| Most lemonade
is, in a sense, corporate. Neither you nor I invented it. That lemonade
is a part of culture, like karate, violins, pastrami, marriage,
language, profanity, pornography, sailboats, love, and mathematics.
Learning is also corporate. Most of the great models of learning we have
are corporate: initiations, families, monasteries, yeshivas, schools and
colleges, pupils and teachers. The quasi individualistic models of
learning, Moses on the mountain, the Buddha, the shaman, the vision
quester, the modern researcher, turn out not to be individualistic at
all. One sets out to slay the dragon from a place in culture and returns
with the dragon's head to claim one's reward, or one points the way for
others, or one heals. Questers and pilgrims can easily get lost in
nothingness. The idea of the lonely autodidact is a nice romantic
notion; it has great appeal in times of alienation, but it has very
limited value as a model of education. We don't learn all by ourselves,
and we don't learn just for ourselves. We don't buy into culture,
either. We come at culture not as absolutely autonomous individuals who
make entirely irrational choices to accept it or not, but as children
who are its creatures. Part of the value of an education is that it
enables a person to take up a position within culture and thus to
acquire a kind of autonomy. Autonomy, such as it is, results from
education; it does not precede it. Our whole discussion assumes a new
shape if we argue that we learn in order to become pilgrims, questers,
healers, teachers, warriors, mothers, priests, prophets, poets,
scientists, statesmen. Of course, some of these species are endangered.
But don't believe the wowsers who will tell you that all lemonade is for
sale. It isn't. There is lemonade so wonderful that kings and queens
mortgage their souls for it It cannot be bought and sold because it is
free—God's lemonade as it were.
One doesn't find it at the top of a lonely mountain, guarded by assasins.
It is like the philosopher's stone or the pearl of great price; women
find it in the street, children play with it. "Walk in
beauty," says the Navajo healer, and offers you a glass of
lemonade.
[Posted At Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms, 6 March 1998] |