LEARNING
IS TRANSFORMING
Marilyn Ferguson
( From The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time)
Think of the learner as an open system-a dissipative
structure, interacting with the environment, taking in information, integrating
it, using it. The learner is transforming the input,
ordering and reordering,
creating coherence. His worldview is continualIy enlarged to incorporate the new.
From time to time it breaks and is reformed, as in the acquiring of major
new skills and concepts: learning to walk, speak, read, swim, or write; learning
a second language or geometry. Each is a
kind of paradigm shift.
A learning shift is preceded by stress whose intensity ranges across a continuum: uneasiness, excitement, creative tension, confusion, anxiety, pain, fear. The surprise and fear in learning are described in The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda:
He slowly begins to learn-bit by bit at first, then in big chunks. And his thoughts soon clash. What he learns is never what he Pictured, or imagined, and so he begins to be afraid. Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly. His purpose has become a battlefield....
He must not run away. He must defy his fear and in spite of it he must take the next step in learning, 'and the next, and the next. He must be fully afraid and yet he must not stop. That is the rule! And a moment will come when his first enemy retreats. Learning is no longer a terrifying task.
The transforming teacher senses readiness to change, helps the "follower" or student respond to more complex needs, transcending the old levels again and yet again. The true teacher is also learning and is transformed by the relationship. just as Burns pointed out that a dictator is not a true leader because he is not open to input from his followers, a closed teacher-the mere "Power wielder"-is not a true teacher.
The closed teacher may fill the student with information. But the learner forfeits his participation. The students, like the citizens of a dictatorship, are unable to feed their needs and readiness back to the one who is supposed to facilitate their growth. It is like the difference between a loudspeaker and an intercom.
The open teacher, like a good therapist, establishes rapport and resonance, sensing unspoken needs, conflicts, hopes, and fears. Respecting the learner's autonomy, the teacher spends more time helping to articulate the urgent questions than demanding right answers.
Timing and nonverbal communication are critical, as we shall see. The learner senses the teacher's perceptions of his readiness, the teacher's confidence or skepticism. He "reads" the teacher's expectations. The true teacher intuits the level of readiness, then probes, questions, leads. The teacher allows time for assimilation, even retreat, when the going gets too heavy Just as you can't "deliver" holistic health, which must start with the intention of the patient, the true teacher knows you can't impose learning. You can, as Galileo said, help the individual discover it within.
The open teacher helps the learner discover patterns and connections, fosters openness to strange new possibilities, and is a midwife to ideas. The teacher is a steersman, a catalyst, a facilitator-- an agent of learning, but not the first cause.
Trust deepens over time. The teacher becomes more attuned, and more rapid and powerful learning can take place.
A teacher clear enough for such attunement obviously must have a healthy level of self-esteem, little defensiveness, few ego needs. The true teacher must be willing to let go, to be wrong, to allow the learner another reality. The learner who has been encouraged to hear inner authority is tacitly welcome to disagree. Submission to outer authority is always provisional and temporary. As the Eastern wisdom puts it, "If you see Buddha on the road, kill him."
Like the spiritual teacher who enlarges or heals the self-image of the disciple, awakening him to his own potential, the teacher liberates the self, opens the eyes, makes the learner aware of choice. We only learn what we always knew.
We learn to walk through fears that held us back. In the transformative relationship with a teacher, we move to the edge, our peace is disturbed, and we are challenged by what psychologist Frederick Perls called "a safe emergency."
The optimum environment for learning offers security enough to encourage exploration and effort, excitement enough to push us onward. Although a humanistic environment is not a sufficient condition for transformation/education, it engenders the necessary trust. We trust the teachers who give us stress, pain, or drudgery when we need it. And we resent those who push us for their own ego, stress us with double binds, or take us into the deep water when we're still frightened of the shallow.
Yet appropriate stress is essential. Teachers can fail to transform if they are afraid to upset the learner. "True compassion," said one spiritual teacher, "is ruthless." Or, as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire put it:
Come to the edge, he said.
They said: We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them ... and they flew.
Risk brings its own rewards: the exhilaration of breaking through, of getting to the other side, the relief of a conflict healed, the clarity when a paradox dissolves. Whoever teaches us this is the agent of our liberation- Eventually we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom. Finally, we must take charge of the journey, urging ourselves past our own reluctance and misgivings and confusion to new freedom.
Once that happens, however many setbacks or detours we may encounter, we are on a different life journey. Somewhere is that clear memory of the process of transformation: dark to light, lost to found, broken to seamless, chaos to clarity, fear to transcendence.
To understand how we learn fear and mastery, risk and trust, we have to look past the schools to our first teachers.
Parents are our models of exploration. From them we learned to retreat or advance. We were imbued with their expectations. Too often, we inherited second--generation fears, anxieties we sensed in them. And-if we are not conscious of the cycle--we are all too likely to pass their fears and our own on to our children. That is the heritage of uneasiness, bequeathed from generation to generation: fears of losing, falling, being left behind, being left alone, not being good enough.
Recent studies of the "fear of success " a fairly
common syndrome, revealed that its likeliest caus'e is the parent's
communication of the fear that the child will not be able to master the tasks at
hand. The child realizes simultaneously that
(1)
the task is considered important by the parent, and
(2)
the parent doubts that the child can do it unassisted. That individual
establishes a lifelong pattern of sabotage in his own successes whenever
he is on the verge of real mastery.
Most parents, it seems, don't mind if their children are
better than they at certain things: schoolwork, athletics, popularity. There is
vicarious satisfaction in a child's extending one's ambitions. But most parents
do not want their children to be different. We want to be able to understand
them and we want them to share our values. This fear of an alien' offspring
appears in myth and in science-fiction tales of children who leap into new modes
of being and are no longer subject to their parents' frailty or their mortal
limits, as in Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End.
If as parents we are afraid of risk and strangeness, we warn our children against trying to beat the system. We do not acknowledge their right to a different world. In the name of adjustment, we may try to spare them their sensible rebellion. In the name of balance, we try to save them from intensity, obsessions, excesses--in short, from the disequilibrium that allows transformation to occur.
A parent who shows confidence in the child's capacity to learn, who encourages independence, who counters fear with humor or honesty, can break the ancient chain of borrowed trouble. As increasing numbers of adults have undergone their own transformative process in the decade just ending, they have become aware of this tragic bequest, and they are a powerful force for change-a historically new factor.