Is Chaos a Bad Thing?

Posted in Philosophy of EducationStudentsTeaching on Jun 10, 2010 - 09:06 AM

I am teaching two summer classes this year (my "summer vacation, ahhhh" was actually just for one week!) and in one of them we have been talking a lot lately about free schools. Of the 18 students in my class, I would say that about 75 percent of them reacted extremely negatively to the idea that kids should have freedom to learn what they wish, how they wish, and when they wish. Now, my students are definitely not in favor of our current conventional, very constrained system of education, but they seemed pretty appalled by the level of freedom that kids have at places like Summerhill, the Albany Free School, and the Sudbury Valley School. The most oft-cited opposition to these schools was the concept of chaos. My students felt that without an authority figure of some sort benevolently guiding the children, that the result would be complete and utter chaos (defined by them as a negative thing - a disorderly, confusing jumble).

Why do people automatically jump to this assumption when the topic of democractic free schools comes up? Is it our society's Christian heritage and beliefs about original sin that have colonized people into thinking that with the lifting of constraints that people will degenerate into hedonistic, self-absorbed, evil-doers (a la The Lord of the Flies)? Why is there a negative connotation to chaos? Is chaos truly a bad thing?

I am reminded of a book I read a number of years ago entitled Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Spiritual Wisdom from the Science of Change. In this book, the authors argue that chaos theory can teach us much about the world and that we should embrace chaos rather than reject it as wholly negative. They posit that Western culture over-honors order, hierarchy, and power, but such an over-ordering actually goes against the nature of life. A healthy system depends on elements of irregularity, chance, mistakes, and failures. These authors point out that nature uses chaos to create and hold the universe together, and that chaos actually has hidden patterns. Embracing elements of chaos, they argue, may be what is needed to help move us to another world view.

But how do I help my students at least consider that chaos could possibly be a good thing? How do we break away from our deeply-ingrained assumptions about what schools should look like and do? In addition to the culturally-accepted negative connotations to the concept of chaos, perhaps my students' assumptions about chaos at free schools has to do with the fuzzy role of the teacher in these places. Students just can't seem to wrap their minds around what adults do at a free school. They seem to have a sort of black/white dualistic thinking - that if the teachers aren't controlling the kids as they do in conventional schools, then there is no control at all. The ideas of self-control, or community control, or self-development don't seem to enter into their consciousnesses at all. And the ideas of gentle, non-coercive guidance also seem somewhat (albeit not as fully) foreign to my students. How do I help them to see that the adults/facilitators/teachers in free schools actually play quite active roles in the development of children?

I suppose I should talk more about my own experiences at the Albany Free School, where I spent three months as a participant observer in 2003. I need to illusrate how the teachers there seek to know the students, to find out what interests them, troubles them, and connects to them. I need to point out the much smaller teacher to student ratios, and give examples of the multi-faceted approach adults take with students there of close and distant observations, formal and informal interactions, and passive and active roles. In essence, the teachers at this school seek first and foremost to know the children and then decide (along with other teachers) how best to serve each child's developing academic, social, and emotional needs. Maybe I just need to have my students read Chapter 7 of my book Free School Teaching (I know, sorry for the totally shamless plug here!) which provides detailed illustrations of what precisely teachers do at this particular free school.

And maybe, too, I and other free school proponents should more explicitly discuss the fact that what looks like chaos on the surface and to the untrained eye, may actually be a wonderfully (post) modern dance with a unique structure and order all its own.

What other ideas do people have for challenging the negative connotation of chaos?

Tags for this entry:
self-directed learning, freedom, student-teacher roles, chaos, free schools

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