The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.
Amidst the deluge of daily life, what deserves our attention?
This is, relatively speaking, a new question for us to consider.
Until recently, homo sapiens were an incremental species. Our ancestors only learned to read 200 generations ago. The first universities are just 1,000 years old. We didn’t even develop a germ theory of disease until the late 19th century.
Before, in other words, it took many generations for big changes to occur.
Now, however, we are experiencing multiple, massive shifts to the structure and flow of human life in a single generation. Whereas it took decades for the telephone to reach half of all U.S. households, it took just five years for cell phones to do the same. And although it seemed laughable in 1965 when Intel’s Gordan Moore predicted that every other year we’d double the number of transistors that could fit onto a single chip of silicon, “Moore’s Law” has become the most enduring technological prediction of our time; indeed, today’s computer chips offer 4,000 times more performance than they did fifty years ago, are nearly 100,000 times more energy efficient, and cost about 60,000 times less to produce.
As a result, the Industrial Age has begun to give way to the Information Age, reshaping our timeworn frames for what is worth knowing — and who gets to decide.
Whereas in the past, we collected the world’s knowledge in an encyclopedia, in the present, we co-construct it via a Wikipedia.
What will we do in the future? And how can we survive the deluge of information in our modern, networked world without feeling as though we are drowning in, well, TMI?
As always, the most valuable lessons for our human systems are to be found in the natural world, with its several billion years’ worth of trial and error.
As you read in chapter one, a paradox of living systems is that each organism maintains a clear sense of its individual identity within a larger network of relationships that help shape that identity. But whereas establishing a clear sense of “who’s there” is the building block of any living system, the determinant of whether that system can evolve and adapt is its relationship to the very thing that is overwhelming us in our hectic modern lives.
This insight is counter-intuitive. Yet nature reveals that anything that disturbs a living system is also what helps it self-organize into a new form of order.
Growth comes from disequilibrium, not balance.
And information is not power; it’s nourishment — but only when/if the information that is absorbed is the kind that is most meaningful and relevant to the system that absorbs it.
In scientific terms, this is known as a dissipative structure, a system that gives up its previous form in order to recreate itself into something new. And in practical terms, this is not how we have designed our schools, our organizations, or our civic structures — which are not only not “living” in any meaningful way, but are also likely to treat information as something to be guarded, repressed, or preferenced.
“We suffer from a fundamental misperception of information,” says organizational theorist Margaret Wheatley. “We have treated it as a thing, as a physical entity, which has kept us from contemplating its other dimensions — the content, character, and behavior of information. We expect information to be controllable, stable, and obedient. We expect to be able to manage it. In the new science, however, information is a dynamic, changing element. Without information, life cannot give birth to anything new. Information is what allows for the emergence of a new order.”
Although our relationship to information has always shifted with each new innovation — from the alphabet to the printing press to the smartphone — the new order emerging around us has, in fact, been predicted for generations.
In 1937, H.G. Wells envisioned a “sort of cerebrum for humanity, a cerebral cortex which will constitute a memory and a perception of current reality for the whole human race.” Generations later, Marshall McLuhan picked up the thread to suggest that Wells’ cerebrum had, in 1967, finally arrived. “Today,” he wrote, “we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.”
Today, of course, the global brain and body Wells and McLuhan anticipated is fully upon us — for better and for worse. What should we do with the daily flood of bits and bytes it is producing — and how should it impact the ways we think about preparing our children to build a better world?
As you’ll see in the stories that follow, the first step is to ask, amidst the deluge, “What’s meaningful” — and to follow one another’s answers wherever they may take us.
If an organization wishes to become more alive and adaptive, it must open itself to information the way a living system does. “Only information that truly challenges or illuminates our understanding or interpretation of our learning identity has the greatest potential to provoke meaningful changes in our thinking and behavior,” Wheatley explains. “We learn because the information matters. And it matters because it has personal significance to who we are now and who we wish to become. This is true for us as individuals. And it is true for our systems.”
“For so long,” she continues, “we’ve been engaged in smoothing things over, rounding things off, keeping the lid on (the metaphors are numerous), that our organizations are literally dying for information they could feed on, information that was different, disconfirming, and filled with enough newness to disturb our system into wise solutions. We need to have information coursing through our systems, disturbing the peace, imbuing everything it touches with the possibility of new life. We need, therefore, to develop new approaches to information — not management but encouragement, not control but genesis. How do we create more of this wonderful life source?”
This, then, is the work: To pay close attention to whatever helps shape, and reshape, our individual and collective sense of identity. To follow the meaning. And to know that in a living system, change is the only constant.
It’s what undergirds the science of feedback loops, which allow living organisms to maintain a sense of equilibrium.
It’s what prompted the Palestinian playwright Amir Nizar Zuabi to produce a one-person play that tells the story of Syrian refugees not in a single theater — but in myriad cramped kitchens across an entire metropolitan area.
And it’s what drives the adult educators of Reggio Emilia to model in their daily interactions with children a form of deep listening and emergent research that has yielded the finest (and most equitable) nursery schools in the world.
In the end, it may even result in a radically different conception of what we have up to now called school. “As the sheer volume of information increases,” write scholars Jal Mehta, Robert Schwartz, and Frederick Hess, “the portal associated with formal schooling begins to look increasingly restrictive and, in a world of direct access to information, increasingly dysfunctional. What qualifies as ‘official knowledge’ looks old fashioned in an age when there are many possible portals for access to information and many possible ways to attach meaning to that information through the process of learning.
“Schools may not disappear entirely,” they suggest provocatively, “but they will no longer be able to claim a monopoly on what is worth knowing and how to know it.”
To which one can only say: perhaps — but only if we can build the discipline, and find the space, to cut through the noise of our modern lives and focus solely on that which will help us build a better world, by design.
Amidst the noise, we must find the signal.
“Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility,” writes the author James Gleick in his book The Information. “Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.”
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