Morphogenesis

“The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects” – Thomas Berry

Even with the advent of AI, I still come across the dated idea that human education is about teaching people things. Instruction has its place, of course, in the context of human learning as a whole. But instruction must be the barest tip of the educational iceberg, since the world we can describe factually is always a meager approximation of the fullness of reality.

Reality is, in its wholeness, a vast ocean of mutually dependent, co-arising phenomena of every imaginable kind. Isn’t the goal of education to help human beings come into contact with this multiplicity, balancing specificity with overarching unity? Waldorf education has certainly aspired to this aim. And, like any movement, the vocabulary of its aims continually needs to be reworded in order to meet the realities of the ever changing times we live in.

What kinds of educational aims are adequately adaptive to the dynamisms that swirl around and within us, causing our language – symbolizing our collective imaginations, our ways of being – to morph and shift as the decades flow on? Surely this question must find its answer far below the rippling surface of standardized testing or numerics of any kind. 

The first dive down might be to affirm that qualitative aspects of learning are centrally important. But soon enough, we could be in danger of finding ourselves mired in homogenizing these qualities into ambivalent tropes like ‘skill and capacity building’, ‘intellectual and aesthetic development’, ‘executive functioning’, ‘moral and ethical training’, and so on. These are all necessary, but not sufficiently profound.

What aims of education will be powerful enough to keep us warm as humanity free dives far, far out into the oceanic horizons where AI and all the rest must be integrated into our collective human psyche?

One idea that I think prevents deeper imaginations of education is that we picture learning happening solely beneath our skulls. In fact, learning takes place throughout the whole body, and even beyond the body. We draw the world into ourselves through our senses, and we ‘make sense’ of the world through processes we don’t consciously understand, like memory, dreaming, feeling, and so on. Learning that lives only ‘in our heads’ is certainly worth something, but is clearly in decline of value: encyclopedias, the internet, interactive agents – they have this kind of ‘knowledge’ covered. They are supremely better than us at it. Factual regurgitation is a largely externalizable process.

The kind of learning that counts for human beings has to traverse all the way to our toes and fingertips and back up. Once we’ve really learned something, it becomes a new way of being in the world. The avenues formed in us between perceiving and conceiving will then become the world for us, as far as we can cognize it. 

I have said what I think education is not really about. And I eschew any reductive or dogmatic statements about what it must become. As Rudolf Steiner is supposed to have said, education is an art, not a science, and art should not be summarized. Yet, while aware of my presumptiveness, I want to attempt to pose what I think is a helpful framing an adequately profound idea of education. 

So I posit: education is, ultimately, the art of systematically and rhythmically attending to living relationships between every manner of subject. The word ‘subject’ I mean with all its manifold nuances: 

• subject as individual/student, 
• subject as teacher/facilitator
• subject as specific topic/activity/craft, 
• subject as other being(s) encountered, and
• subject as any aspect of the world taken as a temporary whole.

Education is for cultivating and strengthening relationships between manifold subjects. A subject is anyone, any topic, any being, any aspect of the world apparently isolated by an act of consciousness. 

This word ‘subject’ I find beautiful because it pertains both to beings and to the places we put our attention and creativity. I am a subject, but so is math. Literature is a subject, but so is my cat. 

Creation is ultimately one whole, so no part of creation can arise without all the rest: no subject exists without all others co-existing, co-arising. And in the same breath, no change to a subject comes about without a change occurring in another subject. As the subject of mathematics expands into new horizons in this century, so do human beings who encounter it. As human beings have new feelings and ideas, so does our literature morph and fold and grow. If I teach a class, the teaching of it changes me, while also changing the students. This is as true at the human level as it is at the cosmic, biological, or quantum level. This is the recognition of the reality’s radical nature of inter-becoming. Everything helps everything else to become. Nothing is dead, nothing static, in its essence.

Education is about putting us in touch with this aliveness so that we can be creative co-participators within it. Defining education in these extremely broad terms helps us refrain from thinking of it as existing only during a class period, only in a school campus, only at certain times of day. We are constantly being educated by every social interaction we have, every ritual or tradition we engage in, every game we play, every photo or video we see, every word we hear, every movement we make. Our learning is constantly evolving, as is the world.

And where exactly does our learning live, once we have learned something? Can we store it in ourselves, like we do in computers? Remembering and forgetting are not at all the same as storing and retrieving. Every time a human being remembers something, we also come into a new relationship with what we have remembered; we work on the memory, changing it as it changes us. We are not static storage containers: learning lives in the cultivated spaces between subjects, not beneath the skull.

Subjects become more real the more they relate to other subjects. Our self-knowledge lives in the communion between bodies, ideas, and circumstances. Knowledge in general is better defined as the strength of a relation than any storable quantity of information. If we want people to be really knowledgeable, we need to focus on nurturing their relationships to the evolving world around them.

Steiner spokes of the essential goal of education as to teach people how to breathe, in the broadest possible sense of the word ‘breathe’. What is breathing, at various levels of reality? It is the relationship between one state of being and another. Breathing is lemniscatic dynamism: a conversation is a kind of breathing, a taking in and a giving back out something new that depended on what was just received. If learning is all about breathing, it is all about attending and responding to what we encounter. 

The opposite of breathing is suffocation. A dead person does not breathe. A person is ‘dead to the world’ when they are no longer capable of relating to the world around them with fresh observations, feelings, insights and intentions that depend on what they have observed. 

We are obliged to ask ourselves: how am I, as the (ever-changing) teacher, able to draw the student, as the (ever-changing) student, into a relationship with the (ever-changing) subject at hand? How can I introduce them to mathematics or literature in a way that forms a strong relationship with that ever-changing aspect of the world, as if, like a person, it had its own being? 

What will we say in the future when we say that someone has had a ‘good’ education? Will we still measure it by the current norms of SAT scores, job success, and so on? I would say that a good education leaves a person able to adapt and respond creatively and lovingly in their unique life context. The educated person is flexible in their thinking, sensitive in their feelings, confident in their will, full of humor and seriousness, self reflective, and actively, compassionately interested in the world around them.

These are the healthy symptoms of someone who has been in the habit of being asked by their teachers and peers, year by year, to strengthen their relationships with the widest possible breadth and depth of subjects. These subjects are anything and everything, since all the world is a communion of subjects: other people, the body of the earth, myth, math, theater, dance, poetry, physics, logic, philosophy, language, music, art, history, their peers… a well educated person is capable of engaging their whole body, soul, mind, and spirit when they wake up in the morning. They are as alive as is humanly possible, a dynamic subject who loves and attends to and engages every other. True education is, and always will be, about questions of interbecoming.