Learning to be Free

The Supercool Philosophy

“All men are born free

But everywhere he is in chains”

Jean-Jacques Rouseau

“The truth will set you free”

Gospel of John (8:31-36)

"Liberty consists in doing what one desires"

John Stuart Mill

Abstract & Introduction

Building on Amartya Sen’s Nobel prize winning “Development as Freedom” we make the case for a new, truly liberal educational institution – Supercool School – where students learn to Be free.

In 2008 we, the people, are finally ready to embrace, build and use an open peer-to-peer (e)learning platform, that empowers everybody with internet access to learn what s/he considers important in life¹.

Knowledge and information are the central resources of the emergent knowledge society. What makes this epoch distinctly different from all predecessors is that there is substantially more equality of opportunity then ever before, because Cyberspace potentially empowers each individual to realize an indefinite number of free knowledge opportunities. With the right entrepreneurial mindset everybody can identify, create and realize the opportunities leading to the most stimulating Self.

The paper develops personal freedom as the central leitmotiv of Supercool learning. We propose that the power of freedom in its internal as well as external sense is what allows the individual to strive and lead a good life. In this context the Faucoultian concept of Epimeleia Heautou (to be able to take care of oneself) as well as swaraj (Sanskrit for the liberation from the inner fear that holds people back from realizing their potential) are evoked as two different approaches to developing a mature self that is conscious of the freedom and responsibility that comes with accepting one’s free will. These two abstract teleological concepts are subsequently complemented by other aspects essential to the Supercool learning approach.

In the last section of the text we make a case for a new post-industrial approach to education. The idea is to show that education has been shaped to fulfill the demand for well-adapted workers in big companies and not to create individuals that will be able to create their own work. The bigger part of of our current educational practices have been designed during industrialization, hence they follow the mindset of mechanical efficiency and uniform workers performing standardized tasks. Today’s knowledge workers need a different skill- and mind-set. They need to be able to collaborate in a team, be creative, flexible, and mindful. They need to develop and embrace sustainable visions of their work and our common future. Supercool School is the educational institution which allows for dynamic demand driven, and hence intrinsically motivated learning aimed at empowering the learner to Be free and choose the life and work s/he is passionate about.

Setting the Scene

The freedom to decide upon one’s life is the most fundamental source of motivation and well-Being. When Rousseau (1954) says "men are everywhere in chains," what he means is that most people don’t choose their lives. They feel they don’t have “free will”. They are doomed to struggle for survival and even most of those who have security and food are constrained by the dominant repressive social-system to “accept their faith” and play their role, rather than to explore their dreams and realize the way of life they chose to be theirs.

We believe that humanity has achieved the best of all worlds, so far. But we also believe that this world can be much better still.

Evolution continuously tries out new ideas, and even though we acknowledge that all creativity is build on the past (Lessig, 2004), we believe that the educational institutions (esp. high-school & university) and the educational system as a whole (teaching methods, curricula, grading and certification) are not focused on bringing out the highest potential of the individual student, but are stuck in an archaic industrial production of a work force, rather than educating individuals to live a fulfilling life. Not only that, access to education and the whole capitalist system of education fools the masses with the illusion of the “American dream” while in reality the reproduction of power happens within elite circles only (Bourdieu 1988).

We believe that by employing the connecting forces of Cyberspace we will give birth to a new educational institution. An educational institution that brings the opportunity to form learning communities and to go through the process from novice to master in the pace and style you want. An institution where you, the individual, decide what to learn and when to learn it. An institution in which learning is enjoyable and social².

It is our mission to give positive personal freedom (Berlin, 1969) to the people. The freedom to create, identify and realize learning opportunities on all subjects and all levels that will give rise to the entrepreneurial spirit within each of us. It is this entrepreneurial spirit that will have people tackle the vast challenges of our time. It is this entrepreneurial spirit that will creatively deconstruct our current learning practices, measurements and objectives and replace them with a system that is much more social, human, and egalitarian, while at the same time allowing for a never seen degree of productivity and individual liberty. By exploiting Cyberspace for social learning we will unlock the true nature of the potential and essence of the knowledge society.

A very brief history of the evolution of learning technology

"Books will soon be obsolete in schools ... It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years"

Thomas Edison (1913)

Technology has always been a fundamental aid for communication and learning as it allows any literate person to externalize and codify knowledge into information that can be used by learners at distant times and. Over several thousand years humanity has developed learning technologies based on text and one can argue that with the invention of the printing press text-based learning fueled a revolution in massification of education never seen before. However the fundamental shortcoming of this revolution was (and still is) that it is based on industrially produced “one size fits all” textbooks. Hence the single most decisive factor for educational quality is class size, because the information containers have to be individually unpacked and deliberated in order to be transformed into embodied knowledge.

Great forecasts have been made about the impact of technologies like the radio or television onto our educational system. Both technologies have had their effect on our learning culture, but it was not as groundbreaking as expected because they merely transposed the traditional (amongst pedagogues long overcome) frontal teaching method into a new medium. Nevertheless one can plausibly claim that especially television _is_ the most dominant learning technology, only that it does not necessarily teach about the subjects people want to know about. Furthermore, and this is much worse, the medium’s message (McLuhan, 1964) is not to liberate but to “program” the people to comply with the system and be good happy consumers rather than creators and active learners. Last but not least TV provides non-social information feeding, promoting individualization and egoistic thinking.

Even more widespread enthusiasm has been spread amongst cyberphile educators regarding the potential of the internet to enable global access to and sharing of knowledge. Nevertheless so far most e-learning institutions have been mere online doppelgangers of their offline equivalents³. Research on technology innovation (Bates, 2000), especially media, has shown that when a new technological medium becomes available it is first used to replicate the traditional practices. The first films for example where recorded stage plays. In a second stage the new possibilities of the medium are embraced and perfected, but the organization of the institutions stay the same. So to stay with the film industry, while the new computer animated movies are exploiting all facets of movie making, they still follow the traditional institutionalized production and distribution scheme. It is in the third stage when innovations truly unfold their potential to alter culture and the way of life of its users. It is through democratization happening on online video platforms that we exploit the true transformative power of “movie making” and develop a “see for yourself” culture of peer-production . A way of life where everyone co-creates and shares his/her experiences with the world.

As stated, the educational institutions we find online so far are still rooted in the old industrial paradigm, but we can already observe the new culture of learning. It is the vast multitude of online knowledge sphere (fora, blogs, and places like wikipedia) that is the complex adaptive system, the new complex educational institution of the cyber agora (knowledge marketplace) where the distinct economies of knowledge are immanently understood, practiced and developed further by digital natives.

We believe that the time has come for an institution to empower online learners to bank with and profit from their entrepreneurial learning ventures. Supercool School sets out to become the institution where everybody’s informal learning becomes formalized.

We formally codify your learning by collecting information about your interests and level of understanding distilled from you actual creative learning activities and the impression you left with your co-learners.

It is our aim to provide this third generation educational institution – Supercool School - to empower all people to team up with peers to realize opportunities to learn exactly what they want to learn and to build up a knowledge profile that certifies the learning process.

Hitting the target without aiming

“Therefore the Master

acts without doing anything

and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

things disappear and she lets them go.”

Tao Te Ching

When the German philosophy professor, Eugen Herrigel, inquired in the early 20^th century to learn the teachings of Zen he was politely informed that one can not learn Zen . One can only learn one of the Zen arts and thereby come to learn to embody Zen. He subsequently learned the art of Zen archery. It took him more than two years of strenuous disciplined practice before he became able to hit his target more than 30 meters away without aiming.

We believe that the institution we create has to be as open and diverse as the learners who cavort in it. We believe that there are infinite paths to knowledge and that to attempt to steer is to constraint and to forge new chains. Hence we believe that good practices will prevail naturally and that it must be our aim to provide an environment for democratic meritocracy.

Freedom as Motivation for Learning

In the following paragraphs we outline our understanding of positive liberty as primary leitmotiv for education. We illustrate the essence of freedom as fundamental motivation for education by exploring the meaning of Epimeleia Heautou, the greek practice of taking care of oneself, and swaraj, the Indian concept of finding inner and external liberation.

While we do not believe that the proposed motivations need to be made explicit in all Supercool School classes, we promote their essence in everything we do.

Swaraj – to liberate the Power of Self

In the early hours of dawn a man enters a room and, looking in a dark corner, he believes to see a long coiled snake. He escapes from the room in panic. Later, when the sun has lightened the room, he finds that his not-seeing caused him to mistake a coil of rope for a snake.

This old Indian parable illustrates beautifully how knowledge (understanding of the true Being) makes us see better and therefore liberates us from fear.

So it is the unknown, the dark, the void of understanding that causes us to be afraid and to either attempt to stop the fear by terminating its cause or surrender our so called faith to someone else, who we believe to know better. One is in fear of the unknown, or better that which is not understood, because we can not prepare for the impact of whatever event it will trigger. However once we understood its Being we can influence and adopt our behavior.

This freedom of inner clarity and autonomous judgment has been named Swaraj in Indian tradition. Swaraj is the force Mahatma Gandhi (1934) conceptualized as the spiritual energy source behind the Indian peoples struggle for independence.

It is the realization of the importance of knowledge for self-esteem and self-realization that causes the entrepreneurial spirit to attain knowledge opportunities and to develop sagacity.

Epimeleia Heautou - To take care of oneself

Foucault (1983) introduces one of his lectures in Berkeley by recounting a story of the Greek scholar Hermotimus, who has been taught for the last ten years by a great philosopher. The scholar is desperate, because the studies have consumed all his wealth and he still hasn’t learned what he aspires. What he aspires is to learn to take care of himself (in Greek Epimeleia Heautou).

Foucault elaborates that one takes care of oneself spiritually and physically first as an autonomous individual and second as participant within the division of labor and societal relations of civilization.

Two general motivations are analyzed to be fundamental: Learning about oneself and the world, as an end in itself. And learning to be able to do something.

What the Greeks called episteme - learning about life and the understanding (making sense) of one’s reality as such - is a recursive perpetual motivation for learning (as self-development). It is this knowledge, described by Lombardo as “understanding the big picture” and “deep learning”, that empowers critical thinking and reflexive capacity (Giddens in allowing learners to (trans)from themselves into mature interdependent individuals (Harvey & Knight, 1996) and to engage in cultural and political discourses as cultural citizens (Delanty 2001).

The second motivation is aimed at concrete abilities and knowing methods to do something. This knowledge was named techne (as in technique) in ancient Greece. The resulting actions and benefits of techne knowledge is what allows you to physically survive (by generating economic value).

Thoreau (1910) gives us a good impression of how one can provide a (in his eyes) splendid life in almost complete isolation and autonomy from civilization. His account Walden is a great example for a way of life where one is content by oneself thereby depicting the self-recognition and self-esteem aspect of taking care of oneself. However Thoreau depicts a very eremitic perspective and most men will want to learn how to take care of themselves within society so this is what we spend the following paragraph on.

Three pillars of taking care of oneself within society can be depicted. The first objective is inner freedom, or liberation of the self-applied chains, while the second and third learning motivations aim on external freedom or freedom to master challenges outside one’s self. Three categories of knowledge can be deduced:

(1) personal development – empowering self-realization through loss of fear and development of an inner locus of control;

(2) social and cultural citizenship (Delanty, 2001) – this knowledge allows one to understand and master the complexities of public and private political struggle,

(3) and last and possibly least important technological citizenship (Delanty , 2001) – the ability to add economic value to the society.

The following section discusses the fundamentally dual nature of all these knowledge motivations described above as practice and understanding.

Ever changing knowledge – or why to pursue understanding

“In a fight there can be no flaw” is an old samurai saying illustrating the true believe that, when engaged in a performance there is not a second to think about what to do next, there is no time to analyze and reflect. There is no time to understand only to act.

We believe that all learning involves going from a Janus-like dichotomy of developing understanding and practical experimenting to the harmony of mastering a subject. The essence of true mastery however is fluid and masters understand that all knowledge evolves and morphs by being embodied in the minds of its bearers. This is the WuJi of Chinese philosophy, or Japanese Zen, which is the same as the Hegelian concept of essence.

For Hegel all human agency was divided in two categories. Most of what we perceive and enact is our mere existence; we eat, sleep, wash etc.. Existence is the mechanical, the profane aspect of our lives. What really matters is understanding the non-perishable ideas that form the basis of the ideals we believe in, because it is these memes that really make up the essence⁴ or the ultimate reason of the world.

Hence, what seems important when proposing freedom as the motivation for learning, is that hereby learning is not about possessing knowledge but about understanding and thereby being able to entrepreneurially select and live one’s essential opportunities. To create and identify the right opportunities for oneself, by understanding the essential logic behind their existence and to be able to realize them by contextualizing them with one’s life as a whole.

I learn what I want to learn

"... the human animal is a learning animal;

we like to learn; we are good at it”

John Holt (1980)

We believe that, once education is understood as learning to make life more wonderful ( rather than to fulfill expectations, etc.), natural curiosity becomes an all encompassing intrinsic motivation for self directed learning. Subsequently we believe it is the learner who knows best and ought to decide what to learn. Or in Holt’s words: “Since we cannot know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.” (Holt, 2007)

In this sense Supercool School is in line with the de-schooling , unschooling , modern or free school movements.

Why teach for free?

At Supercool School all standard teaching is done for free. What motivates the teachers to dedicate their time and effort? There are two key motivations: It is hardly news that „by teaching we are learning“ (stated by Seneca two thousand years ago ) but possibly even more relevant as an „incentive“ for teaching Martin defined gain in the three higher elements Maslow’s pyramid of needs (3. Social love & belonging, 4. esteem & self-confidence and 5. growth through self-actualization) as being substantially stimulated by teaching as the act of sharing knowledge and coaching learners.

More concretely, like a blogger, the teacher is building up a reputation. Individuals with excellent reputations will be offered opportunities based on the trust created by the multitude of evaluations and enacted knowledge activities.

Qualitative and Discrete Performance Measures

At Supercool School there are no exams to pass and no test-scores to reach. We believe that what is understood brings one to the next level; hence progress is reflected through further learning and especially teaching activities. The peer learners and teachers are encouraged to share their impression of the level of understanding and give social feedback; both meant to be foremost a constructive recommendation for concrete improvements and referrals to additional learning resources. Because the School collects all sorts of information about the learning efforts, an additional perspective is composed of the landscape of learning activities.

Creating our Future, Supercool Style

We want Supecool School to become a fertile ground where future generations choose to team up, envision and engineer the knowledge that creates our future, because we believe that it is up to each citizen to decide and create the values and ideals upon which our future is build. Durkheim felt that the great achievement of modernity is “the possibility to dynamically differentiate and elaborate values” (Welsch, 1998). It is in this spirit that we want to close our pamphlet.

Different from the natural laws of the physical world, the perceived life-world (Habermas) of the individual is constructed through their knowledge. It is hence in the hands of knowledge entrepreneurs to creatively deconstruct and recombine existing ideas about social reality in order to foster innovative enriching ways of living . These idea-units that make up the building bricks of our culture have been conceptualized as memes. A meme, as originally defined by Richard Dawkins, is "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation" .

Hence what we see is a new kind of learner. One who does not consume knowledge but is used to perceive memes (or information) and then comment, edit and expand it. Thereby engaging with it, making it part of themselves, of their identity, by expressing and defining their relation with the matter. As Tapscott and Wiliams put it: “this new generation of prosumers treats the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This new way of learning and interacting means they will treat the world as a stage for their own innovations“ (Tapscott & Wiliams 2006).

This is our motivation at Supercool School, to liberate people

from the dogma of consuming knowledge and promote deep “big picture” learning (Lombardo, 2000) that encourages the individual to

take responsibility for his/her life, create their dream and

be creative and pragmatic in pursuing it.

Living and learning the Supercool Style means creative learning that empower individuals to know more about themselves, how to relate to others, and how to make a living.

Living and learning the Supercool Style means to pursue positive personal liberty and to entrepreneurially embrace life’s journey as a series of learning opportunities.

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