Schoolishness and Alienation - A Conversation with Prof. Susan D. Blum

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The more I learned how people actually learn in what I call the wild, what we do in school began to seem stranger and stranger and stranger. All these rules, all these artificial constraints, and the mismatch became so salient for me.

Hi everyone, and happy New Year. Welcome back to the first episode of 2025. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. It's a strange thing that the concept of school has become an almost universal phenomenon over the last few hundred years. If you ask anyone almost anywhere in the world, they will be able to describe something that looks roughly like a shared concept of school. But maybe it didn't have to be this way. Maybe it could have been different. And this week, the amazing professor of anthropology Susan Blue soon joins me to talk about Schoolishness, which is her latest fantastic book based on decades of research into the cultural development of the dominant ideas around formal institutional education. Susan is Professor of Anthropology at Notre Dame University. She specializes in cultural, linguistic, and psychological anthropology with a particular focus on the study of China and the United States. Susan's latest book, Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic Joyful Learning, was published last year and the third in a trilogy about higher education. It follows on from I Love Learning, I Hate School: An Anthropology of College in 2016, and My Word: Plagiarism and College Culture in 2009. She also edited a widely read book calling into question the centrality and necessity of grading called Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning and What to Do Instead.

Fantastic. Well, thank you, Susan.

Susan, it's a great pleasure to meet you. I have a friend in Melbourne, Australia to thank for making the connection, Cameron Patterson, who recommended your book to me, which I had not heard of and was just, yeah, completely loved. I knew I would when he recommended it. And so it's a huge pleasure to be able to, yeah, chat to you today on the podcast.

Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Tim Logan. Thank you for the connection that your friend in Melbourne made, and I'm glad to hear that you like the book.

Good.

Yeah. Well, let's dig into it. So, I mean, first thing perhaps to say is we share something in our anthropological backgrounds. I'm an anthropology graduate, obviously not, not as steeped in the discipline as you are as a professor of anthropology, but I have, it's a, you know, has a, a strong place in my heart as a discipline, as a way of working, as a kind of very open and curious endeavor to learn about these strange things called humans and how they inhabit the world. So that perhaps, if we may, where we could start is one of the things you talk about is making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. And that's in a way an anthropological move. But it felt somewhat that's what you were doing with this thing that we are all in some way more or less familiar with called school or formal education. So yeah, perhaps maybe if you could just say a little bit about what was your intention there and the intention kind of behind the book as well.

Yeah, well, that is exactly kind of what happened. I had spent the first half of my career studying China, which began sort of unfamiliar, strange, why do they do these things? And then after I spent decades getting familiar with it, it became familiar to me. And then I was actually teaching a class here at Notre Dame. I'd been teaching for a long time before I came here. And I was writing about plagiarism and I was absorbing all of these critiques of students these days and kids these days. And, you know, we have to be rigorous and we have to be strict and we have to make sure that they only do what we allow them to do and everything. And I was talking to students and something clicked for me that made me realize I was teaching about children and learning in Samoa and children and learning in all these other places, and I had never wondered at all about children and growing up and learning right here where I am. And the more I learned in the context of human history, in the context, not so much cross-culturally anymore, but I learned how people actually learn in what I call the wild, and what we do in school began to seem stranger and stranger and stranger. All these rules, all these artificial constraints, all of these things that we're not allowed to do. You can't ask your friend, you can't consult a reference work, you have to write in this particular way. All of it began to seem so odd. And I began to learn more about the history of formal education and its roots in kind of the factory model, the roots in eugenics, the roots in sorting. And then I learned more about learning and how people learn, not so much learning this particular equation for that particular test, but how curious people go out and try to actually uncover things that they care about. And the mismatch became so salient for me. And I, I've been sort of dwelling in this tension between what we do in school, which is so strange, and what we do everywhere outside school. And so that kind of animated this particular book, but I've kind of been doing this project for 4 books and 20 years, and I've had a lot of assistance from undergraduates who have helped me. I've done ethnography, I've done all these things, and I experiment like crazy in my classes, and I observe what happens when you change one thing or another. Yeah.

Amazing.

Well, I guess it's true participant observation when you are an educator as well as an anthropologist studying education.

Yes. It's kind of exhausting because there's no retreating from the field site.

You never get away. Yeah, exactly. Amazing. Absolutely. But if I could just to reflect on what you're saying about, because I'm also very interested in the cultural roots of this more industrial formal schooling system and very much so all of the eugenics stuff that was the darling of science in the, you know, the early 1900s, but I I think the thing that I really appreciate about the anthropological lens on it is that it was coming from a very specific cultural context in which that was growing up. And I, I've had these kind of debates back and forth with a few people about the universality of the kind of formal educating mode. I mean, you know, some people would argue that this is just the way humans gather to educate their young. I mean, to me, absolutely not. I think it's a deeply cultural product, the way that it has come to be, as you say, in very strange batch processing. I don't want to put words in the mouths of the others who, of course, there's nuances to their position, but at the same time, for me, there is something very cultural about the way that it has grown up in particular type of psychology, a particular time in history and politics, and particularly in Europe and in Prussia and then in the US. Any reflections there about just how cultural this thing is? It does— it could have been different, right? That's a phrase that I come back to all the time, like, it could have been different.

Well, it could, and I think that's the hopeful takeaway. It could be different, right? If it could have been, it still could be. But the institutional entrenchment is very powerful. But I— there are a number of reasons that what you're saying is quite true. Anthropologists have looked across cultures at formal schooling, formal education, and non-formal learning. And there are people like Jean Lave and Suzanne Gaskins who have gone and looked, and Barbara Rogoff, people who have looked at the ways people learn through apprenticeship, how they learn through trial and error, Suzanne Gaskins talks about learning through abiding attention and wide-angled observation. David Lancy, in his amazing book, The Anthropology of Childhood, talks about autonomous learners, and he shows how children often set themselves a task of trying to figure something out and learning. And all of that has been, as he says, tamed in this sort of spread of formal education. There have in some cases been other formal education settings. There are, as somebody pointed out to me recently, there have been bush schools in certain parts of Sub-Saharan Africa where children would be gathered in what might look familiar to us, where they are taught directly certain kinds of information or when people are learning to do navigation on the open sea, they are sometimes taught directly by someone who is an expert. But those are not universal. They exist cross-culturally, as you might expect. Humans invent all kinds of ways of doing things, but they are not the majority and they are not how things always go. And even in formal schooling, I want to put in a plug for a wonderful project called Preschool in Three Cultures that was a project organized by Joseph Tobin. He had two different sets of collaborators for the two different editions of the book, which were approximately 20 years apart. But in both cases, he and his collaborators studied preschool in the United States, China, and Japan. And what they found were dramatic cultural differences in the ways even preschools were organized, whether the primary unit of analysis was the individual or the group, or what exactly the role of the teacher was and how individual differences were encouraged or suppressed. And it's fascinating. So even in the context of formal schooling, there are differences. There, these differences persist into higher levels of school too. So for instance, in Japan, they don't have ability grouping. And, you know, in the United States, we are all about tracking or ability grouping so that the so-called gifted can go faster. And speed is a cultural value. Precocity, doing something sooner than somebody else, younger than somebody else, age grading, All of these are cultural values. This idea of— I have colleagues who study age and age as a kind of cultural product, that age has not always existed. There's Chudakov's book, Howard Chudakov, who has a book called How Old Are You? and the importance of age that arose with the widespread institution of formal education where you had to know exactly how old people were so you could put them in these groups and then you could sort them, the ones who knew more at an earlier age.

Yeah.

So that you can then call them, you know, higher IQ. And that IQ was basically that, how much do you know divided by your age? And all of these things are intertwined. Yeah. And they are cultural, but because of the dominance of what we sometimes call in the social sciences now, WEIRD societies, Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic, democratic with an asterisk. Exactly. But because of the spread of colonialism and certain kinds of dominant societies, these have become the kind of norm worldwide. So you can see very familiar institutions all over the world now, but that is a really recent phenomenon.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I completely love Joseph Heinrich's work, the weirdest— the book, The Weirdest People in the World. And absolutely. And this That's exactly why I love anthropology because it gives you a cultural lens to think about these things because, so for example, as you were speaking, I was thinking about some people in the, in the, you know, in the educational debates will refer to biological justifications. For example, David Geary's work about biologically primary and secondary knowledge. And we could go down that rabbit hole, but I don't particularly want to, but my point is that there is often a reaching for justification as to why it is like it is. And, you know, biology is a many pitfalls in that conversation. But the cultural lens, I think as you see it, you know, the responses that humans have in groups to raising children and you know, how to go out into the world and be a person and all of these different things, you know, they are so deeply culturally rooted that I think for me it just is, provides such a useful lens on, again, that question that it could have been different and it is different in many different places. And in, in order to understand that, that's where the ethnography comes in. But perhaps then we could start bringing in this weird idea, I think, in the weird, in the Joseph Heinrich sense of schoolishness, such a lovely concept that you've, you've used. I don't know that you've coined it necessarily. I think you're drawing on other people's work, but your book Schoolishness and just this, this idea that is somehow beginning to seem to be universal in a way as a result of globalization and colonialism and all the things. But yeah, perhaps you could just describe what is this this strange thing called schoolishness?

Yeah, and in terms of the term, I didn't coin it. I had seen it used by one person and it inspired me. And then since the book was published, I've found other people who have also used the term. But somebody went back and saw that the term schoolish is attested in the Oxford English Dictionary to the 15th century. So, okay, just because of the way English is formed, it— we understand what that means. But for me, schoolishness has to do with all of the things we take for granted in a school. So you have a building and you have teachers and you have students and you have time set aside from life for this kind of learning that somebody has predetermined, and they are going to evaluate the learners on how well they can replicate whatever the learning is as the teacher decides. And there are certain kinds of questions that are part of testing. Testing that are done by the teacher or the institution. So these are questions that have correct answers, and the job of the learner is to match that answer. And then there are consequences for knowing, often punishment or whatever. In this context of schoolishness, um, there are certain emotions that are often found which have to do with anxiety and fear as the evaluation the powerful teacher becomes a kind of threat or perhaps promise. But as Alfie Kohn says, you can be punished by rewards as well as punished by what we more often recognize as punishment. So there are a lot of things that happen in schoolishness. You are fed information in Paulo Freire's sense, and it isn't that you want it or need it, but that it is predetermined. So all of these things look like school. You can go into a room and see if it looks like a school. If it looks like a school, you probably have students, multiple students in perhaps rows. It doesn't have to be rows, but the kind of passivity is built into the physical structure. There is a distinction between the teacher who is usually one and older and knowledgeable, and the multiple children or students, the novices, who tend to be younger, but not inevitably, because we do have adult learning and adult education. But those are some of the dimensions of schoolishness, which, as I have come to see the world through this lens, helps explain some of what I consider to be alienation. So alienation is when you're doing something not for yourself. You're doing something for some external, extrinsic reason. And there are psychological downsides to being in alienating situations over and over. And to the extent that in the modern world, especially the weird world or the affluent world, school expands to occupy most of the years of childhood. From preschool through higher education and even postgraduate education. So we're talking perhaps 20 years of school. And if school in and of itself is harmful, that is a huge problem. Yeah.

And just to, as a small aside, it also rhymes with foolishness, which which I like.

It does. And I put that in there because people kept saying it. And for me, that was just kind of an accident until it seemed to resonate with everybody.

Yeah. Right, exactly. But the thing that I find incredibly interesting about it is just how persistent it is though over time. Because I think, you know, there are all these, the memes about the industrial system and comparing it to other industries that have changed radically over the last decades. And then this persistent schoolishness. I mean, it is dogged, It just has not changed in many, many ways structurally, you could say. I mean, people would argue that the things going on within those spaces have changed. I'm not totally sure they've changed that much. Some of the technology changes, some of the content has changed, but actually it's incredibly dogged in the way that it has stuck to this very schoolish frame. And I, yeah, I wondered what, why do you feel that it has been so persistent? As a structural concept that, you know, we just, we all kind of just get it, we understand it, we can't think almost outside it somehow?

There are a lot of reasons. I think you're right, there are changes, but they tend to be either small or temporary or sometimes superficial. And I, I was talking to some people about somebody who teaches in a school, and the teachers are obligated to— this is a secondary school— the Teachers are obligated to teach to the test, and they know it's bad. They know it's bad for the students. It's bad pedagogy. It's bad for learning. It takes time away from more meaningful activities that they could do, but they have to do it. There are accrediting agencies that mandate these tests, and there will be consequences perhaps for the school more than the individuals. But what the tests are used for varies also. But these things are are in place. There are institutions that create the tests, that score the tests. We have PISA, you know, the international test of high school learning, and people rank school systems on the basis of these tests. There are a lot of consequences built in to the familiar structures, and so to opt out of the structure usually requires a kind of privilege to disregard it. So one of the things that influenced me almost 20 years ago, I had a student assistant who was from South Korea, and she had gone to a Montessori school, which is of course in tension with schoolishness and has been for 100 years, as have many other progressive education methods. And she had gone to a Montessori school, but in South Korea, the expectation was by time students went to middle school and high school, they were preparing for the college entrance exam, which is the same all over East Asia. It's kind of the SAT on steroids. It's the entrance exam that determines what you study and which university you go to and so forth. And she didn't want to spend her whole childhood doing that, so instead she went to some international prep school so that she studied for the SAT and not the South Korean college entrance exam. So she then was able to come to the university in the United States and had many, many more options and much more freedom. But this was because her parents could send her to one of those schools. And her parents were worldly educated enough to see the disadvantages of this rigorous South Korean education system. Um, but we have in the United States and worldwide a lot of people who know real school. They know it when they see it. Real school looks very disciplined. Real school means having homework and having tests. And if you don't get real school, it doesn't look good enough. And so there are many students and their families who really insist on something that might look like real school. In higher education, there was a study several years ago where they contrasted learning in conventional lecture and test courses and learning in what we now tend to call active learning situations. And the learning was so much better in the active learning situations, but the students felt felt that they learned more in the lecture courses. And so the evidence on a test was that they actually were not able to know their own learning very confidently, but they knew what real learning looked like. And what it looked like was a professor lecturing and then being tested on that material. So if you were just talking to your classmates, that didn't look like school. And I think this pervades every level of education from the worksheets that preschoolers are given so that they can prepare for kindergarten, which has now also become very, very academic. At every level, people think they know what school looks like. So there's a psychological dimension, there's a structural dimension, institutional dimension, even the architecture. So when I have colleagues who want to teach in a more active learning sort of way, a less schoolish way, but they're assigned to classrooms where the chairs are bolted to the floor and they're in rows and they can't rearrange the furniture, it's very hard to fight the schoolishness of the very room that you're teaching in.

Absolutely.

And I've seen the absolute opposite of that where the room is changed, but the frames and the expectations and the cultural norms of the teaching staff working in those rooms weren't addressed. And therefore what they tried to do is just do the old schoolish thing in the new rooms. So the room itself doesn't necessarily change, but it can absolutely— the opposite— be a real barrier, definitely.

I talked to somebody recently about a class she had in graduate school that pretended to be democratic and egalitarian and everything. They were sitting in a circle and the professor did almost all the talking anyway. So we are also socialized into these roles, and it's very challenging to undo that training.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, it was a slightly unfair question to ask you why it's persisted, because I mean, as you say, it's such a deep question with so many different facets. And absolutely, I completely agree. But one of the other things I think you bring out really powerfully in the book is how it's also colonized childhood in other ways. So for example, you talk about everything about childhood has become material for pedagogizing even play. And so the idea that everything becomes a learning opportunity, but not just a learning opportunity in a natural sense, but a learning, a teaching opportunity for how can we structure the learning of this person even in their free play. And so that colonizing of those spaces, I think also just takes it a whole nother layer deeper into our psyche. Of, well, it's not real learning if there's just exploration, or if people are collaborating together without a supposed pedagogue in the mix.

Yeah, and linguistic anthropology has been very powerful in helping me see some of this because we know that children learn language without being taught, and yet we have this model that parents are the teachers of their children. And when people go around the world and they observe how how people— it isn't only parents— how people are interacting with young children and toddlers. We see a huge range of interaction, from kids being strapped to the back of somebody and just going and working in the field while the daylight is out, to having a 5-year-old child nanny, to the kids playing in mixed age groups. We see all kinds of As children are exploring, they're wandering around, they're shepherds, but they're playing and they're doing all kinds of things and learning and maybe working a little and doing all kinds of stuff, but nobody's directly teaching them. But now we have this idea that parents are supposed to be teachers. They're supposed to have these one-on-one relationships at all times with their children, which is, if you have children, you know that is exhausting. And that is not how it's been. My parents did not have one-on-one interactions with me every minute of my young life. I mean, I'm one of 5 children. They took care of us. We were safe. We were fed. We were taken to school. But they weren't quizzing us every minute and instructing us about things every minute. But to watch, I'm going to say middle-class US white parents interacting with their children, it's to observe constant pedagogizing. The parents are constantly teaching their kids, asking their kids to repeat, quizzing their children, giving them opportunities to show off what they've learned. And it's exhausting.

For everybody.

It is exhausting for everybody. And it teaches a kind of dependence that I think is harmful.

Yeah.

But I would also love to make the connection back to alienation with that, because I think that's the other thing that's going on. And I would, I guess I would reflect on, there's no blame attached to that, and I'm not implying you are attaching any, but I think, I don't know if you know Hartmut Rose's work, a German sociologist, and he talks about this, the idea of dynamic stabilization, that the, the society is just moving faster and faster and everybody's kind of running to keep up. And it's this mode of aggression. He talks about this mode of aggression and alienation. So it's very similar. He's a critical theorist, but he talks very powerfully about the idea that there's this constant optimization going on, you know, so that interaction with your child is like, how can I help them to be better all the time? Because I know they need to be as good as they can be to then be able to compete in the, the increasingly fast-paced economy that they need to compete in. And et cetera. So there's always this logic of optimization somehow. And he contrasts that with this logic of resonance, you know, so the idea of is a completely different way of relating to the world, which I think personally I just find completely beautiful. But also I just, I, I really hear it in what you are describing of this pedagogizing of every moment is this optimization. How do we improve? How do we develop? And quicker and better and faster. And again, quite weird ideas, I would say.

Oh, absolutely. I think that's exactly what I'm also talking about in different phrasing.

Yeah.

You know, optimizing your children in some places so that they can get into a competitive preschool, so they can get into the desirable next level elementary primary school, so that they can go to the college prep high school so they can get into a selective university, so they can either go to postgraduate school or network and get into a financially secure and stable situation in this genuinely precarious moment.

Right.

So that they're not wrong about the fact that we don't have a lot of economic and social stability. So the idea that all of childhood, 25 years of childhood, is in quest of mostly financial, economic capital and stability. Security.

Yeah.

And security in an insecure world. That's true. And I see it in the activities that children are doing now. They go to violin lessons and they go to gymnastics and they go Mandarin lessons, and then they go to painting, and then of course there's soccer, football, and all the other things that every upper-middle-class child has to be able to demonstrate as they apply to competitive universities, especially in the US but elsewhere as well, and as they position themselves in society to the right kind of person to be hired. By a firm or something so that you have the same kind of experiences. And I've heard of parents of 8-year-olds taking their children to 5 different activities after school in a single day. And that's exhausting. It's harmful. It's alienating. And, you know, the kids might like it if they have friends at those places. And I'm sure the people who are directing it are doing their best. I think one thing I'd like to emphasize in all of this is that I think Everybody's intentions.

Absolutely.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's not that there are villains, it's just that the system has made it so that individuals can either follow the logic of the system or with difficulty resist the logic of the system. And that's where an anthropological perspective differs, let's say, from a psychological perspective in in that we are much more likely to look at these multi-layered systems rather than just to see it as an individual adapting to something.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And there's a situating of the response of the opposite of schoolishness, right? The de-schoolishness, unschoolishness. I'm not quite sure what you're referring to it. But in contrast to that, like, I mean, the fear of insecurity is a phenomenally powerful motivator. So to choose not that and to choose unschoolishness seems to many like, A, not even an option, or B, the most reckless and irresponsible thing you could do.

Yes, and its logical conclusion, there's unschooling. And one of the people that I discovered is also using the term schoolishness is someone named Akilah S. Richards, who advocates for families who are choosing to unschool their children. And there's a whole network of self-directed education where people are unschooling their children, sometimes at great sacrifice. Often a parent decides to opt out of the workforce to be around their children, and sometimes unschooling is lumped together with homeschooling, but homeschooling can sometimes look like schoolishness just at home. I once was asked to give a talk about China to a group of homeschoolers, and I walked into this room and there was a chalkboard and there were desks. It was basically a schoolroom, but in a house rather than a school. But unschooling in the pure sense often rejects the whole notion of schoolishness and it follows the interests of the child, the learner. I went to a talk a few weeks ago online, but about somebody who was studying international unschooling families. They were traveling to different places and their children were becoming exposed to all kinds of things. But there's a study by Peter Gray and Gina Riley about how the adults who had been unschooled old think about their upbringing, and most of them are glad that they had that. But occasionally somebody says, I was limited in my choices because I didn't have enough formal math classes or something like that, right? And so many people are worried that if they don't teach their children how to take these tests, if they don't do the biology classes with the people their age, age, they will be out of luck later on, or they won't get into a good college, or they can't go to medical school. And there are cases where people have been successful. So one of the colleges that I know rather well is Hampshire College in the United States, and they don't give grades, for instance. The students develop a course of study that they kind of put together on their own, and then their entire fourth year of university is spent doing a project that they devise under the guidance of some mentors, and they have no grades at all. And they do go to medical school, they do go to graduate school, they, they write scientific papers, they do all kinds of things, but it's a small scale. And it's been established since the early 1970s, so there is a track record it's not just one lone individual saying, I'm going to figure it out on my own.

Yeah. And it's, I mean, the thing I struggle with about that is that there is often an instrumentalist justification for why we're doing it. So it's like the reason becomes, it's as good or better than the schooling. So everything's in comparison to, again, it's relative to schoolishness. Oh, it's less alienating, but they still do as well.. And in a way there's something fundamentally different about the thing we're talking about, right? Like as different as the optimization versus the resonance. To me, it's like it has a, it's a different way of relating to maybe to each other, to the world. And I mean, on that note, I really appreciate Ivan Illich's work and Deschooling Society. And he was also then very interested in this idea of conviviality and tools for conviviality. Reality. How, how actually do we create community, relate to each other, to one another? That's quite different as an educational experience for itself, not because it helps you on the conveyor belt of the success narrative.

Yes, and I think I'm sort of busted on my use of the same justification because I I feel the same pressure to explain that it is just as good and you can do all the things that you can do through conventional schooling, even though that's not where my heart is, right? I, I teach classes myself, and one of the things I often ask my students— I, I don't use grades, so I, I have students do a reflection mid-semester and at the end of the semester, and we meet briefly to talk about it, but one of the questions I often ask is, did you make a friend? You know, how were your relations with the class? And for me, those are important outcomes, and those are outcomes that I can see. We eat in class, we have conviviality for sure. I teach some classes on food, and we talk about eating together. We talk— sometimes my class is noisy. People people are really interacting. And for me, it's resonance. It's like literally sound, right? And you can hear it happening when something good is happening in the room. And that's really what I want to see through this authentic engagement in the class. But also, as someone who teaches in an institution, I have to be able to also show they 'wrote this many words' or 'here's the product of their learning'—

Exactly. —that it's also responsible. Yeah, I mean, again, you'd be irresponsible if you didn't, right? I mean, that, that in a way is the holding of these tensions because we have to be pragmatic in that sense. I mean, and that's often what is so easily dismissed about the so-called, the romantic progressive educators who were just, you know, 'wouldn't it be nice if the world worked like this, but it doesn't. So get back to reality and get back to school. And it isn't just that, but it is, we do have to hold the reality that, that we are all working in current systems. But my, I mean, my hope is that there are important reasons why all of the systems and the ways that institutions are operating are unsustainable in a very deep way. And we need to, they need to be evolving into something else quite rapidly based on climate and big issues like that. But maybe just to kind of bring it back around, cuz I think it's also again, really important in that slightly more pragmatic move to show how this is possible in spaces where, where schoolishness is currently prevalent. Because for, it's not for every parent to be making these choices to, you know, doing the radical moves, pulling young people out and creating their own situations, whatever. So perhaps you could just speak about the example that you give of the Bowman Creek Education Ecosystem Project, because I just think it's a really concrete, lovely example of how this is really possible, you know, it, it's really possible to do in spaces. It doesn't require world transformation and, you know, burning all the systems down and rebuilding.

I'm so glad you asked about that. That project really has a very important place in my heart. And I see that I keep talking about emotion here, and that's partly because humans are very emotional beings and and teaching is relational and experiential and learning is experiential. And so to ignore the emotional is to really cut off half of our being. But I started learning about the Bowman Creek Educational Ecosystem by accident. I was invited to help with a grant proposal and I ended up studying it 3 years, 3 summers. So I understand it well now. Now, it's now evolved into something else that we call the Institute for Community Engagement, but it's still run by the same person. But basically this is an engineering, or fundamentally an engineering internship in the community in this particular region that emphasizes real life problems as ways of structuring Learning, and it brings together people of all different ages, backgrounds. We had high school students and we had 50-year-old community college students from all over the country with all different majors. And basically this was project-based learning and problem-based learning in a community. So they were divided into teams and each team had kind of a general theme, but their job was to work with the community to solve a real problem. And then once they identified the problem, they had the summer to figure out what they needed to learn in order for that to happen. So that's how actual engineers do their work. So it was run by two engineers who were frustrated at the kind of inauthentic problems that their students were getting in the classroom. Classroom, and they wanted to give them hands-on experience. But in the process, the interns had to learn all kinds of technical material. They had to measure things. They had to learn programming. They had to learn about laws and regulations. But they also had to engage with the community, and they had to talk to politicians, and they had to wait. This was something that was so fascinating, even to the and some of them commented on it, that in school everything is efficient, it's maximized for efficiency, or in your term, optimized for learning. And in the real world, sometimes you put in an application and the person whose job it was to approve it was on sick leave, or this summer maybe they were having a family trip, and so the team couldn't proceed until they got that permission. And we would consider that in school to be a waste of time. Yeah. But it was real life experience. And this project, the summer that I spent the most time there, there were 8 teams and they had these projects like trying to keep a tree nursery alive because a tree nursery can grow little trees on vacant lots, very inexpensive. Aggressively, and then plant them in other places when they're bigger to help with the tree canopy, which is a huge issue in all cities in the world, especially in this moment of climate change that people have recognized. It also beautifies the neighborhood and so forth, but it was hard to get the water to the trees because sometimes the trees were on lots adjacent to a yard that didn't have a functioning sprinkler or hose. And so this was an engineering problem, this was a botanical problem, this was a social and political and economic problem. How do you get the spigot hooked up? Who does that? Yeah. And then how much water do you need? What does the water pressure have to be? How often do you have to do it? How do you know if it's getting enough water? So they learned to program little devices so they could measure the water And it was breathtaking and very successful. And the students had to present their work. They learned communication. They had to learn so many things, but it was not in a classroom. It was outside. There was no predetermined curriculum. The test was, could they keep the trees alive by the end of the summer? So for me, this was the antithesis of schoolishness. It was evidence of how how well people can learn even hard things when they want to and when they have support. So support is one of the critical things that schools could supply, you know. If we— we don't have to throw out the entire notion of institutional education because support made all the difference. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I— it's just, yeah, again, so resonant with you, your chapter 6 in the book on time. I mean, you know, so much about how we carve up time and it's just even that phrase, a waste of time. We are so obsessed with the efficiency around that. And I agree, just, you know, it's not rocket science in a way, right? You know, they're in community, they're doing meaningful work that's adding value. It's just, you know, participating in life and that's how, where the learning is and, you know, the support and the role of the educator shifts fundamentally, obviously. But it's still, there is still a role for an educator, as you say, providing support and guidance. And yeah, no, I love it. Thank you, Susan. I mean, so much there. So many more questions I have, but maybe next time. But thank you. No, it's a fantastic book and many of your previous books as well. And so yeah, thank you so much for all of the work.

Well, thank you, Tim Logan, for asking me all these great questions. My brain will be buzzing for many, many hours now, and I hope we do have a chance for follow-up conversations.

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