Do you want your child trained, schooled, or educated?
Training is a great method to elicit a specific response to a given stimuli. Think of the training of a greyhound to chase a mechanical rabbit, a martial artist slipping out of an arm lock, a jazz soloist playing over chord changes or the reflexive snapping to attention when the pledge of allegiance is recited. Training is a tactic that is of use when a specific action is necessary, difficult or is going to be performed under stress. Training can also limit the tools one can bring to bare on nonstandard, evolving or unanticipated scenarios.
Training is a tactic we employ at Tilde School to promote specific skills that have a high degree of complexity, require precision and occur in real time. We do not train behaviors, beliefs or perspectives because training would limit our students ability to perceive, adapt and be resilient.
Schooling is a well-established method to group individuals and have them respond as a collective to existential threats or in a predictable manageable way. Gazelle, fish and birds have all evolved to school as a means of protecting the survival of the species (often at the expense of individuals) in the face of predators. We, as humans, have selected for school-ability in domesticated animals to make herd management more efficient or to leverage pack hierarchy into a team management tool. Cattle, domestic ducks, horses, even dogs have had this management philosophy bred into them to great utility for us as their masters.
At Tilde School we do very little schooling. We certainly want our students to be able to work together to identify and avoid real threats that they may experience in the larger world. Identifying pathological behavior, and instinctively avoiding it, is a healthy form of schooling, but we do not use these methods as a means to make individuals more manageable. Schooling as a means of management sacrifices the autonomy and agency of the individual, limits the opportunity to receive feedback, learn responsibility and have a strong sense of personal achievement.
Education from the Latin ‘to lead’ is a more nebulous concept. One can lead groups, which could make us think of education as synonymous with schooling. Where schooling does not operate on the individual level, leadership-rooted education does. This notion of leadership should raise questions of how is one leading and to what end.
As for the how, let's examine the root of learning from the Germanic ‘lore’ and the tradition of passing on knowledge by means of oral storytelling. Learning comes from the journey that a talented storyteller narrates. The process of identifying archetypal characters, setting the scene, posing hypothetical conflicts, engendering empathy for the plight of protagonists and antagonists alike, ultimately allows the listener to glean a new understanding from the myth, fable, story or biography that was obscured at the onset.
How do we lead at Tilde School? We lead by curating the environment, fostering empathy and posing challenges which transform the understanding and illuminate paths less traveled.
To what do we lead? The best expression of the goal of education comes from Aristotle with the concept of Eudaimonia or human flourishing. What does a flourishing human look like? This is somewhat subjective and relies, at least in-part, on the values you personally hold. At Tilde School we value Happiness and Health. In these two concepts are entailed other necessary values, our job (mine and yours, as parents) is to identify the necessary prerequisites for our core values of happiness and health. Some of the values that we profess at Tilde School under the category of Happiness and Health are: resiliency, capability, autonomy, self-determination and self-awareness.