Last week, at the first-ever Civic Mirror Summer Institute in Edmonds, WA, I spoke to the group several times about how truly crazy it is that I’ve spent the last 8 years developing The Civic Mirror and now Action-Ed. I mean, when all of the emphasis in education over the last ten years has been on assessment methods and curricular standardization, I’ve totally done the opposite and invested everything into an experiential, growth-oriented, game-based educational initiative.
But (I continued to explain) there was always something deep down that told me it was the right thing to do. It was real teaching. It brought out the inner-life in my otherwise sedated students. It got them out of their seats and talking about life and the world and how they want it to be. It was the reason I put “wisdom” at the center of Action-Ed’s philosophy.
And so I want to share an inspiring passage from the best book I’ve read in a long time. It’s taken from Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write (page 144). It reminds me of why I got into the business of teaching in the first place, and what “real teaching” and “real learning” truly is. I hope you find it a pleasant contrast to all the standards and benchmarks and assessment methods we’re all worrying about right before this new school year begins:
“Or should I put it this way: van Gogh and Chekhov and all great people have known inwardly that they were something. They have had a passionate conviction of their importance, of the life, the fire, the god in them. But they were never sure that others would necessarily see it in them, or that recognition would ever come.
But this is the point: everybody in the world has the same conviction of inner importance, fire, of the god within. The tragedy is that either they stifle their fire by not believing in it and using it; or they try to prove to the world and themselves that they have it, not inwardly and greatly, but externally and egotistically, by some second-rate thing like money or power or more publicity.
Therefore all should work. First because it is impossible that you have no creative gift. Second: the only way to make it live and increase is to use it. Third: you cannot be sure that it is not a great gift.”
