Tag: hamlet

Nature’s Design Principles: Identity

Posted on | by Sam

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.

More than four hundred years after it was written, people around the world are still reading, performing, and wondering about Hamlet. 

Why?

The simple answer is because it’s the world’s most famous playwright’s most famous play. But the complex answer is because the title character and we, no matter our culture or our age, are kindred spirits. 

Like every young person everywhere ever, Hamlet has visions of his future that don’t align with the visions the adults in his life have for him. He is an artist and a dreamer — a person more comfortable in the world of ideas than the world of actions. And he is in love.

But Hamlet is also the future king of Denmark, which means he is bound by custom to avenge his father’s murder — a duty that leads to his own untimely death in no small part because the act of killing goes against his very being.

No matter your age, then, to read Hamlet is to watch a fellow human being struggle between staying true to his own sense of self and accepting the role society has assigned him to play. And so Hamlet’s struggle illuminates a central question we all must wrestle with — a question not coincidentally posed by the first two words in the play:  

“Who’s there?”

This is a new question for us, homo sapiens sapiens — the being who knows, and who knows he knows. That’s because for the great majority of our time on this planet, human beings have viewed the world almost entirely through the prism of “we,” not “me.” 

As foragers, we lived in unquestioning obedience to the unknowable marvels of the natural world. And in the earliest civilizations, we lived to serve the needs of our Gods in Heaven – and then, later on, their hand-chosen emissaries on Earth.

In these long chapters of the human story – which make up more than 93% of our history as a species – our ancestors were most likely to find comfort, and a sense of identity, through their ability to fit usefully and invisibly into a larger community.

To stand out from the crowd was undesirable, since, in reality, doing so could mean ostracism or death. 

To walk in someone else’s shoes was unnecessary, since, in effect, everyone wore the same shoes.

And to wonder about the world was to focus one’s gaze outward, or upward.

Over time, however, the human gaze has shifted. 

Beginning with the rise of the great religions, continuing through the citizen revolutions in France and the Americas, coursing through all of Shakespeare’s plays, and running right up to and through the age of social media and the Selfie Stick, we humans have begun to increasingly look inward – for better and for worse.

At the same time, a wave of new discoveries in fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology have taught us that our need to understand “who’s there” is more than just an exercise in navel-gazing; it is the way we deepen our empathic capacity to connect with our fellow creatures.

“We are learning,” says the social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, “against all of the prevailing wisdom, that human nature is not to seek autonomy — to become an island to oneself — but, rather, to seek companionship, affection, and intimacy. The conventional belief that equates self-development and self-consciousness with increasing autonomy has begun to lose its intellectual cachet. A growing number of child development psychologists now argue the contrary — that a sense of selfhood and self-awareness depends on and feeds off of deepening relationships to other people. Empathy, in turn, is the means by which companionate bonds are formed.”

“The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship,” explains psychiatrist Dan Siegel. “What happens between brains has a great deal to do with what happens within each individual brain . . . [And] the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.”

As far as words go, empathy is a new one – it didn’t even appear until the early 20th century. It comes from the English translation of the German word einfühlung, which was used to describe the relationship between a work of art and its subject; it was later expanded to include interactions between people.

Those interactions, according to Rifkin, are what give rise to a deeper human capacity for making sense of the world. “Empathic consciousness starts with awe,” he contends. “When we empathize with another, we are bearing witness to the strange incredible life force that is in us and that connects us to all other living beings.

“It is awe that inspires all human imagination. Without awe, we would be without wonder and without wonder we would have no way to exercise imagination and would therefore be unable to imagine another’s life ‘as if’ it were our own.”

In other words, we have slowly flipped the paradigm of human understanding: 

It’s not the world that makes us wonder; it’s our wondering that makes the world. 

Or, as the Chilean biologist-philosophers Francesco Varela and Humberto Muturana put it, “the world everyone sees is not the world but a world, which we bring forth with others.”

This epiphany is changing more than just our understanding of the brain. In recent years, scientists in fields ranging from biology to ecology have revised the very metaphors they use to describe their work – from hierarchies to networks – and begun to affirm, as physicist Fritjof Capra says, “that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”

Going a step further, scholars like Siegel have even suggested that the very thing at the center of our most personal sense of self — the mind — may not be as distinct as we’d thought. “Mind emerges as much in relationships as it does from physiological, embodied processes including brain activity,” he explains. 

“Relationships are the crucible in which our lives unfold as they shape our life story, molding our identity and giving birth to the experience of who we are, and liberating — or constraining — who we can become. . . If we consider that our minds are a part of an interacting, interconnected system that involves our bodies and our brains, as well as the environment in which we live, including our social relationships, we may be able to reconcile how the mind is part of one system that seems to be in two places at once.”

That isn’t just flowery prose; it’s how living systems operate in the natural world — by existing and creatively organizing within and between a boundary of self. Although this boundary is semipermeable and ensures the system is open to the continuous flow of matter and energy from the environment, the boundary itself is structurally closed. 

A cell wall is a good example. It’s the boundary that establishes its system’s identity, distinguishes it from and connects it to its environment, and determines what enters and leaves the system. But because this meaning of “boundary” is as much about what it lets in as what it keeps out, the end result of this arrangement, according to the German biologist Andreas Weber, is a notion of self in which “every subject is not sovereign but rather an intersubject — a self-creating pattern in an unfathomable meshwork of longings, repulsions, and dependencies.” 

The Chilean biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist Francisco Varela agrees. “Life is a process of creating an identity,” he says. Every organism is “a meshwork of selfless selves.” And these principles of life are universally applicable.

What’s true for the microorganism, in other words, is just as true true for the megalopolis.

But what does that really mean in the daily whir of our personal and professional lives? And how do we intentionally build our empathetic muscles in the service of building a living, thriving school? 

As you’ll see in the stories and examples that follow, our work begins with a commitment to hold the space, and make the time, to allow all members of a learning community — from the youngest to the oldest — to understand that each person’s sense of an individual self emerges, as Siegel puts it, from not only our inner life, but our “inter-life” as well.

The science of the human brain — particularly its bi-hemispheric structure — has allowed us to integrate two very different ways of making sense of the world, and our place in it. 

The art of the American writer James Baldwin is a direct challenge to the myths that have shaped our shared sense of what it means to be an American. 

The insights of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn offer a window into the ways our understanding of the mind shape our capacity for well-being. 

And the genius of the June Jordan School for Equity, a public school in San Francisco, is in its ability to foster a strong sense of collective identity that can provide clearer support to each student’s more precarious individual search for who they are, and what they value.

In the past, says Weber, “with our craving to build a new and better world we have thoughtlessly given up that one crucial sphere to which we are linked by the umbilical cord of life. We have attempted to sneak away from our Siamese connection with all other human beings. We have tried to escape from ourselves.”

In truth, we need to be many to become one — and one to become many.

We Need a New Set of “Words, Words, Words”

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on We Need a New Set of “Words, Words, Words”

On the radio this morning, I heard three different stories about public education reform. In each story, I heard the same three words — data, testing, and accountability.

Before I get any more depressed about how uninspiring this language makes me feel, I have a proposal to make: let’s stop the madness and start identifying some new words that can more accurately describe the changes we seek for children.

Fittingly, the person who first made me aware of the power of language was none other than William Shakespeare, whose plays I used to teach in a variety of classrooms across the boroughs of New York City.

Hamlet was always my favorite. He is, like most teenagers, a searcher, occasionally brooding and introspective. He has visions of his future that don’t align with the visions the adults in his life have for him. He is an artist, an actor, and a dreamer – a person more comfortable in the world of words than the world of actions. And he is in love. But Hamlet is also the future King of Denmark, which means he is bound by custom to avenge his father’s murder – a duty that leads to his untimely death, in no small part because the act of killing goes against his very being.

No matter your age, then, to read the play is to watch a fellow human being struggle between staying true to his nature or accepting the role society has assigned him. Hamlet’s struggle also illuminates an essential question of human nature, not coincidentally posed by the first two words of the play – “Who’s there?”

This is not a question many of us choose to ask of ourselves. Instead, we keep busy with work and other distractions. We ignore the inherent, unarticulated contradictions between our internal passions and our external actions. And we wonder why we are left feeling unfulfilled.

Everything we do as individuals is determined by who we think we are — or, in the case of school reform, by what we define as our ultimate goals. And yet part of Hamlet’s challenge is that throughout his struggle, his only recourse for greater self-understanding is to “unpack [his] heart with words.”

This tension between thoughts, words and actions continues throughout the play. At one point, Hamlet finds himself standing directly behind the man who killed his father – the King’s brother, Claudius. All the young prince needs to do is unsheathe his sword and complete his duty. But Hamlet feels paralyzed, even as he struggles to talk himself into the act. He tries to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action” – but to no effect. Later, Hamlet bemoans the futility of “words, words, words” – at once his (and our) greatest resource and chief source of frustration.

Shakespeare’s exploration of the relationship between thoughts, words and actions illuminates a universal human tension, and a particular challenge I see reflected in our current efforts to create a more equitable school system: Before any of us can use our talents to make ourselves seen and heard, we must first understand how to “suit the action to the word, [and] the word to the action.” And before we can ever hope to become the most effective teacher, parent, boss or school leader, we must be willing to do the internal, reflective work necessary to answer the question, “Who’s there?”

If I apply this question to the current reform landscape, it’s unquestionable that the words we use are somehow divorced from the essence of what schooling is all about — helping children unlock the mystery of who they are by acquiring the skills and self-confidence they need to be seen and heard (at college, in their careers, and as citizens in a democracy) in meaningful, responsible ways.

Why is the significance and power of this goal so absent from the most common vocabulary of the current reform movement? The optimistic side of me says it’s simply because we haven’t thought about it enough. The pessimistic side wonders if it’s because we’re so blinded by the current charade of labeling schools (or reform efforts) as successful or unsuccessful based on a single measure of success that we’ve come of believe our own press clippings: if the scores go up, we really are closing the achievement gap. If the scores stay stagnant or go down, we’ve made no progress whatsoever.

As anyone who has studied Shakespeare knows, a worthy plot line is more complicated than that. And so is the work we have ahead of us.

To get us started in the right direction, I have three simple proposals:

  1. Every time you find yourself wanting to say data, say information instead. It’s a good thing, for example, that we’re more concerned now with acquiring relevant information about whether or not kids are learning, and how well or poorly our schools are creating healthy learning environments for kids. But the fact that schools now talk about “Data Days” at their school suggests to me that we’ve gone a little too far in the direction of valuing the number and not the story behind the number. We need both, and information strikes me as a more neutral term.
  2. Every time you want to talk about testing, talk about learning instead. Tests will always be a component of our education system. But take a moment to reflect back on your most powerful personal learning experience, and I can guarantee you it did not involve a test. I know this because I was part of a powerful data-collection campaign — I mean, information-gathering campaign — to uncover the core conditions of a powerful learning environment, based on people’s lived experiences. After hundreds of individual stories were collected, we made a word cloud of the most essential conditions, and, no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention in their life, the top five were challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive and experiential. So let’s stop playing it safe and focusing on tests that can only skim the surface of what real learning looks like, and let’s start asking ourselves, relentlessly and collaboratively, How can we create more learning opportunities for kids that are challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive and experiential — and how will we know if we’ve succeeded?
  3. Every time you want to talk about accountability, talk about sustainability instead. What we seek is not just a system that holds people accountable — after all, the most successful systems are the ones where people are intrinsically motivated to do that for themselves. No, what we seek is a system that can sustain its capacity to use meaningful information to improve the overall learning conditions for children. And in case you think this is flowery progressivism at its worst, you should know that I’m partially basing this notion on the insights of renown business guru Jim Collins, who says the best organizations create environments where employees need no motivation, and leaders trip up when they destroy that drive.

In part, Hamlet’s story ends so tragically because it was written not by him, but by the expectations of the society in which he lived. Educators today are not similarly constrained (despite how it may feel). But we still need to learn how to use words and language to focus on the right goals – the ones that will connect us to an aspirational vision of the knowledge and skills every child will acquire over the course of his or her schooling. We need to learn to ask the right questions – the ones that will help us create optimal learning environments. “And this above all; to thine own self be true.”