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From Living Mind to Living Mind
In his essay-cum-homily, “Mummy Wheat: A Sermon on the Value of Education, Which Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Getting a Ph.D.,”1 writer Jack Butler distinguishes “training” from “education”:
I am going to use that assembly-line metaphor that I despise--use it against itself, you might say. The difference in what I have called training and what I would call education is a difference in the end product. The end product of training is a mind designed to fit into a system. The end product of education is a mind.
Butler elaborates, “I could say that whereas a trained mind fits into a system, an educated mind can see the system itself, can step outside of it.”
Substitute “training” with “learning” and “education” with “learning to change the world,” and Butler’s distinction applies to the theme of this Sophist.
Preaching to the Choir
Some hard-nosed readers may clamor for a definition, wanting to know exactly what we mean by “learning to change the world.” But our guess is that many more readers intuitively grasp the concept.
Most nonprofits are trying to change the world. Let’s look briefly at two examples: The mission of Heifer Project International (http://www.heifer.org/) is “to end hunger and poverty and to care for the earth”; the mission of the March of Dimes (http://www.modimes.org/) is “to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects and infant mortality.” A world without hunger or poverty or birth defects would be a different world indeed.
Learning plays an important role in delivering on those missions. Whether for their members or constituents, their staff and volunteers, or the general public, nonprofits rely on education, training, advocacy, and outreach to help them fulfill their goals.
Learning to change the world isn’t some pie-in-the-sky ideal; it’s the driving force behind most work in the nonprofit sector.
True Believers
Without defining it precisely or limiting it unnecessarily, we can look at the essential characteristic of learning to change the world.
Simply sharing knowledge, the lowliest rung in Benjamin Bloom’s highly touted taxonomy of learning objectives, can have a profound impact on society. What, then, makes some information just information and some information the beginning of radical change in the way a person lives or society functions?
One answer is choice: the unpredictable but essential interaction between the learner and what’s learned. Learning to change the world is profoundly personal. Butler again helps:
You aren’t educated until you have given shape to what you know. You don’t know Mozart because you know what the notes are, you know him because you connect him to something that happens in your heart. If you can do that, you know that you can have more and bigger emotions than you otherwise would, and weirder thoughts. You don’t know what Kant thinks is wrong with Descartes’s version of St. Anselm’s notion of why God has to exist just because you can say ontological argument. You don’t know it until the relationship between imagination and existence starts to make sense to you, and starts to take on vital importance.
His examples are from the liberal arts, but you can see how “giving shape to what you know” is the lifeblood of the nonprofit sector. Stephanie Eskins Gleason, of the National Wildlife Federation, tells the following story of how learning offered through Wildlife University took a personal turn:
I received four “essays” from a teenager and his dad. The son took four courses. After each one he wrote an essay about what they could do in their yard to apply what he learned. Then they did the activities together and attached pictures of what they had done. You should see the water feature they built together. They knew which wildlife they could expect to use it, what would be required to maintain it properly, and how to design it for the most benefit to various species in their area (Texas)!2
This reliance on the individual to give shape to what she knows is what makes learning to change the world so intensely personal--and unpredictable. Engagement of this type, whether of mind or body or both, requires thoughtful, critical thinking, not blind faith. You can’t predict people’s reactions and actions when it comes to learning to change the world. You’re no longer dealing with fixed, knowable quantities, but with flux, evolution, change. As Butler writes, “The mind is not organized of facts built up to a whole, like bricks into a building, but according to the changing continuities of a living cell.”
Shifting Plates, Not Sands
While learning to change the world is personal, driven by individual choice, it’s also, ironically, impersonal and reliant on the unconscious. While it starts with the individual, much learning to change the world culminates in a larger context, in ways never fully contemplated by its authors or actors.
Let’s return to an earlier example. Imagine a red-cockaded woodpecker stopping in a Texas backyard. In dangerously low populations, the aid given a single member can have profound effects on the whole species--think of the butterfly effect and how little things can have huge implications. The Texas teenager who worked to provide food, water, and cover for wildlife in his backyard may never see the endangered bird or know it paid a visit; his work has expanded beyond his awareness.
Changing the world may suggest revolutionary, radical, even world-shattering events. In reality, it is often decidedly less dramatic. Broad, societal change often occurs in imperceptible ways--slow shifts in the tectonic plates, not volcanic eruptions. Individuals engaged in learning to change the world may begin a chain of events or thinking that may never come to fruition during their lifetimes and may not even be traced back to them. Despite its fundamentally personal nature, there is a necessary selflessness in learning to change the world.
Communion
Thinking about learning to change shifts a paradigm: Learning is no longer about just the practical--the type information, how to convey, and the use to the individual learner. It’s about how learning directly and indirectly influences a learner’s thoughts, interactions, and actions, how it impacts the world and those around her.
To learn to change the world, the learner has to feel a sense of connectedness and communion with the world. She has to be engaged. In Butler’s words, “Learning goes from living mind to living mind”--even if those “living” minds can only be found in books or online.
1 Jack Butler, “Mummy Wheat: A Sermon on the Value of Education, Which Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Getting a Ph.D.”
2 This quotation comes from the interview available at http://www.isoph.com/nwf_interview.htm.
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