Christopher Alexander’s remarkable book, The Timeless Way of Building begins with a trenchant exploration on quality:
To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name.
2. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.
In learning with others, knowing the quality without a name is important, but not often sought when it comes to education policy.
On Facebook today a friend shared a video CNA–Speaking Exchange which is a program where English learners in Brasil talk with old folks in the USA.
Years ago, a Vietnamese kid started chatting with me on Yahoo Messenger. I was a bit leery at the time, but the idea of his practicing English with me seemed okay. There were moments when I found myself saying: “It’s pointless to have me do your homework!” Mostly the conversations were enjoyable for me. So that’s how I met my Facebook friend.
One day I got a letter in the mail from Vietnam. In it was a card to: Chu (Uncle) John. He had filled the card to the edges with cancelled stamps from Vietnam. That gift, and that he let the letter come as a surprise, convinced me our online relationship was a good one.
He was a senior in high school and one of the things we talked about was choosing a university. He was disappointed he wasn’t accepted to one of the most elite universities. But he was considering whether or not to accept a position at new university and an inaugural class of social work majors, or to take a place at a university that had a good reputation in a traditional subject area.
He decided on the social work major. While at college we chatted here or there. Somehow we’ve kept connections online, but we haven’t really chatted for nearly 10 years. He works now for an international NGO. His Facebook posts are relentlessly cheerful, but also clearly professional networking. I don’t speak Vietnamese, so I usually stay out of his threads. In this case I wanted to point to Sugata Mitra.
Mitra won the TED Prize in 2013. TED has great pages up on how to start a SOLE–Self Organized Learning Environment. There’s also a Web site. And there’s a Granny Cloud blog.
The blog strikes me as an essential part. I believe that online learning relationships have a great deal of potential for good. But like all relationships they can be very difficult.
Poverty hurts. And lots of the time I’m running away from the hurt. Poverty is unbearably unfair. There are always catch 22 situations, like, yes, she can go to school, but she must have shoes and a book bag. And money for those is nowhere to be found.
One group I follow on Facebook is The Chrysalis Youth Empowerment Network in Uganda. Even though I spend a lot of time running away, today when I looked at the page I felt tears running down my cheeks. I was so moved to see some of the participants as young adults I knew as young teens.
The network is an association of mostly Acholi people from northern Uganda in Kampala. Many of the children, quite young children, eek out a living in a rock quarry. A while back a women’s group associated with this population lost their lease on a building they had long used. There were aspects of this eviction that were outrageously unfair. I sent a small donation through one of those online donation sties.
I’ll mention again that I spend a lot of time running away from the many good projects I know about. Anyhow, as soon as I made my small donation, the thank you messages started running in. I was amazed because I had no idea that some of the people I was getting messages from were involved. I was startled to remember how far back these relationships went. And that a group of women I didn’t know had heard of me for a long time.
Looking up links for Sagata Mitra I ran into a great article from last year in Wired, How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses. The story is a way of introducing Mitra’s ideas for education. It’s also the story of a young math prodigy, Paloma Noyola Bueno and her teacher Sergio Juárez Correa. What stands out to me in the article is how it engages with the “quality without a name” implicitly.
Juárez Correa felt a chill. He’d never encountered a student with so much innate ability. He squatted next to her and asked why she hadn’t expressed much interest in math in the past, since she was clearly good at it.
“Because no one made it this interesting,” she said.
Back in the day when I first read The Timeless Way of Building it knocked my socks off and I passed the book around. No one I lent it to was as impressed as I was. They thought it a bunch of woo. I stopped lending the book out because the reactions were exactly the opposite of mine.
When the topic of quality comes up about education almost always it is in relation to quantitative measures. The impulse behind that is to be objective and precise. What excited me, and still excites me, about The Timeless Way of Building is a framework for thinking rigorously about quality without recourse to quantitative measures. I’m not opposed to tests, but they tell only a part of the story necessary to improve education.
The book has been put online–probably without permission–here is one place to see it. If you take a gander and are interested to read the whole book, you’ll probably want to check it out of a library because it’s a beautiful book to hold and to read. But online is good enough to read the extended Table of Contents.
Like building beautiful buildings, good learning situations depend on knowing the quality without a name. Because we cannot name the quality doesn’t mean that we can’t know it. Alexander provides a map which maybe useful in other endeavors like teaching.