Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning

Speaker 1 And then we wonder, you know, why why children aren't doing well on their tests. Well, tests are bad. The system is bad. The questions we're asking are the wrong questions. But it doesn't have to be this way. It could be different.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to episode one fifty two of the Human Restoration Project Podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters. Three of whom are Peter Kratz, Leah Kelly, and Alexander Gruber. With a huge shout out to all of our Conference to Restore Humanity participants for their engagement and enthusiasm. You can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media. My guest today is doctor Susan Bloom. Susan Bloom is professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She's the author of I Love Learning, I Hate School, and My Word, as well as the editor of Ungrading. Her new book, Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic Joyful Learning, is now out on Cornell University Press. It catalogs in great detail the characteristic of a schoolish education, that is school as a self contained institution with its own logic, grammar, and rules, one that ultimately sets students up for a difficult reentry into the rest of their lives in an unschoolish world. Susan draws upon examples of unschoolish learning from around the world and makes a powerful case for a necessary anthropological perspective that makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. If we don't try, nothing will change, she writes. It's hard. Hell, it's probably impossible. Schoolishness is probably here to stay, but maybe not all of its elements are inevitable. Entrenched? Yes. But inevitable? I don't think so. Thank you so much, Susan, for joining me today.

Speaker 1 Thank you for having me, Nick. It's so exciting to be talking to you about this book because I I finally had a chance after years of knowing your work to watch the video that you sent me about the human restoration project. And I watch the whole thing and there is not a word that I disagree with about it. And you and I, you collectively and I are about the same things. This is a philosophical, a moral undertaking, and it isn't just technocratic, and it matters for the world. So there's a lot wrong, but there are a lot of great examples of things that we can do better.

Speaker 2 And there are projects like yours that are trying to actually make that happen. So I'm so excited to be talking to you about it. That's awesome. And and I'll just say just real quick, it was such a shocker to get to the to the end section of that book and see Human Restoration Project mentioned as one of those solutions in there too. So, you know, I'm going through there. I have an Iliad, a Neil Postman, and, oh, here's Human Restoration Project alongside that too. So that was pretty awesome.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, I I've been scouring the world for examples of people who have done it better. And there were the critics, you know, fifty years ago who were really trying. There were critics a hundred years ago who were trying, and here we are again. As I said recently in a talk, there's kind of a tension between the Thorndyke and the Dewey models of education. And schoolishness is basically the Thorndyke model. Right? It's the model, for those who don't know what that means, of measurement and testing and comparison and industry and breaking everything down into tiny replicable uniform units that we can then impose in every single situation, whether they fit or not. So if you have taken a standardized test, we have that thanks to Thorndyke and his supporters. And in contrast to that we have people like the philosopher John Dewey who was active a hundred years ago. He spoke in China for two years. The whole world was consumed with concern about the way education was going, and they were seeking alternatives to it. More humane, more student centered, more learner centered, more differentiated, more active, more physical, more social, more cooperative. And in fact, what we have when we think of the kind of conventional model of schooling is exactly the Thorndyke model, exactly not the Dewey model. So when you think about a kind of prototypical school situation, what I call a schoolish setting, you have uniformity of goals, uniformity of participants, uniformity of outcomes. Everything is controlled. Everything is measured. Everything is done because somebody told you to. And the goal is to have students compliant and behaving according to what some outside force has imposed on them. And as we know, that doesn't really suit a lot of individuals. It doesn't suit a lot of children. It used to suit me, to be honest, because I was the kind of person who could sit still and I could embrace the goals that the schoolish system gave me, and I could learn that way. I could learn by myself in kind of competition with others, because I was good at it. So I was affirmed all the time most of the time, not in gym class but and not in other ways, but I was affirmed that I was good at this stuff. And so I became a teacher. Right? Like so many teachers, school worked for me. This idea of a kind of uniform curriculum where the payoff is always in the future and the goal is abstraction. So the goal is to use your mind. And if you use your body or your hands or whatever, it's all in the service of the mind. And so these are some of the dimensions of schoolishness that I became aware of kind of late because the old system had been so naturalized for me. So using my anthropological disposition to call into question what I see around me all the time, I began to really ask a lot of questions. So I've been at this really about twenty years, really questioning what's going on in this institution that seems so obvious and normal. And what I have in the new book is everything I have found out and including all the projects like yours that have been also grappling with these really fundamental issues.

Speaker 2 And that's, I think, a great thing to discuss here is exactly that anthropological perspective. I mean, there's a million and one education books out there written by people with all kinds of education credentials, bona fides, and all of that. But I've kind of become obsessed with the quote that's at the beginning of the book from what naturalist conservationist. He's the father of the national parks. Right? John is it John Muir? And you use it to open up the book and it reads, when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. And I think what I'm struck by is it's not an explicitly educational quote, but it offers a lot of wisdom for people who are thinking about the complex ecological systems and problems like human learning in school. And, you know, as as we had mentioned, as you just discussed here, you're a professor in the department of anthropology. So what what lens does that offer us in understanding education and learning that other disciplines miss if we're too, you know, lost in the sauce of of educationalese and schoolishness ourselves? Or maybe is it like the power of the anthropological lens that it is so intensely interdisciplinary? That's that's a thing that I'm fascinated by. Well, welcome to anthropology. I love it.

Speaker 1 You know, it what we teach our undergraduates is that anthropology is holistic in the sense that it includes all kinds of dimensions, especially American anthropology because anthropology has different flavors in different parts of the world. So in Britain they tend to have social anthropology, which is really focused a lot on social relationships. And anthropology in The US is we talk about a four field discipline. So it has biological anthropology, archaeological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, which is one of my fields, and cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology, which is another of my fields. And you can see that we, a discipline as a whole, are interested in human evolution and how the human species fits with the entire biosphere and how our built environment and the natural environment interact with our cultural and social choices. So we look at the evolution of human communities and how different environments lend themselves to different communities. We look at the origins of agriculture and what settlement does in terms of inequality and competition and accumulation. We look at how language created us, and then we use language in ways that are both intentional and agentive. And also we inherit language from our forebears and our community, so we don't entirely create language anew on our own, but we are shaped by language and language is or communication of all sorts, and that's another dimension of linguistic anthropology, which is also interested in writing and visual signs and all kinds of what we call semiosus or meaning making. And then cultural and social anthropology are connected to human organization, what kind of social relations you have. Are you in a small scale hunting and gathering society? Are you in a large scale industrial society? Are you in a place that valorizes competition or cooperation? Is gender the primary organizing feature of life? Or is race one of the or class? What are all of the factors that are influencing any moment of human behavior? So anthropology, as I embrace it, is looking at everything, which of course means that we aren't very well known outside our own discipline because we always begin every answer with it's complicated. But in fact, it is complicated. And just like anybody trying to address climate change or inequality, all of these huge issues are multifaceted and multifronted. And if you're going to solve a problem and how you define a problem is also not obvious. But how you when you're trying to address a really serious complicated problem, you really have to operate at multiple levels. So what we see in education often is kind of a narrowing of the definition of a problem and then a narrowing of the definition of a solution. So you can get things like, in my world, the learning management system, which I have railed against and I'm writing about a little bit now. It's for those who don't know, it is a kind of platform that allows everything about the class to be found in one digital location, which is very convenient for students and faculty. So what's not to like? Right? It's it's a kind of educational technology solution to the fact that there's a lot going on in any particular course. The problem, of course, to me is that it is an entirely schoolish universe that this is operating in. So the students get the sense that if I do this task that is due on Wednesday at 02:30, then I have finished my obligation and everything is done and I don't have to think about it anymore. And that is practical, certainly for busy students. But if you zoom out a little and ask what we're really trying to accomplish in a big sense for the students' lives as humans, as learners, as citizens, and as employees, this is really teaching them something that is not going to serve them very well. It's teaching them to really narrow the definition of learning and to make it something that somebody else is predetermined. And we know that knowledge isn't like that and learning isn't like that. So we're teaching them a fake version of learning, but it's convenient, it's packaged, it's all in one place. And so that's a kind of example of where I as an anthropologist may not be an expert at all of the educational technology, although I've learned a lot, but I am pretty good at zooming out and looking at how things are diff how things are in a much broader sense in the scope of a human life in the context of a human society and knowing that we can look elsewhere and it's different. So one of the things that anthropologists often bring to the conversation about education is that they go to other places and they look at how people learn in ways that are not so schoolish. And when you do that, our system looks really bizarre. And that is kind of the we love to talk about making the strange familiar. So we go somewhere and you see three year olds with machetes and you say, oh my god. How could that be? But then you come home and then the familiar becomes strange. So basically, schoolishness, and in some sense my whole life's project, is to make our familiar situation strange. Because once you do that, you can question it. And once you question it, you can change it.

Speaker 2 And I so I so appreciate that lens because, again, so often people who are trained in education essentially get a training in schoolishness and kind of take for granted, you know, the different the the various parts, the LMSs, the behavior systems, the grading systems, all of those things, and don't begin to question it. Like, it's just part it's just baked into the process. Whereas through an anthropological or other disciplinary lens, we can see, no, these things didn't fall from the sky. These could be composed a lot of different ways and they can in fact be composed differently to serve different ends and means. And I just think that's that's such a powerful way of stepping outside of ourselves and really beginning to question a lot of those assumptions. The title of the book again is The Schoolishness, The Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic Joyful Learning. And alienation or what you define as as estrangement, separation, being different from, and the like, seems to be that unifying theme of schoolishness. So the million dollar question, I think, is like, how do we make school less schoolish, which you frame in part as this moving from alienation to authenticity. Again, another framing I was really struck by. So kind of a two parter here, but what do you see as that relationship between schoolishness and alienation being part and parcel of one another? And then, I guess, little bit later on, how do we work to resolve that? How do we move from the one to the other?

Speaker 1 Well, you are a very good reader. Those those are the kind of themes of the book, and I reorganized the book a million different ways. I think I had five or six completely different structures and many, many, many titles, one of which was alienation and authenticity. Because these have been really helpful for me to unify what appears to be a kind of hodgepodge of topics. So the central part of the book has 10 different chapters about different ways that schoolish practices presume a kind of alienated relationship, and each one then includes examples of a more authentic or more humane alternative. So, for example, there's a chapter on space and place, and schoolishness presumes a kind of alienation from the world and the environment with buildings. And we take for granted in a way that schools are buildings and that you are inside and you are in chairs and you are with desks and there is a chalkboard or a blackboard or a whiteboard, and nowadays, of course, there's a projector and a screen. And all of this stuff presumes that you're contained and that you can predict where the learning is going to happen and that you you sort of block out the external world because you need to control everything inside. And we know there's a great, great book by Susan Rock, h r a c h, called Minding Bodies. And she talks about how powerful it is to go outside. Even if you're in a campus in a bad weather place or something, you can still go do a field trip. You can go outside. In my own classes, I sometimes send students outside. You know, I teach in a regular place, you know, we have hours in buildings and classrooms, but I send them outside. Go observe something in the student union and come back and report on it, or go look at the languages represented in the signs outside. Or when I taught a class on food we went to a farm, and there are things you can do that that break this kind of assumed frame or confinement. And so alienation seems to be pervasive in every sort of way. And this is a topic that many philosophers and political theorists have written a lot about. So it has many, many dimensions including, for instance, the alienation of people from minoritized groups who feel alienated by the dominant paradigms that the school system is imposing on them. But alienation is pervasive in all kinds of ways. When students say I learned it for the test and I forgot it, that to me is an example of alienated learning, learning that never becomes part of the learner. It's always outside. It's always other than. They don't want it. They don't need it. They don't like it. They don't care about it. That's a kind of alienated learning. You do it for the test. You do it for the points, you do it for the grade, you do it for the credential, but it's not meaningful because somebody made you do it for all kinds of extrinsic reasons. So alienation aligns with extrinsic motivation and all kinds of stuff like that. In contrast, authenticity is when anthropologists go around the world and they see people learning, they see people learning to do rituals, and they learn how to cook, and they learn how to identify plants, and they learn how to navigate by the stars. It doesn't have to be easy. There's a book by Edwin Hutchins called Cognition in the Wild where he he has studied people navigating by the stars and learning how to, operate boats in the ocean. And that is really hard technical stuff. You have to know your material. You can't just learn it in a classroom, but but it's it matters because lives are going to depend on it. So that to me is an example of authentic learning which is meaningful and brings authentic intrinsic rewards. You don't need points if the goal is to save a life, you know, if saving a life is its own reward. So authenticity for me is when the activity itself has its own meaning. You don't have to go outside the activity to find a meaning. So I use the example in the book of learning a language, and I'm very fond of learning languages. I've learned I've studied many. I speak several. You can learn Spanish because you want to communicate with a relative who married somebody who from a Spanish speaking country. And so you can learn Spanish for all kinds of meaningful authentic reasons, or you can learn Spanish because it fulfills a language requirement in your degree program. And if you're doing it for that, you might actually begin to like it or love it. You may learn it really well, But it could be Spanish or it could be Russian or it could be Arabic or it could be anything else. In some way, they're interchangeable. So the kind of choice to choose Spanish over something else is arbitrary. And when things are arbitrary, they become more alienated. So when things are authentic, they are necessary, not arbitrary. So there are there are a whole bunch of concepts that kind of line up. So you've got alienation and schoolishness and extrinsic motivation and arbitrariness on one side. And that's where all the bad stuff happens in terms of school. That's where cheating happens. That's where putting corners happens. That's where dropping out and acting up happen. On the other side, you have authenticity and meaning and connection and real outcomes and intrinsic motivation. And that's where people feel pride and where they care, and you don't have to give them points for that. And clearly this distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation has been challenged. People now are really interested in gamification, which I also find really interesting. I do Duolingo every day and I get points for it and they remind me I have a streak. My current streak is over eleven thousand days, which is, you know, it's points. Right? But I also want to learn Spanish, and I'm actually going to The Middle East in the later in the summer, and I'm I've added Arabic to my rotation, so I'm playing with that. I'm motivated for sure, but also they give me little nudges which don't hurt. But I'm not doing it for the points. The points and this is something that in our schoolish system we often have to grapple with. Right? We are not in utopia. And so how do we deal with the actual students we actually have in our classrooms? And sometimes some of these other tactics, which a lot of education developers talk about all the time, can be useful. But you don't need to give people points for cooking a meal for their family. You know, that has its own intrinsic goals. So you can use points and gamification and stuff in our schoolish system, but in the dream system that I'm envisioning, we don't need them.

Speaker 2 And you mentioned the connections to ungrading as well as like an entree into shifting away from that alienated system. Because as as mentioned with the John Muir quote, right, once you find grading is connected to assessment systems and motivation systems and LMS and all these things, you slowly realize, well, if I'm moving towards ungrading, I need a different way for students to show their learning. So now your assessment changes. And then when you change your assessment, you realize, oh, I can't teach the same way that I used to before. So your instruction changes. And then those behavior systems that you're relying on, suddenly those things change too. And everything is all kind of connected together. But in the schoolish system, it all is there to reinforce, those schoolish, attitudes, habits, abilities, and really, like, sort students by how well they play in that schoolish environment. And in the book, you actually make a case study kind of for the authentic space that you I think that that space that you'd like us to move into. So let's talk about that Bowman Creek educational ecosystem as the as that case study for the kind of authentic unschoolish project we should be doing more of. So could you just describe that program in a nutshell, what you observed, and particularly how participants felt about that experience? I loved the the data reporting on that too. Yeah. And I only gave a little tiny

Speaker 1 hint of the data. We have so much data, but I don't know how to use it all. But so this is a project that still exists but with a different name now. It was begun almost ten years ago by student engineers at my university, the University of Notre Dame, and it was actually the Society of Women Engineers who wanted to clean up a local polluted creek. So they began to work on the engineering side. This project grew quickly over time, and it became championed by one of our engineering faculty and then somebody he partnered with a city engineer, and they created this project. I was brought on in about year two or three with some other social scientists because they wanted us to study it a little bit. I worked on it for three years and somewhere between the first and second year I realized I could study the learning. And they wanted us to study something else, but I thought this is a perfect example of how people are learning outside a school ish structure. So the the year I write most about was 2017 when we had 30 interns. Five of them were ethnographic interns. That means they were hired as anthropologists embedded in this project. And there were eight or nine projects that these teams were doing out in the community. The goal was to work with the community, not on the community as so many other community based projects do. And it had an engineering core, but it became clear that there were social and political and economic and aesthetic dimensions to it even. They built rain rain gardens and tree nurseries, and they fixed up a playground, and they got lamps in neighborhoods, street lamps. They did all kinds of things. So they came in with whatever academic training they'd had, and one of the things that the project was really proud of was that they had multidimensional diversity. So there were students who went from age 15 in high school to people in a community college who were 50 years old, and then people at highly selective colleges, regional colleges, all kinds of things. We had a bunch of mentors from the community, including high school teachers who were helping the groups. The students had backgrounds in math, computer science, civil engineering, economics, sociology. They had psychology. They had anyway, but they what they had was they had to define projects, and these projects drove their work for the whole summer. They've they've now shortened the summer, but at the time it was ten weeks long and or eight weeks long. And the goal was to complete a project. So whatever it took to complete this real project was what they did. They went in every day, eight to five, and they worked on their project. They reported to the group so they had accountability, which meant they had authentic audiences for what they were doing. They had to learn to make presentations, which made them really, really nervous. But that is something that engineers apparently do all the time they have to present their work and their work in progress to stakeholders. But they also had to learn a lot of technical stuff. So they had to learn programming, they had to learn about water chemistry, they had to learn how plants grow, they also had to learn technical political stuff. They had to learn who has jurisdiction over this empty lot, and how do you get permission to enter somebody's house to fix their pipes. And there were so many dimensions that they had to learn, and nobody was telling them to do it except the need of the project. So the thing that was the most extraordinary was how meaningful this was for all of them. And when we did our interviews at the end or focus groups or anonymous surveys or their own reflections on their project, most of the people said this was the most important thing they had ever done in their lives. They came to work every Monday morning at 08:00 in the morning and they were so excited to work on this. They formed close relationships with everybody in the project. They said they had more genuine relationships with people here than they had ever had in their lives or than they had ever had in college, and their learning was magnificent. But we didn't predict what the learning was. There was no curriculum. There was no learning outcome that was predetermined. The the learning was part of the project which dictated what they had to do. So if they were a technical team, but they had to learn some of the social stuff, then they had to learn it. And not only did they have to learn it, but they had to figure out how to learn it. So nobody was saying here's the textbook. There might be a textbook, there might be a website, there might be an expert. They they had to learn in whatever way made sense for their needs. So in that sense, it was real life. You know, it was contained within this academic structure because they were getting paid, but and an institution got the permissions and the first entree into the community. But, basically, it was real life. So for me, this was an example of a completely authentic, completely unalienated example of learning. So they they had headquarters, but they weren't confined to headquarters. Headquarters was this, like, messy human ever changing old repurposed building, but they didn't have to be in the building. They could go out on their own. Nobody was policing them. Nobody was surveilling them. They didn't have time cards. They did have to tell people where they were going because they wanted to know where they were for safety, for you know, practical reasons, the same way a family wants to know where the kids are because you just need to know where the kids are. But it was free. They were free agents with a lot of support and they learned in ways that they will never forget in their entire lives. They didn't learn it for the test and forget it. They learned it because it was meaningful and mattered. So I could go on for hours about this project because it was such an amazing contrast with all of the schoolish learning that I had become so familiar with throughout my lifetime.

Speaker 2 And that's what is so powerful. It's like the antidote to all of the because you do spend that middle part of the book. It's like this facet, this facet, this facet. Here's how it's alienated. And by the time you get to the, the Bowman project, it is like, woah. Here's this breath of fresh air. And I'll I'll just highlight for listeners, who are obviously gonna go get the book and read it for themselves. But since you said you had this pile of data, not quite quite sure what to do with it, but you do focus on these three datasets with which I thought were really striking. And the one is, do you feel comfortable speaking in public about your work? And those numbers, there's not anybody who rated it less than a seven out of 10 in the post internship world. And it was kind of all over the map, in the pre internship place. So so the students in the project left feeling more comfortable speaking in public about that work, which, again, for technical people or for engineers, it is certainly a skill that may not be emphasized in a technical education program. The question, do you prefer learning by doing rather than learning abstractly, huge increase in this. Right? So, like, the mode here is a 10 out of 10 of in as far as students strongly agreeing, in preferring learning by doing. But I think the most striking one, that I found, especially as it relates to those community connections, was on this question, do you feel a connection to the Bowman Creek neighborhood? So in the pre internship dataset, the the most frequent response was a two out of 10. And then on the post internship, the most frequent response was a 10 out of 10 on that. And and that's not the kind of thing that you can get within the four walls of the classroom. Right? Talk about like an anti alienating thing. It's actually building community connections. People feel in community, a responsibility. Right? A shared communion with the with the people in that community afterwards. And that was just really incredible. There was I was gonna read one quote from one of the participants. Here we go. Who who went by these awesome pseudonyms that you got. But one of the students wrote, in classrooms, students rarely have the opportunity to be truly responsible, not just punctual or obedient, but to have others actually count on them for something meaningful. And as you said, it wasn't points or a grade or anything else, but knowing that now I know and I'm in relationship with the people in this community, right, that sets us up for this series of important human obligations, you know, that I now have to navigate. I can't just extricate myself and go focus on cramming for the test. I'm responsible and obligated now to other people just as they are to me. Moving into a broader context here, like, I don't know if you've seen this too. You're kind of in the same similar social media spaces as me, I suppose, for better or worse. But in the last few years, I feel like the social media discourse has really shifted, and and there's risen to prominence. You you had mentioned Thorndike earlier on, and, obviously, there's been a pendulum swing back and forth. And perhaps we're part of a pendulum swing that's going back towards, like, high management, efficiency, maximization, reducing risk, and all those kinds of things. I don't know if that's a response to, like, the high stakes of schooling after 2020, learning loss crisis, or whatever. But why do you think that the stakes are so high, and why have these high control pedagogies and systems come to prominence? And, like, what are the greatest barriers to achieving this example, right, that you write this this stunning case study? What what is a barrier for having schools do more of that as opposed to the opposite?

Speaker 1 I think the biggest barrier is social inequality in and economic inequality in The US, which is contrasted, let's say, with Finland where, you know, the Finnish educational system is quite different from The US educational system and their economic system is also quite different. In The US we have this perception that if you get the right credential and you rank a certain way, then you are going to be safe economically. You will not be in the situation most Americans are in, which is of economic precarity and the fact that your health insurance could be taken away any minute and all of that. So there's a sense that you need something sure fired to make sure that you can either maintain your class status or improve your class status. Even though evidence shows in The US that movement among social classes is very, very low in the contemporary moment. So this is not something that schools can actually solve, but everybody's looking to the schools to solve it anyway. So schools are being asked to do everything And there's so much uncertainty out in the world that people want a place of guaranteed success. And so this management of behavior and management of learning looks as if it's the way. If you do all of these things, you follow the rules, you get your points, you get your credits, you graduate from high school with this certain rank, you can get into a certain college, and you can then with certain majors, and those majors now are almost all practical. You know, there's a perceived crisis in the liberal arts because students in colleges aren't majoring in the liberal arts so much. In fact, they're minoring in them. They're majoring in practical fields for their parents or for their livelihood, and they're taking other classes like mine for fun for themselves and all of that. But but this movement toward efficiency and management mean, in some ways I don't really have an answer to you. I'm I'm trying to come up with an explanation. I mean, there's a lot of management in our world. I I just saw a a post about the top jobs in The United States right now, and the top jobs are home health care aide, food, counter clerk. And in this top ranking, most of them had salaries in the 30,000 range per year. The one exception was management, which had a salary of 100,000 a year. And there are a lot of managers, and this looks like the way, you know, we have this kind of scientific metric focused outlook in our health care, in our economy, in our food system, in our education system, as if we have figured everything out. And if you just crank everything through this uniform system, you will have proper outputs. And I I teach classes I have taught classes for thirty some years about the food system, and I've it's also an avocation of mine to know about this. But it's the same model. The industrial food system and the industrial education system and the industrial health system all have the same assumption, which is that everybody is the same. And if you can break everything down into its tiny components and then just put them back together artificially, you sort of alienate everything, and then you artificially reconnect them, then you will get the output you want. So in, for instance, in agriculture, we have destroyed the topsoil, but we have been able to add fertilizer which can artificially produce food in great quantity even though the food isn't as nutritious, and it certainly doesn't taste as good, and it continues to require more and more inputs of pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer, energy, but but it produces something that resembles food. And I think in education it's exactly the same. If you constrain your testing, for instance, there's this thing about something called direct instruction in education. If you assume that the measure of learning is a standardized test and and you are committed to the notion that you can test in a meaningful way through these uniform tests and you compare two different methods of learning, let's let's call one curiosity driven learning and let's call the other one direct instruction. Direct instruction will often produce better results on those standardized tests because they're basically the same thing. One is just at a different moment in the cycle. But the curiosity based learning doesn't do things that way. It may be that you create somebody who goes home and spreads this curiosity to their family and it has an effect on their younger cousin, or they go out and invent something, or they go into the community and they have a relationship with an older person who can tell them something. So that's not measurable on a standardized test. It's impossible to get metrics if you are actually looking at things that are more meaningful. So if you're going to test the deliciousness of food, you know, you can test a strawberry that's produced to be huge and red and transportable and look like a strawberry, and you can get one in January in Indiana, but it will have no taste. And it has put all these chemicals on the soil, and it has been transported 1,500 miles, but it looks like a strawberry. But the one I get for two weeks in June that was grown down the street that was fertilized by the compost, that strawberry is delicious. But if depending on what you're testing, the the first one, the big red one that that you can get in January looks like you've produced something amazing through your industrial agriculture. And in education, it's the same thing. You can get high test scores if you teach to the test, and we know that so well. But for instance, I taught a class this past spring on food and basically the class was one question, what should we eat? And the class also emphasized speaking, and it was a fun class, and I I love teaching it. But at the end, one of my students said to me, for most of my classes, I forget everything I learn as fast as I can because I don't really care about it. But in this class, I learn things that I will know forever. And for me, that's validation of the fact that he he got interested in something and then he went and learned about it. He and his team did a TikTok about it and that was their learning, so they learned skills and they learned to ask a question, to answer a question, and it mattered to them. So those everybody wants to know the answer. We have NGOs and governments that depend on metrics. And if you want metrics, if if you've if your whole system depends on metrics, then you have to produce these metrics. And so for students to use the LMS, they can see I have a ninety seven percent completion rate on time in the window when the assignment is available. And then an administrator could come in and see how how long are the students engaging with the LMS, which as we all know is meaningless because people turn on a program, and then they go and they exercise and they come back and it shows that they've been on it for two hours, but, you know, they haven't. But I don't really know why this moment is producing so much of this, but it certainly is. And the the example of learning loss is is one of those great examples.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It it took me far too long, like, in my own classroom teaching career to realize, like, the things that made me a good educator were the things that made me a bad teacher in, like, the bureaucratic management sense. And then the more that I did more of the educator things, kind of the worst teacher I became. And then eventually, like, the system kind of rejected me for those reasons. And I I I would always try to tell my seniors in particular, you know, as I made room for more authentic learning for my high school seniors at at the cost, frankly, of, like, teaching core curricular content for my econ class, for example. So I would say, like, I don't really care if you know about the price elasticity of demand. Right? That's go ask, go poll a 100 adults and 99 of them aren't even gonna know what you're talking about. Okay? But I want you to start something here that you're not gonna finish until five years from now or ten years from now. Right? So again, to come back to these metrics, that's not anything that's that was reflected in the final course grade or in, I I guess, on an ACT score or anything else that'd be relevant to college admissions. But, you know, they're the things that kids would come back to me when they were in college or, like, beyond and say, like, hey, this thing that I started in your class or got thinking about really motivated me later on. And, you know, they'd email or touch base with me on social media about all those. And those are validating, certainly, but they're not captured, as you say, in those metrics. And, you know, it really is just kind of this alienated system on top of alienated system. Thinking back to that econ class and on the notion of alienated labor, it was really an interesting revelation for them to see. We were looking at, like, hey, where does all this stuff come from? Right? Like, Chromebooks are you know, how what's the supply? You know, it was like a really econ focused thing. And we learned that the desks and the chairs and all of the school supplies were built and supplied by Iowa Prison Industries. And so there was this huge kind of like, woah, right, revelation where the connection to cheap alienated labor on the one hand to supply schools for, again, you know, these alienated learning to set up in desks and chairs and rows and things that presume, again, a certain outcome for a lot of kids. You know, it was like quiet and stares in the room as I pulled up the Iowa Prison Industries website to showcase these are the desks that you're sitting at. These are the chairs that you're sitting in built by prison labor for cheap. And, again, one of those kind of, I don't know, authentic learning moment that really helped shine a light on that whole system. But, yeah, as you were talking, I'm just I'm having all of these moments and connecting to those ecological systems. Alienated agriculture, alienated labor, alienated learning. So connecting all of those things back to those various perspectives. As I went through your book, one of the biggest takeaways, again, for me, was the insight that you had shared into all those perspectives that informed your own. You know, you draw very liberally from citations and, and quote from from other works that help inform that perspective. And I've bought many of them, including David Lancey's Anthropology of Childhood, which I'm excited to dig into. So I kind of appreciate how your book is like a syllabus on how to think more like Susan Bloom. So I think I think in addition to then, obviously, having listeners buy and read your book, is there, like, a top tier kind of top three books where you would say, hey. If you wanna learn to think more like an anthropologist on these topics of childhood and education, where what are kinds of what are some of the works that you would point people in the direction towards?

Speaker 1 Well, certainly David Lancy's work on the anthropology of childhood, which is now in its third edition, and it's it's a book I use when I teach the anthropology of childhood and education because it really does talk about education. So what we used to call socialization, how children become members of their societies, which involves learning, some of which is directed and much of which isn't directed. So that is one work that I certainly always recommend. I think Jean Lave's work. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have a book about communities of practice. But Jean Lave and Barbara Rogoff and several other Suzanne Gaskins, Ruth Paradise. These are some names of people who have gone to field sites for decades and decades and decades, and they have shown the way people learn in often indigenous communities. But Lave's work is not in indigenous communities necessarily. Some of it is and some of it isn't. Some of it's in industry. How people learn, let's say, in companies in ways that are not directed by an all powerful teacher, but how people learn in what she and Wenger call communities of practice. So there are a lot of people there doing incredible work that will really blow your readers' minds when you see how people are learning to weave or to cook or to set to light fires or to use knives or to do all kinds of things. And I can hear your reader your listeners saying, but that's simpler stuff. It's not the complicated stuff that our students have to learn in school. It's not math. Much of it is math. And in fact, Lave has talked a lot about how people learn math in everyday life. They can do incredibly difficult math calculations when they're doing real work, and then you come back and you give them a worksheet and they can't do the worksheet that is attempting to teach the skill that they can actually do. So I I think it's there's so much work in the field of anthropology, the anthropology of learning, the anthropology of childhood, socialization, showing how children are socialized without schools. Another person that people could read is Eleanor Oaks, o c h s, who has she and Bambi Schefflin have basically invented or named a field called language socialization, and that is a field that shows that children are learning language not by being taught but by being meaningful members of their society. So all of this has been incredibly influential on my thinking. And when you go and you look at how people are learning language or skills or to be members of their society, They're doing it not by points, not by being punished for mistakes. Although some mistakes might be punished, some mistakes also have authentic consequences, so you learn from that. When I see how that works, and nobody is exhausting themselves teaching, they're maybe exhausting themselves doing work but not through the process of teaching, and you see how hard it is for our children to learn in school, you wonder what is wrong. You know, if you actually observe, and this is something that anthropologists also bring to this conversation, if you observe how people are acting and feeling about being in school, you find that by late elementary school for sure, many of them don't like it. They are completely alienated. They have stomachaches. They get sick. They have headaches. They have all kinds of behavior problems. You mentioned prison, you know, the school to prison pipeline is no joke. And you have people with all kinds of energy and all kinds of curiosity and physical power, and they're being forced to sit still in chairs learning something that doesn't mean anything to them that they forget really quickly. And then we wonder, you know, why why children aren't doing well on their tests. Well, tests are bad, the system is bad, the questions we're asking are the wrong questions. But it doesn't have to be this way. It could be different. So I I'd like to suggest something I've only recently been deeply involved in or more deeply involved in is something called the Association for Self Directed Education. Peter Gray is one of the big names here. He has a book called, I think, Play to Learn, and he's all about looking at he's not an anthropologist, he's a psychologist, but looking at indigenous communities and what kinds of lessons we can learn from them about how people are learning, and what he finds is they're not learning in confined spaces with somebody telling them what to do, but they're learning, he says, by play. David Lansy makes it more complicated. It's not all play. The self directed education work, people like Gina Riley who has written about this, and several others, Helen Reese. They they've Lise. They've looked at self directed education unschooling the Sudbury Schools, which began in the Sudbury Valley in Massachusetts, but a long time ago. These are places not only elite places where the students and these are children, you know, I I mostly teach adults, but these are children who go to this place and the question is what do you want to learn? What do you want to know? What do you want to do? And they figure it out, and they end up literate. Most of them learn math, some of them don't, and that's one of the regrets that some of them have later in life, that they when they were children, nobody made them learn math, and so now it's hard to become a doctor because they they missed out on some of the early math thinking. But there are lots of ways to learn lots of things. And, clearly, as I say to people when I talk about ungrading, if what you're doing is working in terms of your students learning well and thriving, then fine. Don't change anything. But if they're not learning and they're not thriving, then maybe what we're doing isn't working, and then maybe looking somewhere else is a good idea.

Speaker 2 I think that's a perfect place to to leave it. The book is alienated education and the quest for authentic, joyful learning, which I would highly, highly recommend.

Speaker 1 Available everywhere. Thank you so much, Susan, for taking the time to share your work with us today. Thank you so much, Nick, for inviting me and for asking great questions and for all of your work beyond the podcast.

Speaker 3 Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.