Clues to Learning – Part 1
“The ‘Blue Mind’ way of education not only trusts in our natural intelligence; it IS our natural intelligence at work…”
“’Red Brain’ loves to explain and inform, which is useful to a point. It does not easily relinquish control. But unless it surrenders its willful control, the marvelous higher faculties cannot join in the process of learning.”
“The right shot at the right moment does not come, because you do not let go of yourself…. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do for yourself does not happen.”
~ Japanese Zen Master Kenzo (from Eugen Herrigel, Zen and the Art of Archery)
A few years ago, we were teaching our “We Are Here” curriculum in a Montessori school. It dovetails nicely with the Montessori philosophy, especially exploring the solar system, the Earth’s timeline, and micro-macrocosm comparisons.
In teaching the song Riddle of the Planets, we show a video of a computer-generated model of the helical motions of our solar system. It’s awe inspiring. It crudely depicts the combined spiral pathways of the planets around our sun as the sun moves through the galaxy. It successfully breaks away from the single plane Newtonian atomic model of the solar system and opens the door to breathtaking new perceptions.
We show the video then demonstrate the planetary motions in “3D Blackboard” style. The children get it right away. It enters the fertile garden of their brains and stimulates wide-eyed new connections. It doesn’t conflict with the fact that they observe the sun going across the sky every day from a geocentric perspective. Nimble minds have the mental agility to shift perspectives with ease.
Then comes the wonderful questions: What is gravity? What causes gravity? And I say, ‘Ya know, the smartest quantum-physicists in the world are puzzled about gravity. They don’t really understand it. What do you think causes gravity?”
And one bright seven-year-old girl says, “That’s simple, scientists don’t understand gravity because everything is spinning around everything else and they don’t know that’s what causes gravity!”
How can you not love this answer? “Everything is spinning around everything else!”
What it says is the compound force of all the rotations and helical orbits (of the moons, planets and suns etc… combined with their space-bending mass) is what is causing gravitational force.
It is a beautiful thought.
It says – in order to truly understand anything, one needs to come inside the living, moving, dynamic context.
That is Blue Mind.
Red Brain training is to isolate and stop something in order to study it.
Blue Mind researches everything in the context of inter-relationships and multiple-causality.
Red Brain loves to explain and inform. Explaining and informing is not teaching. They are elemental building blocks of knowledge, but they are not the same as really teaching something.
The Blue Mind ‘teaches’ by immersion and trust in the interweave of human faculties working together in various speeds and ways, preparing the way for surprising and unpredictable outcomes.
The Red Brain works at one dominant speed, one repetitive modality, always seeking to control outcomes. It works by control, not trust.
The Blue Mind way of education not only trusts in our natural intelligence, it IS our natural intelligence at work, bridging left and right hemispheres, activating higher systems of inductive reasoning, engaging the body, senses, language, rhythm, speed, cadence…the natural human theater of learning.
The Red Brain dominant way has no patience for this. It tends to dismiss the Blue Mind way of things…because it doesn’t conform to lineal logic.
Yes, that’s true. The Blue Mind is not lineal progressive. It works by immersion and comes at things oblique and adjacent.
We need our “Red Brains” for so many important things, like informing, explaining, measuring, demonstrating, recognition, identification, incremental progression and more. It’s just not meant to be the CEO of our education and development. It is meant to be a facility of support, a partner to natural learning.
The “Blue Minded” way of learning opens doors, opens pathways, opens human possibility to a future that does not lie on the trajectory of the past, but is originating from a wholly new foundation.
It doesn’t happen by magic. Like anything truly worthwhile, it takes practice and a perpetual beginner’s mind and attitude.
You’ll know you’re on track when there’s little separation between teacher and student and you are all enthusiastically engaged, lost and stretched into new discovery and new perspective, hungry for more. That is when you know real learning is happening!
~paz
