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You
are here: The art of learning
This article appeared as part of "Weaving the Urban Network" in Research News, a publication of the University of Michigan. Excerpted from the opening address at the Urban Network Teacher-in-Residence Program, October, 1989.
We can all agree that there is a problem in education and that the problem is especially severe in the nation's cities. We know that many children are not prepared to begin school, that many drop out of school, or are inadequately trained for jobs; that drugs, crime, and violence dominate the school environment; that, overall, American children do not rise above their international competitors.
Our solutions attempt to regulate and standardize the performance of children and teachers -- making them accountable, dissecting their week into so many minutes per skill, keeping them on track, and testing -- testing -- testing -- about one day out of every four.
As an artist and architect concerned with the emotional and the esthetic, I find such solutions oppressive to the human spirit. So I have been trying to discover some other, less restrictive means of engaging the imagination of children and teachers. Let me invite you for a moment into my artistic realm to look at what I see there.
I look and I see -- a farmhouse. Inside, sitting around a table are women -- women who work hard to carry water, chop wood, harvest crops -- women who often suffer the loss of children at birth. They are sewing together tiny, tiny pieces of cloth of many different, beautiful colors and textures to make a carefully conceived pattern. Why? Why do women who work so hard to stay alive spend their time sewing little pieces of cloth into a pattern with thousands of tiny, tiny stitches?
I look and I see -- a Native American nation. People are sitting in a circle -- one person is holding an intricately carved stick. He speaks for a while, then hands the stick to another person. Each person who wishes to speak is first given the stick, which is called a talking stick. If these people want to talk, why don't they just talk? Why are they passing around a stick and why is the stick so beautiful?
I look and I see -- a young boy about ten years old. His name is Carl Jung. He is painting a small, very smooth stone. He is dressing the stone and putting it in a bright yellow pencil box. He's putting the box on a beam in the attic where, he says, no one will find it. Everyday he works on a library of books for his stone. When he later would write his autobiography, this man, one of the greatest thinkers of our time, said: "This was the most important experience of my life. It had a profound effect on the formation of my character." Why?
I was in a museum. It was the African wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. I looked and I saw very skinny, tall statues. They were about twenty feet high, each one carved with numerous incredible figures, entwined to stand straight up in the air. I asked my friend what the statues were for. She said they were carved when a tribe was going to war. I sat down on the floor, looked up at these creatures, and tried to imagine: you are going to war, but you take time to carve a statue that defies gravity. Why?
Because that's where you get the courage to go to war...Because making a secure place for a stone is how you get your own security. Because passing a talking stick from the leader to the followers empowers the followers. Because stitching together the fabric of a quilt stitches together a community so that it can face the threats of nature.
In my work, I have been trying to find a way to get educators to put aside the tests that will be failed and to take time out from the books that can't be read. I have been trying to find a way for educators to put their arms around the 4,000 children who drop out of school every day and say: "Let's take this beautiful cloth and stitch ourselves together. Let's use this bright yellow pencil box to make a safe place of ourselves, because all children need a safe place in which to grow. And here, you take my talking stick . . . and you can have all the p-o-w-e-r that I have!"
. . . Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s success in changing race relations in this country can be attributed to his extraordinary ability to generate a broad-based "We" and to empower it with a collective vision. This shared vision helped people take enormous personal risks to accomplish their mission. In the Urban Network, my colleagues and I are trying to generate a purpose or meaning in education that will be vivid enough to engage the imagination of children for whom failure, drugs, poverty, and violence are part of life. In the Urban Network, we are trying to bring learning into the human sphere for both the disadvantaged and affluent. In the Urban Network, we are trying to create a sense of community -- a "We" that can take collective action to better the human condition -- a "We" that is unified in its vision of what is good, true, and beautiful while, at the same time, diverse in its means of participating in the vision.
You can contact Dr. Sharon E. Sutton, FAIA at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, 208T Gould Hall Box 355720, The University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-5720. Her e-mail address is: sesut@u.washington.edu.
© 1990 Research News
Posted with permission of Sharon E. SuttonNew Horizons for Learning
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