Spark Series: Designing A More Ideal Future
How can we create learning environments that welcome our fullest selves?
I spent last week in Memphis, where I got to return to the wondrous world of Libertas Montessori, one of my favorite schools in the world.
Libertas is part of the growing global movement to provide a Montessori education in a public setting — there are now more than 25,000 such schools in the world — and, as you can see from the video we made about them a few years ago — it’s doing so in a neighborhood that has been historically starved of vital community resources.
While I was there, though, I was reminded of an unusual feature of a Montessori education — the fact that children, in having the autonomy to make their own choices, will sometimes return to the same materials over and over again — seemingly long after they’ve “completed” the work.
I asked one of the educators when they know it’s time to encourage the child to move on. “Just as we adults will sometime return to the same issue, or question, or problem, over and over again, so, too, do children sometimes prefer to linger on a certain work or concept,” she explained to me. “It’s misguided to believe that this is wasted time. We are circular beings, after all — so it’s important that we create the space for people to be circular when it suits them.”
I was reminded of that sage insight again yesterday, when I watched a stirring talk given by Anthropology professor Michael Wesch, who directed his professional training towards the passive students seated in front of him, in an effort to better understand the roots of their interest, passion and preferences.
As he literally took every student of his out to lunch for a conversation — no small talk allowed — he discovered that there were three really important questions that were driving his students — and being completely ignored in the classroom.
Who am I? What am I going to do? And Am I going to make it?
Those circular questions feel especially important to consider together, as those of us in the Seed + Spark Network continue to search for better ways to build a better world, by design.
If they feel important to you, too — and if you’d like to linger on them awhile, with good company — then JOIN US this Wednesday night (May 11, at 8pm EST, via this link) for a special community conversation in which we ask one another what it would require to create environments that could support our true nature as human beings, and how that might impact our current ways of living and learning together?
Share your voice with us, and spread the word — so that together, we can #changethestory . . .