Unschooling is Education Inspired by Nature by Wendy Priesnitz
“Look deep into Nature, and then you will
understand everything better.” ~ Albert Einstein
A few months ago, I began research for an article about biomimicry
for Life Learning Magazine’s mother magazine Natural Life. As serendipity would
have it, around the same time, a Twitter contact suggested that I write
an article for Life Learning about how biomimicry relates to life
learning (unschooling). Oh, yes, I thought: Learning is one of Nature’s most elegant
devices! However, we humans are the only species that sends our
offspring to school in order to learn and to socialize. (We may also be
the only species that stubbornly refuses to learn from our mistakes –
even the famous lemmings who are supposed to blindly follow each other
jumping off cliffs are reportedly a Disney fabrication.)
The term “biomimicry” comes from the Greek words bios, meaning life, and
mimesis, meaning to imitate. It is the examination of Nature, its
models, systems, processes, and elements in order to find solutions to
human problems. By emulating Nature’s patterns, its goal is to create
new ways of living and of designing policies and products that are
well-adapted to life on earth.
An early example of biomimicry (although it wasn’t called that at the
time) is the study of birds to enable human flight. Although never
successful in creating a “flying machine,” Leonardo da Vinci was a keen
observer of the anatomy and flight of birds, and made numerous notes and
sketches on his observations as well as sketches of various “flying
machines.” Likewise, the Wright Brothers, who finally did succeed in
creating the first airplane in 1903, apparently gained inspiration for
their airplane from observations of pigeons in flight.
Modern biomimicry research has inspired adhesive glue from mussels,
solar cells made like leaves, fabric that emulates shark skin,
harvesting water from fog like a beetle, and more. The fastening marvel
called Velcro® inspired by the tiny hooks found on the surface of burs,
carbon-sequestering cement inspired by corals, and energy efficient wind
turbines inspired by schooling fish are other examples of biomimicry
being used to create better products in the modern world. In fact, the
green building sector has enthusiastically embraced biomimicry as an
interdisciplinary way to investigate the design of buildings that move
beyond current definitions of sustainability towards regenerative and
restorative.
How
would Nature solve our so-called educational crisis? Biomimicry
would suggest that education should be decentralized,
self-regulating, co-operative, resourceful, always adapting and
shifting in response to new information and changing conditions,
active and always in motion, with built-in feedback mechanisms.
Biomimicry can also be used to create new organizational structures and
systems. In an article in Fast Company magazine, Alissa Walker describes
how, as part of the magazine’s What Would You Ask Nature? biomimicry
challenge, the US Green Building Council (USGBC) reinvented its
operating structure using biological principles and with the help of
design and innovation consulting firm IDEO. They needed to replace their
hierarchical, top-down approach with a more flexible one that created a
stronger sense of community and connectedness among members. They found
their inspiration in mycorrhiza fungi, which grow in a symbiotic
relationship with trees, sharing and circulating nutrients among them.
Walker writes that, “the designers instantly realized it was a perfect
model: What if, instead of a hierarchical relationship, the national
body (like the fungi) was in a supportive relationship with chapters
(the trees), moving information and resources around as necessary?“
This USGBC organizational redesign wasn’t just an improvement of an
existing structure; it was a complete stripping down and rebuilding from
the basics. In their book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make
Things, authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart suggest that
this is the most sustainable path, rather than merely adapting and
trying to improve harmful ways of doing things. “Being less bad is not
the same as being good," they write.
And that brings us back to our education system. Why settle for the
least harmful alternative when we could have something that is better –
something that mimics Nature’s ever-adapting and evolving attempts to
remediate damage and create optimum conditions for growth?
Our warehouse/prison style of schooling processes students in
preparation for the past rather than the future, and largely
ignores the potential of new technologies and emerging
worldviews. So educational reformers should be building entirely
new paradigms, rather than merely tinkering and ending up with
something that’s arguably “less bad,” like they’ve been doing
for decades.
So how would Nature solve our so-called educational crisis?
Biomimicry would suggest that education should be decentralized,
self-regulating, co-operative, resourceful, always adapting and
shifting in response to new information and changing conditions,
active and always in motion, with built-in feedback mechanisms.
Doesn’t that look a lot like life learning?!
Clearly, Nature wouldn’t create dedicated school buildings
full of desks. It wouldn’t coop kids up indoors all day and even
get rid of outdoor play time in favor of sitting at those desks.
It wouldn’t create a top-down hierarchy where there is a high
ratio of young students to adult “experts,” standardized
curriculum, tests, or grades. There wouldn’t be passing and
failing or report cards.
A biomimicry-inspired education system might borrow from the
way the fringe-lipped bat learns to use frog calls from
different species as acoustic cues to assess the palatability of
its prey. In a study published in 2006, researchers Rachel Page
and Michael Ryan at the University of Texas at Austin
investigated the role of social learning and cultural
transmission in bat foraging. Comparing three different learning
groups, they measured the rate at which bats learned new
foraging information: in this case, the experimental association
of the calls of a poisonous toad species with the presence of
edible prey. The researchers tested the effectiveness of
learning this experimental association and concluded that the
best results came from a social learning group, in which a bat
inexperienced with the new call-food association was allowed to
observe an experienced bat.
Or a new education paradigm might resemble the way honey bees
collaborate as they make decisions about selecting a new hive.
They choose the best site through a democratic learning process
that humans would do well to emulate, according to Cornell
University biologist Thomas Seeley. In his new book Honeybee
Democracy, Seeley describes the elaborate decision-making that
bees use. It is similar to how neurons work to make decisions in
primate brains, he says. In both swarms and brains, no
individual bee or neuron has an overview but, with many
independent individuals providing different pieces of
information, the group achieves optimal decision-making.
“Consistencies like these suggest that there are general
principles of organization for building groups far smarter than
the smartest individuals in them,” Seeley writes. The bees’
collaboration process is being used as a biomimicry model by
researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
who are looking at ways to improve disaster relief efforts.
Collaboration is, indeed, an important part of the new kind
of networked learning environment that is developing to replace
the factory model we’ve been using for the past while. The Fast
Company article that I referenced earlier quotes a USGBC staffer
who said that the organization would be successful when the
national body was learning as much from the chapters as the
other way round. With the help of the biomimicry designers,
Nature’s fungi/tree symbiosis model was taking the organization
in that direction.
School systems, however, have not awakened to the
possibilities of collaboration. In fact, their centralized,
top-down organization means they aren’t even focused on the
needs of children, let alone including them as collaborators in
their own lives and those of their school communities. Instead,
schools serve the educational industry of text book
manufacturers, test creators, and teacher training; their
mandate includes feeding the economy with workers and consumers;
and children are expected to swallow the medicine the experts
prescribe. And that medicine is the same for all and
fundamentally not much different than it was decades ago.
Nature, as we have seen, operates more sensitively. It
creates habitats where each organism is adapted to its place and
its conditions. As habitat conditions change, organisms are
continuously developing and changing in synch in order to
survive. The maverick American ecological economist Herman Daly
has pointed out that as a species, our habitat conditions have
changed as our population has grown, but our strategies have
not. So, too, with education.
Nature’s design for education would look a lot like the life
learning community – participatory and self-managing, rather
than being run by a hierarchy of outsiders. As in Nature,
individuals of all ages would manage their own behaviors by
setting personal standards and evaluating their performance in
relation to these standards. That is, of course, how children
develop until school teaches away that power and turns active
learners into passive receivers of information.
Life learning is one of the forces – along with technology,
which is allowing learners to connect directly with the global
knowledge commons and to bypass schools altogether – behind the
paradigm shift that is underway in education. Schools and their
related industry may or may not reconfigure themselves around
this change, or we may see an entirely new type of system emerge
to organize and ensure equitable opportunity. (Even that seems
like it could be redundant and unnecessary…and, in any case,
it’s irrelevant to whether or not learning happens. But then
again, Nature does like to build in redundancy!)
A few educational reformers understand how profoundly the
life learning philosophy differs from the current norm. However,
most will merely co-opt those aspects and language that fit
their minor rejigging of schools. But that’s okay, because life
learners are on solid ground, having followed our instincts and
designed a new way of living based on billions of years of
natural development. Our lifestyle is an elegant amalgam of the
natural and high-tech worlds, a combination of art and
cutting-edge science.
And if the biomimicry model is good enough for designing
efficient high-speed trains, replacements for buttons and laces,
and passive air conditioning, then it’s a great model for
reinventing and revitalizing how our families live and learn.
After all, learning how to live and adapt within our habitat is
just, well, natural.
* * *
About Biomimicry
In 1960, the term “bionics” was coined by psychiatrist and
engineer Jack Steele to mean “the science of systems which have
some function copied from Nature.” However, the word’s later
misuse in connection with electronically-operated artificial
body parts and the 1974 television series The Six Million Dollar
Man led to it being dropped by the scientific community. Otto
Schmitt, an American academic and inventor, coined the term “biomimetics”
to describe the transfer of ideas from biology to technology and
it first appeared in the Websters Dictionary in 1974. The term “biomimicry”
appeared as early as 1982 but was popularized by scientist and
author Janine Benyus in her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation
Inspired by Nature. Benyus suggests looking to Nature as a
“Model, Measure, and Mentor” and emphasizes sustainability as an
objective of biomimicry.
The principles of biomimicry were developed by Janine Benyus.
They include:
building from the bottom up
self-assembling
optimizing rather than maximizing
using free energy
cross-pollinating
embracing diversity
adapting and evolving
using life-friendly materials and processes
engaging in symbiotic relationships
enhancing the bio-sphere
The characteristics of biomimicry-inspired
optimum systems design include:
form fits function
resilience
decentralization
effectiveness and good performance
abundance (using what’s at hand)
bottom-up design
cooperation and collaboration
the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
“The more our world functions like the natural world, the
more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not
ours alone.” ~ biologist and biomimicry popularizer Janine Benyus
Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley (Princeton
University Press, 2010)
Wendy Priesnitz is the
founder and editor of Life Learning and
Natural Life Magazines, the author of thirteen books, and the
mother of two adult daughters who learned without school in the 1970s
and '80s.
