Quest(ion)
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““So this knight that ought this shield saw none other way but he must die; and then he commanded me to bear this shield to the court of King Arthur, he requiring and praying some good knight to take this shield, and that he would fulfil the quest that he was in. Now what say ye to this quest? said King Arthur; is there any of you here that will take upon him to wield this shield?... Then spake the knight, La Cote Male Taile: Fair damosel, I will take the shield and that adventure upon me, so I wist I should know whitherward my journey might be; for because I was this day made knight I would take this adventure upon me.” ”
Written in jail and finished shortly before the author’s death, Le Morte d’Arthur is the first documented articulation of “quest”. Malory presents it as a mission so meaningful it survives after death (though perhaps so dubious only the most ignorant would take it on....). Finding a calling, engaging emotionally with a defining quest, that is the topic of this essay. I want to explore how well it serves our students to focus on the tools of reading, writing and math and typical measures of school performance like test scores, to the exclusion of some greater purpose. My hypothesis: success in helping students to discover and commit to something, anything, which somehow engages them on a deep, unshakable level would be a far better barometer of educational achievement. It is how we should judge schools.
Quest i on #1: What can you get paid for?
As linear as it looks to connect a beginning with an endpoint, the thread connecting me to my career for example is impossibly tenuous. Imagining the likelihood of that connection is as pointless as calculating the chances of you being you, genetically, from the dawn of time. There is nothing to be done with the calculation, except to appreciate the path. My friends and I scoured building sites for scraps as kids, secretly abetted by a carpenter named Jimmy who would “put things aside”. The nails and scrap lumber we would turn into treehouses. Three years of elementary school, two years of junior high, four years of high school, two disastrous years of engineering school, one inspiring year spent riding a bicycle around Europe and Africa, six more years of college, three years of practical training, a muddy year in the Amazon Jungle, and 40 hours of examinations later, I registered as an architect with the State of California. I was 35 years old. In all that time, I never asked or cared what I would get paid, but I never doubted that I would make a living (It is one advantage to selecting a profession).
In this Age of Acceleration, a child’s life is likely to get less and less predictable. My point here is not to imagine that children will divine their purpose in elementary school by consulting pay scales, nor would I discourage them if it made a difference. The web is filled with resources on potential careers. Rather, I want to propose that school take a more proactive role in regularly connecting students with possible futures and consulting those resources, including the pay scales. Imagine starting every school year with a counseling session, some reference to possible career choices, some focus on the skills required. School would take on new meaning.
I originally defaulted to engineering school because it seemed practical. Asked to define a purpose after I flunked out, I could only muster a desire to go to Africa. It seemed romantic and unattainable and an escape from my current circumstances: my second true, emotional quest. It had nothing to do with improving myself, and everything to do with emotionally connecting to a purpose, however hare-brained. The thought of Africa inspired me.
I did go to Africa in fact, pedaling a bicycle from Amsterdam to Morocco and back over the course of a year, but it did not define for me what I should do with my life. A girlfriend had romanticized architecture, pursuing it seemed better than wandering aimlessly, my wide interests seemed to apply, I could trace the classes, experiences and successes that connected me to the career, and it sounded cool. I was intrigued, but far from certain. My fundamental Question, would this be right for me, only slowly became my Quest.
School had never romanticized or helped me to romanticize anything, but it should. Learning should be ignited by emotion and feel like a magnificent quest for clues that unlock tantalizing mysteries. We might call such a quest: re:search.
Consider:
Do you or your school regularly situate students in the real world?
Do you discuss careers?
Do you discuss what students believe is cool, and help them to explore it?
Quest i on #2: What are you good at?
No one thing more than likely, and then what do you do? In my case, college was preordained but my insecurities had me apply to all of the Ivy league schools and a few safeties as well. MIT beckoned, but seemed too…nerdy. Dartmouth beckoned, but seemed too…liberal-artsy. I chose to attend the engineering school at Cornell University because engineering was what my dad had modelled, and because Cornell offered many other options just in case. Engineering bored and frustrated me, but I found my calling elsewhere on campus some years later. Why hadn’t I found my calling years earlier though, and more efficiently?
The first reason is cultural. Rightly or wrongly, I came to believe that any class at my high school in Acton, Massachusetts that was not highly abstract represented a lesser standard of accomplishment. These abstract classes felt self-contained and disconnected from real life. The result for me was a profound disconnect between ability and purpose. I could master calculus and probability, program computers, make latex in organic chemistry, create holograms with lasers, write stories, essays and position papers, speak some French, draw cartoons, and play tennis and three-dimensional chess, but none of it connected me emotionally to a purpose. Everything was a pointless game that I played well enough. The biographies I read were of men overcoming hardship or dying at the Alamo. The adults I knew rarely expressed joy. Work, competition, and hardship: this was what life seemed to offer, and it felt dreadful. Emotion was therefore an obstacle and not a highly sensitive and useful tool; I could not feel my way to a purpose.
Consider:
Do you share joyful experiences with your students?
Do you often feel and express joy in the classroom?
How do you help your students to use their emotions to identify and explore possible futures?
The second reason I did not find purpose sooner is practical. I invested my time in my courses and not in counseling or appraising my strengths and options. No one seemed concerned, least of all me; I was a committed student. An adult that regularly grabbed me by my collar and forcefully compelled me to think ahead, not just to college but to life thereafter would have made an incalculable difference. More exposure to working adults of all stripes would also have made a big difference. More joy and romantic projection in class would have helped. More biographies of people I could imagine being might have been a game changer. Self-actualization sounds terrific as a guiding intention, but it had all of my energies focused on myself. I found no inspiring purpose there, and seriously doubt anyone ever will. Admonishments to focus on others meant nothing to me, however, since none of my pursuits seemed to lend themselves to it. I was perhaps so single-minded that I needed clearer direction or example.
Consider:
Does your school afford students the opportunity and the time to identify and explore possible futures?
Do you help students to consider a career as a contribution? As service? As anything more than self-development?
Quest i on #3: What do you love?
I didn’t really “love” anything in school. My quest was simply “self-improvement”. This perspective taught me a lot, and situated me for success in that specific environment, but it left me singularly unprepared to choose a direction in life.
We champion the cause of “life-long learning”, enamored by the alliteration and mindful of an accelerating pace of change that will likely impose multiple transformations on our children, but we too often avoid the issue of emotional engagement and commitment. What do we offer a child that is reasonably good at everything but a star in nothing at all? How do we help that student to find, choose or build a direction in life? Is it enough to get them into college and have them figure it out there? How do we help the student struggling simply to pass? Focus on the immediate problems, or present them with portals into possible futures? How do we help these students to find something, some possible future, to love?
What finally is love? For some it may happen at first sight, but for me it took years of effort, encouragement and enough success to feel rewarded. Love was a result, not a precondition. Despite setbacks and diversions, somehow I believed. I believed I would become an architect. Failures felt like detours, not dead-ends. Therapist Linda Carroll (2021) describes love as an infatuation that ultimately meets resistance, parried by a decision. My decision to become an architect felt like that. Perhaps to love is simply to simultaneously accept and believe.
Consider:
How do you encourage your students, no matter how tentatively, to acknowledge and believe in a possible future?
How does your educational program probe this regularly, in order to situate students emotionally?
Quest i on #4: What does the world need?
While learning often connotes “digestion”, where the student is presented with a meal of external provenance, re:search requires self-motivation and self-direction. The researcher is busy making and eating his own meal. In “learning”, the teacher is often the cook, presenting nourishment with greater or lesser artistry but always the agent in the transaction. “Re:search” and “Re:quest” on the other hand, seeking clues and asking good questions, have teachers playing an advising instead of a directing role, co-creating a community of discovery with the student, the student experience the focus.
Eleanor Duckworth, in her book The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning maintains:
“Surprise, puzzlement, struggle, excitement, anticipation, and dawning certainty — those are the matter of intelligent thought. As virtues, they stand by themselves—even if they do not, on some specific occasion, lead to the right answer. In the long run, they are what count.”
The Search, the Quest: fired by emotion, this is truly of the essence! All the more so if it is clues to your future that you seek.
What should students know about re:search before we invite them to partake? Michael Nielsen (2004) offers a cogent take in Principles of Effective Research. He presents research as a balance between self-development and a creative process, the researcher a member of a community responsible for the well-being of that community as well as himself. Achieving an understanding and sharing it are of equal importance, with the success of the student inextricably tied to the success of the community.
For many students, this would be a fundamental shift. The teacher-student relationship can be understood to be a one-way street: teachers give, students take. Re-conceive the contract, and make sure that students understand it, so that teachers and students both contribute, and we open a window to the fresh air of community, communication and collaboration.
Nielsen identifies two types of research: problem solving and problem creating. Solving seeks answers to known questions and Creating seeks new perspectives and new questions. This too suggests an important role for students: responding to preconceived questions but also seeking and posing the questions themselves. The key to agency, autonomy and commitment: offering our students the skills to ask and answer their own questions.
Students too might experience a powerful change that occurs when you dig deeply into a question. You start by looking for buried treasure: something down there to be your answer. You dig and dig until the issue envelopes you completely and you understand it to the point where it thoroughly defines your experience, and then you stop digging and it dawns on you that you have done your part: that if an answer is to be found, you will need to let it come to you.
We might begin to appreciate the difference between “looking for”, (hunting?), and “letting come”, (fishing?). When you hunt, you find what you’re looking for, or don’t. When you fish, you allow the environment to deliver what it has to offer. Hunting presupposes an answer to your question. Fishing suggests going deep and a feel for the subtle vibrations of the pole. This is the real moral of August Kekule’s dream of a snake devouring itself: that after years of research the answer to the formation of a Benzene molecule was not “found”. Instead, it came unbidden, in a few moments of pause.
Expeditionary Learning offers a compelling approach to learning as re:search. Rather than rely on books or lectures, Expeditionary Learning ties student work to actual issues in the community and professionals working in the field of focus. Students find agency, relevance, mentors, and audience for their efforts. They can take on the roles of the experts advising them, similar to an apprenticeship. Collectively, students take responsibility for the final presentation of their work. With Expeditionary Learning, students truly adopt a Quest, stepping into authentic communities of learning exactly as Michael Nielsen describes it and connecting with something the world needs.
“we are crew, not passengers”
If we can bear to tear ourselves away from the interminable focus on content in school, we might take a room full of students, simply pose a question, and ask them to report back with what they can find out about it. They might begin to appreciate the difference between taking something apart to understand its internal workings, and investigating its relationships and context to understand its external workings.
If we appropriately value student agency, we might ask them to choose from a host of questions, or find questions of their own.
If our intention is to truly nurture independent, creative life-long activists, then we might encourage not answers to questions, but solutions to poignant, personally relevant problems. Problems students care about.
“Not just answers to questions, but solutions to problems.”
That orientation, to questions serving a problem, highlights a distinction at the heart of this entire book, between a dispassionate mindset of studying and a more engaged mindset of solving. Studying too often isolates the student in a battle between questions and the mind; solving offers community, and relevance, a connection to what the world needs.
If we value our own leadership role, we might offer resources: a library devoted to cataloging beguiling problems, in lieu of solutions to problems that long ago lost their poignancy. In tackling those problems, let’s then teach students how to formulate questions, evaluate questions, and dig deep with their questions: to work them like shovels.
Quest i on #1: What can you get paid for?
Quest i on #2: What are you good at?
Quest i on #3: What do you love?
Quest i on #4: What does the world need?
These four questions, they imperfectly relate to the Japanese conception of Ikigai, an approach to defining your quest, that which is meaningful to you. If public school would take any responsibility at all for empowering students to situate themselves in the world outside, then they will regularly pause to help them consider these questions.
Toronto Star Graphic via Dreamstime
Here is the key point of this essay: a search is intellectual, a quest is emotional. Look around you, at a world facing problems of immense urgency. Dispassion can be useful, but it’s no excuse for disengagement. We need students right there where passion and dispassion meet. We need them hot and cold, fired up, emotion-driven and firmly committed to intellectual clarity and precision. Let’s entice our students with the mythic qualities of a deeply personal and emotional quest where passion and dispassion are equally valued and required.
How do we do that? Expeditionary Learning gives us a clue in proclaiming “The Primacy of Self-Discovery”. It’s a reminder that the most important quest of all, especially among young students, is to understand and situate themselves within their surrounding context. Identity remains the most engaging and poignant mystery of adolescence, a well-spring of passion if our curriculum would but douse and dig for its source. School should be helping students to discover and commit to something, anything, which somehow engages them on a deeply personal level with something, anything, beyond themselves. This would be a far better barometer of educational achievement. This is how we should judge schools.
Consider:
How do you help your students to make your curriculum both personally and culturally meaningful?
Do you, or can you imagine helping them to situate themselves using Ikigai?
References
Carroll, L. (2021). The 5 Stages Of A Relationship Every Couple Goes Through. [blog]. mbgrelationships. https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/stages-of-a-relationship
Duckworth, E. (2006). The having of wonderful ideas" & other essays on teaching & learning (3rd edition). Teachers College, Columbia University.
Kemp, N. (2022). The cultural appropriation of Ikigai. [blog post] https://medium.com/ikigai-insights/the-cultural-appropriation-of-ikigai-e44ac0ce739d
Malory, T. (2020). Le morte d’Arthur. Project Gutenberg [Ebook]. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1251/1251-h/1251-h.htm#bibl01 . Originally published in 1470 by William Caxton.
Nielsen, M. (2004, July 27). Principles of Effective Research. Technical note 0404. School of Physical Sciences and School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia. https://aykuterdem.github.io/resources/principles-of-effective-research.pdf
Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!