volume of that knowledge is expanding exponentially (by some estimates it doubles every 84 days) so the period becomes increasingly smaller by comparison, and increasingly less significant. Indeed, according to the futurist Ray Kurzweil, the technological revolution (whereby technology doubles in power each year and declines in size and cost) will lead to diacritical growth to the point that the amount of knowledge will have increased one billion-fold by 2049. That is beyond my ability to imagine.
For much of my life I was passionate about history, in particular European and African history, and that ardor gradually enlarged to include education in general. (As an aside, my degree, with majors in history and geography, did not include so much as one course in North American history.) I soon realized that if I taught only what I knew, I was confining students to one miniscule period on a large page, a drop of water amid the ocean of knowledge. The challenge of the educator (as compared to the teacher) is to arouse students’ curiosity to the point that they begin to explore the water for themselves and that they find something about which they feel passionate and someone about whom they feel passionately to share it with. In the words of the Jewish proverb, “Confine not your children to your own learning, for they are of a different generation.”
When we teach students what to think rather than how to think (and standardized tests can all too easily reinforce the former – what is referred to in some countries as ‘the tyranny of the test’) we are drumming our knowledge into them rather than having them develop the mental skills they will need long after they have left our care. After all, the word ‘education’ comes from educare which means to draw forth, not to pour in.
Am I saying that there is no room for basic, fundamental knowledge? Absolutely not, as long as that is not all there is. And even at some of the best institutions of learning in this country there is evidence that the scales weigh more heavily in favor of the what rather than the how.
And then in 2002 I discovered honey bees, or perhaps they discovered me. Gradually another dot on the page came into focus. It was a new area to explore. I had enjoyed biology at school and always had an affinity for nature, but never before had there been this invitation to jump into the deep end of a scientific field and get gloriously wet.
Gradually the dots began to connect themselves, patterns emerged, a ‘network of learning’ manifested itself that was enticing and rewarding. The content was new to me but the principles (analysis, synthesis, evaluation and application) were the same, and the skills that I had tried to develop in others could be applied to this new droplet of glistening water.
The rewards are never ending and, like blowing up a balloon, the more air that is introduced the greater the surface area that is exposed to the unknown. It is not overwhelming; in fact the challenge is appropriate. Besides jig saws I also enjoy doing sudokus and crosswords … but not if they’re easy. If they are it is simply busy work, no more than rote memory using the lower order thinking skills (recall and comprehension.) To be satisfying there is a need to be extended, to be stretched and challenged. There is nothing quite so fulfilling as reaching an apparent impasse and using the higher order thinking skills to move past it.
The same applies to keeping honey bees. At first I was satisfied just to learn, to keep them alive over winter, to find the queen and read a frame. Now the joy comes from choosing to extend myself, essentially by reading, by listening, and by attending good conferences and rubbing shoulders with others who are similarly inspired.
The bees have been great teachers about life, both mine and theirs.
Our Green Cathedral 