Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Pickaxe

AI generated image

The boy was obsessed with both the Minecraft video game and the Harry Potter books. It was a toss-up between which he loved more. I've never played the game, nor read the books, but I feel like I know everything about both because of this boy, who came to school each day alive with his enthusiasm for his twin and often merged pursuits.

Most days, this boy would come to school to play Minecraft and Harry Potter, not as a video game or book, but rather as the foundation for dramatic play. His passion drew other kids into his games where they built structures, thwarted Wither Skeletons, and cast spells using words that sounded vaguely Latin.

Real-world conflict would often disrupt their play as equally passionate children objected or questioned or challenged his preferred version of their mutual games. It didn't matter that he was the only one among these preschoolers who actually played video games at home or whose parents read the Harry Potter books aloud: the only one who knew the "right answers" to put it in school-ish terms. The other kids knew their own "right answers" and strived to weave their own interests, passions and ideas into the play. Naturally, they would bicker over how that would work. Often they would negotiate something new under the sun and continue playing. Sometimes, however, agreement wasn't possible so they would branch off into smaller groups to pursue divergent creative paths. 

After days when things fell apart, this boy would return home where he did research (e.g., played more Minecraft or revisited Harry Potter scenes) returning to school the following day with new ideas and directions that he hoped would persuade or assuage or include the others so that their games could again merge. And the other kids would do the same with their own passions. I can only guess at what these children were learning, but their collective curiosity and creativity was fully engaged, day-after-day as they lived their lives of passion, and that has always been enough for me.

In other words, it was play-based, or self-directed, learning like is found in preschools around the world: children pursuing their own interests in the company of others who are likewise pursuing their own interests, with the result being something larger than themselves.

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As an adult, if I don't know something that I either need or want to know, my first step these days is to ask Google. For instance, when I couldn't recall "Wither Skeletons" I turned to Google for help. For most of my life, finding answers wasn't so simple. Growing up, our family owned a set of encyclopedias and a dictionary, but most of the time, answers to even simple questions required asking adults. When your immediate sphere failed to produce results, and that was often the case, there was the library. That typically required getting to the library then checking out and actually reading books. In other words, if you wanted to know more about pirates, UFOs, the author Thomas Wolfe, or anything that wasn't part of your regular world, it was a project, and not always one that was worth the effort, which meant you were often left to just wonder and wait until the answers found you.

There's nothing wrong with wondering and waiting. In fact, that's something that Google has taken from us. Although, in all honesty, I'm fond of having Minecraft and Thomas Wolfe facts at my fingertips, even as I sometimes yearn for those days of wondering.

When I got to university, I enrolled in a class called Use of the Library, where I learned how to be a power-user of card catalogues, indexes, and microfiche. It was probably the best class I ever took on any topic in that I learned how to ask my questions in ways that most efficiently revealed the answers I needed or wanted. Even well into the age of search engines, many of the skills and habits I learned in this class came in handy. For instance, not so long ago, I had to sort through the millions of "hits" that resulted from every Google search. If my question was of the objective variety -- say, how many cups in a gallon -- the first answer generally sufficed. But with questions resulting in more subjective answers -- say, the best color to paint a baby nursery -- I was forced to dig deeper, clicking through dozens of links, rephrasing my questions, and even researching the sources of the information and opinions the search turned up, all things I learned to do from my pre-internet class.

But that's all now largely in the past.

When I use Google today, the top result is most often an AI summary. The search phrase "Thomas Wolfe's life", for instance, turns up a tidy little collection of facts distilled from 11 credible sources. There is a button I can hit if I want to "dive deeper in AI mode" or I can click through to these 11 links. I really want to hate this, but I don't. At 63-years-old, I'm a self-directed learner. I'm not interested in writing my own 2000 word essay on the life-and-times of one of America's most intensely autobiographical novelists. I just figured that learning a little more about his life would enhance the experience of reading his novels. "AI mode" gave me just what I was looking for in a matter of seconds. I mean, I have fond memories of the library and all, but this is much better for my purposes.

Although . . . if I wanted an AI to write a bespoke 2000 word essay on the life-and-times of Thomas Wolfe, including my opinion that his work (based solely on having read half of The Web and the Rock), while worthy, is obviously, and sometimes embarrassingly, that of a young man who could have used a more rigorous editor, it would do exactly that.

And this is a big part of why the educational world is up-in-arms over AI. Kids are trying to submit AI generated essays as their own work. Teachers in standard schools are clutching their pearls. How will their students learn "think for themselves" if AI not only answers their questions, but snaps them into the exact outline or format required by the teacher, including a few "personal" asides and a nice tidy bibliography? How will they learn to do their own research? How will they learn to develop and communicate complex and original ideas?

I'm thinking about that young fan of Minecraft and Harry Potter, who, as a preschooler, was teaching himself all of these things -- researching, thinking critically and creatively, then not just communicating with his colleagues, but meshing his ideas together with theirs in complex and original ways. The academic essay is far from the only way to practice these skills.

The question I'm asking in this brave new world of AI is, Why are we making kids grind out 2000 word essays that a machine can produce in seconds?

I mean, that's what we build machines for after all: making onerous tasks easier. There's no virtue in, say, taking my dirty clothing down to the river when there's a machine that can do my laundry for me in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the effort. It's pretty cool that there is a machine that prints Thomas Wolfe's 800 page novels for me so that I don't have to make my own copy by hand, the way educated monks did prior to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. And who in their right mind would spend a whole day in the library researching Wolfe's life and times when a tap of the finger brings me everything I want to know from the comfort of my own living room?

Of course, writing essays for school is a different thing. Doing laundry or printing books or learning more about an author to enhance my enjoyment are not intended to "teach" me anything. It's not the essay itself that's important, they say, but rather the process of researching, thinking, and then communicating it that matters. That's where the learning comes in, right? Having a machine write that essay for you defeats the purpose. At the end of the day, the 2000 word essay isn't really about the 2000 word essay at all, but the learning that happens in the process of producing the essay. And that's presumedly what AI steals from kids. That's what they're wringing their hands over, although they typically neglect to mention the main reason they need those essays that they may or may not actually read: assigning grades.

In real life, which is to say life beyond academia, essays don't exit. Few people write them and far fewer read them, except, of course, AIs, which they use as raw material for their own summaries and essays. The vast majority of "first drafts" created in business today -- emails, sales materials, research reports, data analysis, presentations -- are already being created by machines. In real life, when writing needs to get done for tangible reward, be it money or (maybe) even grades, it's being done by AI. Is it any wonder that kids who have been assigned an essay on a topic they neither want or need to learn about turn to the same tool adults turn to for mind-numbing repetitious work? They're not idiots. They've long known that the goal of most schooling is the grade, not the learning. That's the clearest lesson we teach in standard school.

The truth is that just as the machines have killed doing laundry in the local stream, they have likewise killed writing for hire everywhere except in standard schools.

That said, researching, thinking, and communicating are definitely valuable life skills. Indeed, researching, thinking, and communicating defines a life of purpose. When a person is free to pursue their purpose in life, their interests, their passions, they don't need teachers assigning 2000 word essays because the focus is on the learning rather than the grade. That boy who was obsessed with Minecraft and Harry Potter would have never let a machine do his research, thinking, and communicating for him because that's the fun part! He was not just self-motivated, but driven to learn as much as he could about his passions, to fit what he learned into his actual life, and to include others in the process. And shouldn't that be our goal?

Many people refer to my blog posts as essays, but they're not, at least not in the way academia defines them. No, what I do here on the blog is thinking. I'm now over 18 paragraphs into this post and I still don't know exactly where it's going. An essayist is meant to follow an outline, to start by telling the reader what they're going to write, writing it, then conclude by summarizing what they've written. In other words, in a school-ish essay most of the thinking is done before the first word is written, which means that the fun part is finished, the window of curiosity is closed, and all that's left now is the work of proving to a teacher that I've done the thinking.

As the writer Flannery O'Conner famously said, "I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say." That's how I use writing as well. I do it here on a blog because I've been doing it so long that I remember the word "blog" is short for "weblog" which was a term coined to mean a kind of online journal or diary. The possibility that others might read what I've written helps sharpen my writing and therefore my thinking, but at bottom this is where I write my way to some kind of understanding. Researchers say that humans struggle to focus their thoughts on a single thing for more than about 8 seconds -- "the window of consciousness" -- unless they are in dialog with others. Then we can hold a thought or work on a problem for hours. When I write, I'm in an imaginary dialog with a reader who is prodding me with "Tell me more," "Did you ever consider . . . " and "What about . . ." But none of it happens unless I'm actually curious about something to begin with.

Like my friend who loved Minecraft and Harry Potter, I enjoy the process of thinking something through. Everybody loves the process of thinking something through, but only if that something interests them. 

Several years ago "Why I hate school" was trending on the old Twitter platform. Most of it was of the school-is-boring variety -- a perfectly valid criticism because there is simply no excuse for learning to be boring. One kid wrote, "School is boring because it's not about Beyonce."

Why can't school be about Beyonce? Minecraft? Harry Potter? The school-ish response is to scold, If we just let them study whatever they want, then how will they learn algebra? How will they learn about the life and times of Thomas Wolfe? How will they learn to write a 2000 word essay? In other words, how will they learn about all the boring school-ish things they need to learn so they can do more schooling? "Need to learn" is defined, not by life or curiosity, but by the curriculum. How are curricula developed? School-ish adults decide what they want children to know by some randomly selected age, then reverse engineer a delivery schedule the way one plans a manufacturing process in business. The teachers in this metaphor are the workers along the assembly line, expected to put it all together. Curiosity, passion, and life itself, the real evolutionary engines of learning, are left out entirely so teachers are required to implement a system of Skinnerian motivators (e.g., rewards and punishments). "Teaching" then becomes a process of convincing kids, one way or another, not to learn, but to, as John Holt put it, develop "strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don't." You know, like letting an AI write a 2000 word essay. "Learning," writes Holt, "is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners."

That's what happened with that preschooler and his classmates as they explored the world through Minecraft, Harry Potter, and whatever else the children found necessary to the life they were living together.

I spent several years in pre-algebra, algebra, advanced algebra, pre-calculus, and then calculus in which I was able to fool my teachers into thinking I'd learned what I really hadn't. Since school, I've not needed it, but if the occasion arrived when my life or curiosity required advanced mathematics, there is nothing stopping me from learning it, right now, at 63. As a self-directed learner, I would start with Google, with AI, and using the research, thinking, and communicating skills that I've been developing over the course of my life. I'd not learn everything, of course, but exactly what I needed or wanted to know. 

This is precisely what I've been doing these past few days with regard to the life and times of Thomas Wolfe. It even allowed me to have an enlightening dinner table conversation about the author with a neighbor who has spent a lot of time in Wolfe's childhood home of Asheville, NC. Then another person at the table made a connection between Wolfe and Rudyard Kipling that has now sparked my interest in reading more of that author's work. It reminded me of that boy merging his knowledge with that of his friends through play.

This is what happens when you are free to follow your curiosity. We don't stop learning when we leave school. What if we understood that the goal of school is to prepare children to be lifelong learners, to never lose their capacity to be curious, to be passionate. Indeed, for many of us it wasn't until we were out of school that we really began to learn the most important things, like what makes us tick, be it Minecraft, Beyonce, or the life and times of Thomas Wolfe. If we really want our children to grow into passionate, intelligent, curious, creative humans, then we must allow them to be exactly that: passionate, intelligent, curious, and creative humans. And it's those skills of self-directed research, thinking, and communicating -- not writing 2000 word essays or solving for x in exchange for grades -- that will assure that our children will be capable of not just adapting to, but thriving in whatever the future we find ourselves.

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Astra Taylor is a documentary film maker, activist, and writer who was unschooled until the age of 13. She tried high school, but dropped out at 16 to take classes at university. She later enrolled at Brown University, but again opted out, asking, "Why had I felt compelled to enroll in an Ivy League school, to excel by the standards of conventional education and choose a 'difficult' major, instead of making my own way? What was I afraid of?"

I've lost touch with the family of that boy who was passionate about Minecraft and Harry Potter. I doubt he's still obsessed with those specific things, but I'll bet he's passionate about something. The last I heard, the family was intending to homeschool, more or less in the spirit of unschooling. I don't know if they followed through. That can be a hard choice for families in this world of compulsory school-ishness and two-income households. Whatever they decided, I support them, but I hope, hope, hope that he has remained the same passionate, intelligent, curious, creative human that I knew in preschool. It's that hope that keeps me doing what I do.

I know little about Astra Taylor other than what's on her Wikipedia page, which I found with a Google search. I've not seen her films nor read her writing, although we've apparently been allies in our political activism. I looked her up because I came across a quote attributed to her, a question really, that got me think-writing this weblog not-essay. I'm now curious about her work. After all, the best documentaries are always the product of curiosity. I imagine I'll now either seek out her films or, perhaps, keep wondering and waiting until they find me.

She writes: "This is really what the whole debate over compulsory schooling is about. Do we trust people's capacity to be curious or not?" 

The answer of standard schooling is clearly and decisively no. Standard schooling is, in fact, an active exercise in distrust at every level. The very idea of modern schooling is predicated on the premise that without compulsion, children will do whatever they can to avoid learning. We distrust children so much that we try to dictate what they must learn, which is to say, what they must think about. We distrust them so much that we even dictate when they must learn something and label them as "behind" when they don't. So doors are locked, bathrooms are restricted, seats are assigned, failure is punished, even talking and walking are a matter of control. And every psychologist knows that when a person is distrusted, it heightens stress, anxiety, and depression. Distrust causes lowered self-esteem, self-doubt, and a diminished sense of worth.

Let's consider that educator who assigns a 2000 word essay. Let's even say that this educator tells their students that they can write it on any subject they choose. Let's even say that this educator is so committed to trusting children that they offer them the option of not writing a 2000 word essay at all: they can choose to make a diorama or dance or sing or paint their "essay." The only stipulation being that they communicate their learning to the teacher. Of course, this is an unlikely scenario in any standard school because there are always going to be subjects that are off-limits, like sex, drugs, and Beyonce. There are always going to be limits on how the learning is made visible, like sex, drugs, and an AI generated essay. And let's understand that one thing that won't count toward their grade will be exactly what a passionate, intelligent, curious, creative person would be most likely to do, which is enthuse off-the-cuff the way my preschool friend did about Minecraft and Harry Potter.

But enthusing off-the-cuff was exactly what inspired and informed that boy's preschool peers. A 2000 word essay, no matter how well organized and sourced, would never have resulted in the kind of collaborative, viral learning environment that emerged in our classroom, one that created a feedback loop of inspiration for all the kids. Indeed, he made little effort to make his learning visible to me, the teacher, at all, because he knew that I wasn't there to judge him.

"The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember," writes John Holt. And that's why no matter how expansive a teacher tries to make the limitations, every child knows that their learning will always be subject to the judgement of those in power. And we must judge them because we don't trust them.

Anne Sullivan is famous for being Helen Keller's instructor and companion. Left partially blind in childhood, then orphaned, she suffered abuse and neglect for much of her young life. She did finally attend a school for the blind, but was largely left to educate herself. In some ways, she is today, because of her work with Keller, one of the most famous educators in modern history. "I am beginning to suspect," she wrote, "all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think."

Yes, there are kids who thrive in standard schools, or seem to. These are primarily the kids who have learned the most school-ish lesson of all: please the adults. If you please the adults, you receive the rewards and avoid the punishments. But learning has nothing to do with it except insofar as learning to please authority is a lesson learned. And for every one of these children, there are thousands who feel that they are "a kind of idiot" who, apparently, cannot be taught to think. These are the ones who are accused of being "behind" and "unmotivated". 

I've written here before about a young relative who I knew as a bright, engaged, curious boy, always passionate about one thing or another, but who was, as a high schooler, deemed unmotivated. When I asked him about this, he flatly told me, "I don't want my teachers to know anything about me. If they know what I like, they'll use it against me." He explained, "Whenever teachers know what a kid likes, they try to take it away and use it as, like, a reward for good grades or something." In my own mind, I added, Or threaten to take it away as a punishment. For him, and for millions of others, school was simply something to be endured. Thankfully, his parents knew their boy well enough to trust him to his passions at home and today he is a happy young man doing something he loves, not because of, but in spite of school.

Imagine how different his experience would have been had his teachers, had his school, been focused on actual learning. He would have spent his days following his curiosity, which over the years included electric trains, exotic knives, BMX racing, kayaking, and playing the guitar.  He would have come to school each day as my preschool friend did with his Minecraft and Harry Potter to inspire both himself and others, who in turn would have inspired him through their own pursuit of self-chosen, self-motivated learning. They would have agreed and bickered, merged and divided, researched, thought, and communicated. Perhaps they would not have learned about the life and times of Thomas Wolfe or the ins and outs of higher level math, but they would have created a long track record of successfully learning whatever they really wanted or needed to know. If and when those subjects became relevant to their lives they would know exactly how to go about learning it.

As I mentioned before, I write my blog posts in the spirit of a journal that others are free to read. And I recognize that some of my decisions about what to include and what to omit are based on my concerns about some notional reader's judgement. For instance, I felt compelled to end the paragraph before the last one with an assurance that my young relative is doing just fine today. I've left it there because I know that there are some who have read this far (although I know from experience that very few readers made it past the first four paragraphs) who are wondering something like, This all sounds pretty good, but how do kids who are allowed to educate themselves "turn out"?

If you ask Google, "How do home schooled kids turn out?" you'll get an AI summary of 14 links from credible sources stating that "Homeschooled kids generally turn out to be happy, well-adjusted, and engaged adults who perform well academically and socially, often with higher self-esteem and greater community involvement than their traditionally schooled peers." Pretty cool. If you ask, "How do unschooled kids turn out?' or "How do schooled kids turn out?" the AI gives you pretty similar results. This tells us one of two things: either Google's AI is designed to produce upbeat, positive responses to pretty much everything or that it all comes down to the individual child, their family, and the specific experience. I expect it's some of both.

The question of how kids "turn out" is most often really a way of asking, What kind of job to they get with this or that kind of education? I know that many believe that this is the sole purpose of compulsory schooling: vocational training. If the end result of 12-20 years of schooling is just qualifying kids for an entry level job, then we're doing it the least efficient and effective manner imaginable. In fact, if this is our goal, we would be better served to just turn the whole project over to corporations who are in a far better position to know what job skills they're going to need. But, for me, the whole idea of forced training of children for jobs is obscene and abusive.

The great folk singer and story teller Utah Phillips tells about a time when he was asked to speak at a university graduation. He says that as he sat waiting for his turn he saw that he shared the stage with a slew of politicians and chamber of commerce types. When it was his turn, he grabbed the podium and said to those young graduates:

"You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources? Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist. Make a break for it, kids! Flee to the wilderness . . . The one within if you can find it."

But, even if we're earnestly thinking about future happiness and contentment, the truth is that worrying about how the kids are going to "turn out" kind of misses the point. For one thing, while the experience of schooling is significant, there is so much more at play in how a child "turns out" than anyone, not even an AI, can figure out. Eminent researcher and philosopher Alison Gopnik is writing here about parenting, but it could easily apply to teaching as well, "(I)t is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relationship between the small variations in what parents do . . . and the resulting adult traits of their children. There is very little evidence that conscious decisions about co-sleeping or not, letting your children "cry it out" or holding them till they fall asleep, or forcing them to do extra homework or letting them play have reliable and predictable long-term effects on who those children will become."

This is because our children are individual humans who are actively interpreting their experiences and are influenced from all directions, throughout their lives, in ways we simply cannot predict. It's impossible to consciously control educational (or parenting) outcomes, with one exception. As Gopnik sees it, a stable, secure base of love seems to be the single reliable predictor of future happiness and contentment.

When adults create a stable, secure base of love and acceptance for children at home and at school, we find that what matters is not an imaginary future, but rather the quality of the children's lives right now. And that, at bottom, is where standard schools fail most dramatically. Childhood is not a preparation for life, but rather life itself. It is, like every stage of life, a unique and important aspect of this one, short journey that each of us have, yet too many of our children have their first two decades consumed by a system that treats them as a kind of idiot who can't be trusted, whose very thoughts must be managed and controlled according to some curriculum, and ultimately judged by how well they can solve for x or produce 2000 word essays that they don't have any interest in producing.

Perhaps there are grindstones in their future. Perhaps they will find that algebra or writing essays is something they need to know. But right now, as children, what is important is whatever it is that genuinely sparks their curiosity and inspires their passion. And only they know what that is and how to pursue it. Childhood is for Minecraft, Harry Potter, Beyonce, BMX cycling, and off-the-cuff enthusing with friends who in turn enthuse, creating a world of passion and life and love. Childhood is a time to discover what it means to be truly alive and, incidentally, to figure how, why, and when to learn, while creating something larger than themselves.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours. 

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