Matthew Cooke

 Matthew Cooke is the writer-director of How to Make Money Selling Drugs, a documentary film which criticizes the war on drugs in the United States, and Survivors Guide to Prison, about the prison system. Cooke also often serves as his own narrator, editor, cinematographer and visual effects artist.

 

My friends. I haven’t written or spoken about our political situation in a while - mainly because I’ve been focused on making more long form content.

But I had some thoughts about education I want to share. Maybe it sparks something in you as well.

Most of the public arguments about education today are limited to manufactured outrage over curriculum - and the skyrocketing costs of student debt, which depress our entire economy much like a recession - which is affecting everyone.

It’s a really an easy issue to resolve offering K - 16 (instead of k - 12) like most other wealthy countries.

Cancelling student debt is a no brainer. Could be paid for by billionaire profits alone since the pandemic. And it would spike consumer spending power and grow businesses as a result.

But there is an even deeper issue worth considering - which is rethinking public school entirely.

Before the 19th century there was no such thing as a public school system available to all the people, regardless of income or demography.

Public schools as we know them are on the one hand a fairly recent invention and on the other haven’t seen much innovation in the last century.

Academics are separated by factory bells and students are grouped by their physical age - the least likely factor in predicting commonalities. And test scores and grades are emphasized over personal experience and discovery.

This system is supposed to compete for children’s attention at a time where the most sophisticated communications technology in the history of humankind is in their pockets 24 hours a day.

Meanwhile the arts, the category of activity that engages the entirety of the human experience, mind, heart, and body - that which strives to reflect the fundamental essence of what it means to be a human being is the first to go on the chopping block when budgets run short.

Instead, kids cram answers to questions by rote memorization that often appear completely alien and irrelevant to life in the modern world.

No wonder there are record amounts of teenagers diagnosed with attention issues, medicated into submission to conform to a system of education that was created centuries ago and now competing against fortune 500s employing weapons grade psychological tactics for marketing dominance.

Meanwhile: We don’t hear nearly enough about creative problem solving - the critical skill required for progress in a society.

Creative problem solving requires two types of thinking: Convergent and divergent.

Convergent thinking is the application of linear, logical steps to analyze a problem which has only one correct solution: what is the purpose of a coffee cup? Well it is a cup for holding coffee!

Convergent thinking is what we learn in public school. It’s about discipline. Conformity. And that is useful.

But there could be other purposes for a coffee cup, couldn’t there? That is called divergent thinking. We need that skill for advanced problem solving - for problems that haven’t been solved yet.

Little children are notoriously good at divergent thinking, and able to conceive outside the box, coming up with multiple answers to common problems at what’s considered genius levels of thinking but as we get older, children and then adults, are less and less able to think creatively - most likely because doing so soon becomes an act of rebellion - to such an extent it could get you a failing grade on your tests.

Imagine that. Creative thinking can hold you back.

This is why many world-renowned education and creativity experts advise that we should be going completely the opposite way of standardization.

That instead we should be encouraging collaboration and individualization.

We could be building flexibility in curriculum to suit different learning styles. Some learn best by listening. Some by watching. Some can only learn by doing. Some by teaching!

Some have different specialties, challenges. Some are better at collaboration - some work better in pairs or alone.

But one thing we all have in common is the need for association in learning - meaning there needs to be some connection to our lives, to our hearts at the very least for learning to have meaning and stick.

That’s why the best advice I ever heard in college was to not take classes at all. Don’t take classes - a friend suggested. Take teachers.

A great teacher can make any subject fascinating. And turn the specific minute detail of a thing into a universal life lessons. An easy example is when you’re learning a new sport - which by nature is action packed and engaging.

Snowboarding for example. A good coach might advise that where you’re looking, that’s where you’re headed. Well that applies to the slopes and to life.

A great teacher illuminates a truth you carry with you to the next life challenge and the next.

Associations create opportunities for discovery. And deep connections, between ideas, experiences, problems and solutions are the best way to learn.

Because that is how the mind works - by connecting things.

If you ever want to memorize a grocery list, imagine each item smashing into the walls and furniture in the different rooms in your house, then do an imaginary tour of your house and you’ll remember each item.

Without an association, a list of random items becomes meaningless and forgetful.

So what if we made providing context, meaning and association to our outdated school systems?

Let’s take the worst grades of all - junior high school.

When we’re 12, 13, 14 years old. Feeling super awkward and weirded out instead of sitting still learning stuff we have zero application for - we showed up to an empty field and build our own school? Like an erector set?

Set the foundation. Framed the walls. Learned plumbing. Electricity. Put together a printing press. Published a newspaper.

Put an old car back together for a teacher to drive us to get supplies.

Soldered circuit boards to assemble a computer. Ran in telephone lines. Learned math and science THAT way.

And then got introduced to the arts in the context of how those profoundly life changing technologies were invented.

Learned about the Chinese inventors of aqueducts. The Arabic inventors of numerals. The Indian inventors of the ruler, the button, and cataract surgery. The African concept of Ubunto - our shared humanity. The Ethiopian inventors of coffee before we had our first cup.

Kids could sit in classrooms they built with their own hands, giving them confidence and self reliance so by the time they were 16 they felt more like adults - like they used to 100 years ago.

Because as important aside: the teenager is a modern invention.

Nobody was even using the term until the 1940s. It was just adults and kids.

Modernization has created an unnaturally extended period of adolescence - that combined with our current public school system cleaves huge cultural divisions between generations - between children and their ancestors, creating feelings of isolation, anxiety, and the ungrounded existential crises that define post modern industrial life.

We are cut off from wisdom, continuity and communal identity.

Generational differences are getting even more defined as our communications technologies develop faster and faster.

What is the use of that?

Other than for marketing departments to have more demographic markers to target.

Education comes from a latin word which means rearing or training. But what are we training for?

According to Maslow our hierarchy of needs starts with the physical, air, water, food, shelter, sleep, and moves inward to our needs to feel safe, secure, being healthy, and deeper still, the need for community, family, friends, belonging, self esteem, feeling love and respect for ones self and others, and then finally: self actualization - realizing your potential, bringing your gifts to life!

Whether that’s your sense of peace, or humor, to some talent or outward skill.

And feeling that you’ve contributed something to your world, your family, your descendants. All of that, we are training for - all the time.

There’s a wise bit of council for people who are looking for self actualization that practice means attainment and attainment means practice -- that means we have to always be in practice. Always in training.

Always working on actualizing our selves more deeply and authentically.

As some of our first nation brothers and sisters say, always be in ceremony.

Pablo Casals - the master cellist. 81 years old was asked why he still practiced 4-5 hours a day Pablo said “Because I think I’m making progress.”

The master filmmaker Akira Kurosowa upon receiving a lifetime achievement award from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg said “I don’t feel that I understand cinema yet...

I really don’t feel I have grasped the essence of cinema. Cinema is a marvelous thing but to grasp its true essence is very, very difficult.”

If the master artists still considered themselves students at the end of their long and accomplished lives, how much for the rest of us?

If we’re all students for the duration of our time here, then perhaps there shouldn’t be any argument at all, that our educations, and our training should be the number one priority of an advanced society.

As all else we do comes from that - the actualization and demonstration of our humanity.