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home school yourself.         When we decide to exercise our freedom and come into our own as full citizens, we rightfully worry about doing it well. The argument for not asking How? is to acknowledge that our problem is not a lack of tools. We have more tools than we need, many of them we will never use, so why keep enlarging the workshop instead of producing something we are proud of?

Just because we stop buying tools doesn’t mean we stop learning. Instead of learning about more tools, we need to educate ourselves in a broader sense of the word. I need to become a well-educated person, as opposed to a well-trained person. This means reflecting upon and deepening my own ideas, and giving greater value to my own thinking. It may be that changing my mind is what will lead me to act more fully on what matters. We each have our own theories and models about the world and what it means to be human. We need to deepen our understanding of what we believe. We need a learning curriculum that we, alone, have designed. We need a self-designed course in the “humanities,” for we operate in human systems, regardless of how technical and automated they become.

We are not very well equipped to do this, however, because many of us used our education just to build a resume. We got practical way too soon. When people kept asking us what we were going to do with our lives, we thought we needed to give them an answer. Now we need to become clearer on what we are, and what we stand for, not what we want to do, or how to get somewhere.

Humanities Home School

Imagine a humanities home school or graduate program, with yourself as both the student and the core faculty. I like the term humanities because this is the quality of the world we want to inhabit. It is our humanity that needs attention. I am not necessarily talking about the humanities that higher education currently offers, but the word that captures the spirit of what higher education stood for when it was (and still is in many places) committed to developing the whole person instead of just the working person. The humanities recognize that the ideas we need today have a long and noble tradition of looking to the arts, drama, literature, religion, and political theory for insight about individual and institutional transformation. Here are some elements for a plan to move in that direction.

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The Home School Curriculum

Objective: To act on what matters.

Goals:

1. Hold to the set of ideals that are uniquely mine and have always been with me. No recent imposters based on fashion trends or catchy phrases.
2. Accept that I am now free, a citizen in good standing, and decide to pay the price for that fact.
3. Become intimate with what I come in contact with. See, feel, touch, yield to it all.
4. When in doubt, choose to go deeper rather than faster. Accept the idea that reflection and understanding my own nature, including the dark side, is the key to effective action.
5. Make the world better through activism and engagement. Be on the stage, not in the audience. Change the world through peer groups and community. Let the leaders be.

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Required Courses

Course 101: Following Your Heart’s Desires

Begin with yourself. Let your desires lead you. Each of us has within us a calling, something that pulls us. We don’t really know where it comes from, we don’t know whose voice is speaking, and we have no idea what it will eventually demand of us. It is there in the dreams we once dreamed, it is in whatever draws our attention. We get clues about our desires by noticing where our natural energy goes. What would we rather be doing when we are busy not doing what we are supposed to do? People ask me, What are you doing now? I answer, I am busy not answering email. Our desires often come to us in disguise, accompanied by the belief that they are something we cannot make a living at. Good sign.

Three Seconds Remaining in the Game, Our Team Down by One. We find our desires within our own history. If you want a guide, find one—a good therapist, a local artist, it can be anyone outside the field of your current endeavor.

One day it dawned on me in the middle of my life that I had lost my body. I had become, literally, disembodied. I spent my youth wanting to be an athlete. In grade school all I wanted to do was shoot baskets. Hour after hour, often alone, I got lost in my imagination of high drama and personal heroics. My mother would call me in to dinner at 5:00 PM, and not once did I ever go in without first winning a basketball game in the final three seconds.

Despite the legendary feats I had created in my own mind, I had this small problem: I was not that good at basketball. I was slow, I couldn’t jump, and the other guys were much stronger. As I moved into high school and college I quietly put my body aside and got on with the business of thinking about starting a family and making a living as best I could. I never stopped wanting to be an athlete, I just gave up on it. In my mid-thirties, when the questions about making a living began to be answered, I started to despair that the rest of my life would simply be the same, just more of it.

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To try and deal with this feeling, I bounced around a lot, attending workshops, getting into therapy, trying to Be Here Now with Ram Dass. Then I read a book that took me back to my earlier desire of being an athlete and I began to imagine taking it seriously again. I found Tim Gallwey, author of this great book I had read, The Inner Game of Tennis, and asked to be his student. He took me on, and I, in turn, invited him into my work. His gift to me was to bring the world of work and the world of the body together. On the surface I was learning to play tennis, but underneath I was getting acquainted with my own physical nature.

To be an athlete meant to reenter my body. It required me to remember that I had a body and that it had treated me quite well, despite my years of neglect. The goal was not that I would eventually become a great athlete, only that I would refocus my attention. It gave me a clue about what I wanted to learn. What I needed to discover was that learning (the business I was in) was about surrender, trust in myself, faith in my own capacities, and the idea that the best teacher did the least teaching. These were things I had always believed, I just did not fully connect them with the way I had been doing my work. This gave me a way of doing my work that was a fuller expression of my own values. What I ended up learning had nothing to do with tennis. But tennis, the remnant of my earlier desire, became the vehicle that activated my energy and helped bring me back to life.

Knowing More Than You Think. What is interesting is that no matter what you think you want to pursue, you learn the same things about yourself: You learn to pay attention, you experience the power of concentration, you start to notice the details in things that before were undifferentiated masses. You discover how much depth there is in the world and how, when you give it attention, it rewards you. You learn to trust yourself—your body, your instincts, your intuition, your capacities. You learn that you knew more about the subject than you thought you did, and you learn that you are capable of learning. Some of us learn we have a brain, others learn we have a body, some learn we have a voice, or feelings, or the capacity for love, or surrender, or courage, or eyes with which to see. These are the things that are necessary to complete us.

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These lessons are what our desires teach us. They are the domain of our desires. We can learn these things everywhere, as long as we stay in charge and stay responsible for our learning. I took a cooking class in the beginning of those restless years (which, incidentally, have not ended) when I started to have to make meals for my children. I went into the class barely knowing how to make hamburgers and spaghetti. For three days I frantically took notes and missed most of what was taught. (I also had fun because we got to eat what we prepared and drank a lot.) A month after the class, someone asked me what I had learned, and I said that I learned to trust myself cooking: I was not a hopeless case, and realized I knew my way around the kitchen better than I thought I had. I learned that to cook you don’t need a recipe, you need an eye, a nose, and to be able to tell the difference between vinegar and oil.

Now, the chef did not teach this, the course did not promise this, and I did not go there for this. But this is what I learned. What struck me was that the insight I got from the cooking class was the same thing people often said they got out of any decent training experience. It made me more humble about my work, and over time I realized that the content does not really matter; something else is at work when people decide to show up, listen to their own desires, and be in a situation with not too much teaching but plenty of space for learning.

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This means that despite content, it is the act of learning—mostly about ourselves—that is the key to our contribution to, and our ability to make a difference in, the world. Specifically: It is learning about our capacities, strengths, and gifts that are already implanted. Our desires, often masked by our sophistication, point the way.

Course102: Learning About Ideas Outside Your Field

Whatever our profession, it has little more to teach us. We need a liberal education, not a professional education. I have to go outside my job territory to change my mind. It is hard to learn when we think we know something. Our expertise becomes a defense against the innocence and not-knowing that learning requires. Stop reading professional journals, especially the ones you have to force yourself to read. If you must support your profession, better to write for professional journals than to read them. If you insist on attending a professional workshop, teach it instead.

It doesn’t matter what field you learn about, just find something that draws you in and offers the possibility of shifting or deepening your thinking. Go to the liberal arts. If you have already been there, go back to them. Study something, anything. It is the act of learning that is transforming. If you think you don’t have time, or love totally what you are doing, or can’t keep up with what you are into now, think again. You are hiding from a deeper excursion into your own possibilities. Anytime we think we have it together—that we are on the path and only need some fine tuning—we are stuck. Frozen. Even if all is well, there is a future to create that we have barely dreamed of. We have become imprisoned by our success, caught in the paradox of valuing what we have become, believing that we have all that is required, yet still knowing very little. It is never too early, or too late, to change your mind.

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Required Reading. Here are a few books to get you started learning outside your field. They cover a wide spectrum, and if I were the dean, I would make them required reading for meeting the humanities home school degree requirements. They are an excursion across philosophy, revolution, literature, social change, cultural criticism, and architecture. Order them today. Read them tomorrow. Report back to me at the end of the week.

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When you finish these books for the second or third time, read everything these authors have written. Then find the authors and ask to study with them, or find those who studied with them, and follow the path of their thinking. These books represent the importance of ideas and of thinking. I am not sure, but I do not think there is one list of how to do it in any of these books. Amazing.

Course 103: Mentoring on Your Own

Mentoring is an act of love, of care, of willingness to bear witness for another human being. To be authentic, it must be chosen by both parties. It happens to us as much as it is a goal that we pursue. Once it becomes popular, a learnable skill, and an organizational project, it loses its life. So, don’t look to your boss to be a mentor. Find a mentor on your own. You boss may be a great mentor, but your boss has power over you, and this gives an edge to the guidance offered. And if you want to fire your boss as a mentor, you have to do it indirectly and with difficulty. Plus, you don’t want to love your boss—it would be too close to the parenting experience that our freedom wants us to grow up and away from.

There is unquestionable value in mentoring, but we get into trouble when it becomes a program and our bosses are trained and expected to do it. Employees then begin to think they need to be mentored or have a right to be mentored. When mentoring becomes a product it turns from care to entitlement. So stop supporting mentoring programs. Just find a person, whether you know them or not, and make them a mentor, even if you never meet them. I have mentors whom I have never met, but I follow everything they write, do, and say. If you do meet, it is a bonus, but be sure the relationship is reciprocal. You need to have something to offer your mentor in return for learning from them. If there is no balance, the relationship will become unstable, even a little oppressive. Both of you need to be transformed by the process of learning from one another. People sometimes ask me to be their mentor, and I ask them what I might receive from this arrangement. They respond that I get the benefit and joy of seeing them grow. I think of saying, “But I already have enough children.” Making unbalanced, burdensome demands on others keeps us in the child position.

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In the workplace, the risk is that we become too willing to let others define for us what we should learn. The colonial nature of organizations is most visible when leaders think they (we) know what is best for others. We are still are too eager to ask our bosses for feedback, to ask them how we are doing, what we should be learning. These are great conversations, but not with people in power, for the discussion can become instrumental all too easily. We try to get what we want from the boss by positioning ourselves as eager students. The boss is trying to get what they want from us under the guise of learning, generosity, and acting in the best interest of the employee.

We are so conditioned by our school experience that we think we need this kind of direction and prescription. All through school we put our energy into reading the teacher. The first questions are “What do you expect of us? What does it take to get an A?” The dependency runs so deep that if you are a college professor, like David Cox at Arkansas State, and try to renegotiate the learning contract with students, you are in for a battle. Students don’t want to hear about adult learning theory, setting their own goals, devising their own grading system, or being responsible for the learning of their peers. They want an A. It is made worse when the professor who tries to bring democracy into the classroom has to stand blindfolded in front of the firing squad of student evaluation forms. Mentoring has meaning when we take on for ourselves the task of learning. And we do it in the face of all the help sent our way. My freedom, my purpose, my learning, are all faces of the same intention: living out my own destiny and bringing this into the world with all the worth and generosity I can muster.

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Course 104: Making Peers the Point

A perfect source of learning is our peers. Despite all we know about the power of collaborative learning, we defend against doing this. When we listen to a presentation or a attend a workshop, and the leader asks us to break into small groups, most of us groan. “We didn’t come here to pool our ignorance.” This says volumes about our lack of appreciation for our peers and our own ideas about learning. When did we conclude that our peers were ignorant? We have been so conditioned to compete against our peers that we have no faith we can learn from them.

All learning is social. It is with our peers that we will ultimately find our voice and change our world. It is in community that our lives are transformed. Small groups change the world. Form one or join one. There are book groups, learning groups, and on-line dialogues everywhere.

Course 105: Treating the Workplace as Classroom

The final course is to view the workplace as a classroom. Not just for you, but for all involved. This is the best kind of experiential education: Let the business take on the purpose of teaching people how to run a business. Each person learns as many different aspects of the business as possible. This signals the end of specialists as they are replaced by full-service entrepreneurs. This is a particularly good strategy for a small business where it is difficult to keep people, pay big bucks, and invest in training. The boss says I will teach you all I know about this business, and we say yes.

If your setting is a large organization, view it as a training laboratory, where people come for a while and leave when their experiment is over. View every job this way. Be curious about it all. It is a great classroom and you can learn even if the boss is not interested in teaching. This also gives purpose to an organization or business. The workplace is an incubator for economic and emotional self-sufficiency.

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The Point

Think of all of this as home schooling, where you are the teacher and the student, the parent and the child. Montessori is a good model if you want some ideas and a powerful philosophy about learning. Maria Montessori spent most of her teacher education trying to get teachers to stop teaching. She believed that learning should be self-directed and collaborative. Find your local Montessori school and spend four hours in a classroom once a week for four weeks. You will find an imperfect but inspiring way to think about instruction and learning.

We have to spend a lot of our learning time trusting in what we know and knowing what we believe in. This is the challenge. There are few schools that teach this, which is why we have to create our own, even though it has only one student—you.

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