Parent Education: The Struggle for Learning & Discovery in a Cluttered World.

Filmmaker and cultural theologian, Dr. Craig Detweiler, expresses his hope for a future where formal education won’t be in conflict with wonder, learning and creativity. 

My 12-year old is obsessed with card tricks, ukulele, and origami. I don’t know anything about these things, but I’m invited to pick a card or listen to a song or fold a piece of paper almost every day. He’s learned everything he knows from YouTube. As a college professor, I could be threatened by his self-education. Instead, I’ve chosen to be amused, bemused, and maybe learn a thing or two.

For the last two years, I’ve been learning everything I can about the algorithmic authority of YouTube, Netflix and Amazon, the superpowers who dominate the decision-making in our house. I crammed what I learned into a book aimed at parents, educators, and storytellers. I wrote iGods:  How Technology Shapes our Spiritual and Social Lives because I needed an education about the smart phones that beckon to us all day, every day. Since I needed help and perspective, maybe others could benefit from my response to these disruptive technologies.

I am a storyteller, specifically, a filmmaker. I grew up in North Carolina, a long way from Hollywood. My father was a used car salesman. My mother was a nurse. I was the first person in our family to graduate from a university. Humanities and great books transformed my life. I majored in English and minored in Art because those were my worst subjects. I really wanted an education.

◊♦◊

My kids want an education, too. The more I read and study, I wonder if they’re receiving one. It seems like we’re atomizing their innate curiosity with inanity. The school worksheets they’ve been filling out since first grade are fill in the blank. My kids’ inbox has been full for their entire elementary education, prepping them for a lifetime of paper pushing bureaucracy.  And yet, I keep hearing about a paperless future where everything is in the cloud. It sounds so lofty, so uncluttered. Yet, there I am, spending a third of every week, answering emails or status updates that make my cloud awfully crowded.

As a parent and educator, I want to encourage creativity. I admire the chutzpah of new media moguls who got rich by solving our problems of abundance. While I was being taught how to manage scarcity, the iGods of Apple, Google and Facebook were busy figuring out how to organize the overflowing chaos known as the Internet. They thought outside the box long enough to figure out how to structure and monetize the box.

In a renowed TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson suggests that our educational systems are crushing kids innate curiosity. As we strive to make sure no child is left behind, yet we have standardized education in a manner that leaves no room for error or experiment or innovation. Syllabi are expected to conform to standards set by somebody else and measured by metrics that we’ll never see. I empathize with teachers who entered the profession out of love and devotion but now find themselves depressed by each new study questioning their effectiveness.

◊♦◊

How do we unleash the learning lion residing in our kids? I recently co-hosted a conference at Pepperdine University exploring the topic of “Education Disrupted.” We occasionally catch glimpses of a flipped classroom, where homework has become the springboard for lively discussions and guided discoveries. But more often, it appears that another chapter has been checked off to satisfy those who sit above our teachers, measuring student progress. My wife is far more patient with our children’s dreaded homework than I am. She’ll sit beside them for hours, going over math problems or book reports. I encourage our kids to plow through their assignments as quickly as possible. Hopefully, they’ll still be time to shoot some hoops. Yet, I recognize that they will always be confronted by a world of too many problems, too many demands, too many distractions.  How do we turn an abundance of options into opportunity rather than an overwhelming avalanche of too much information?

I start by slowing down. Standing up. Talking a walk. Turning off the screen. Only when I’m unreachable, do I have the freedom to let my mind wander.   These breakthroughs may arrive in the shower, during a workout, en route somewhere. They tend to arise when I don’t have a deadline or an outcome or even a goal.  In following my bliss, I discover what I’m missing or what I failed to realize. Moments of insight arise on a bicycle, on a beach, in a state of play. How do I recover the curiosity of my son and his card tricks?

As a parent, I may demand a better performance from my children, but so many deliverables lie ahead. I’d rather free them from the metrics long enough to try on wonder. There’s hard work in discovery. We may be frustrated by the hours of practice and failure involved. When you finally fool your Dad with some sleight of hand, then you feel for just a moment that all that wasted time was worth it.  That’s education as a deep, satisfying joy.

Photo:Flickr/Adida