The Translucent Revolution by Arjuna Ardagh

Author:Arjuna Ardagh [Ardagh, Arjuna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781577318088
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 2010-09-06T22:00:00+00:00

People have two philosophies about education. One is that you come into the world as empty, or even negative, with a tendency toward evil and therefore children have to be shaped, developed, contained, and made into a good person. The other is that you are born naturally life affirming, learning oriented, and cooperative. We simply need to create safe learning environments, and students will naturally develop.

— Jack Canfield

Linda Lantieri is the editor of Schools with Spirit, an excellent primer on translucent education. She has worked in mainstream education for more than thirty years in the New York area, advocating a translucent view of education. “To nurture the spirit,” she says, “is to cultivate a realm of human life that is nonjudgmental and integrated. It is about belonging and connectedness, meaning and purpose.”1

Lantieri differentiates between two possible approaches to education. The view we call Iago-based she calls “filling the pail.” In this perspective, the child is seen as inherently empty, albeit a potential cog in the machine of established commerce. Education’s first goal is to program children’s as yet empty hard drives with those facts and time-tested formulas that will help them learn to earn and consume. The teacher has two connected roles: as the provider of knowledge, and as disciplinarian who will deal with the wayward tendencies in every child to rebel against this process of force-feeding.

In contrast, Lantieri calls the translucent view “lighting a fire.” In this perspective, the child is seen as inherently full — of creativity, energy, play, and imagination. Translucent education provides the optimum soil in which these seeds can grow to maturity and blossom. The translucent teacher is a custodian, a midwife to this process of unfolding. Rather than stuffing facts and opinions into a child’s empty brain, the teacher draws out potential creativity from within the child’s full spirit. This, in fact, is the original meaning of the word education, derived from the Latin educare, “to draw out.”

Jack Canfield, who worked for many years as a schoolteacher before becoming a chicken soup chef, describes these different systems:

Depending on which philosophy you adopt, you end up with two very different systems of education. One says, “We’ve got to control the little bastards, pump a lot of knowledge into them, which they probably don’t want to learn but they need it. We’ve got to cultivate them.” The other says, “Here are all these wonderful little beings, and our job is to create an environment where they can evolve and learn.” The first one is the old system way, but it’s shifting, little by little. As individuals change, the institutions slowly have to transform to contain them.

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