Miseducative Experiences

Audrey Watters

Audrey Watters

— 7 min read
Miseducative Experiences
Northern cardinal (Image credits)

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?"

Arguably and more than a little ironically, this may be one of the most frequently invoked lines of poetry on social media – I won't add "for better or worse," although I'm tempted to, because as much as I frown when art is reduced to meme, I'm never mad when I read Mary Oliver's words. How could I be? Just these two lines unlock other lines and other poems, and I'm always hopeful that their simplicity and accessibility and power will lure people into reading more. Not just more Mary Oliver, but more poetry of any and all sorts.

Poetry, after all, isn't something you can "optimize" -- neither its reading nor its writing -- and "optimization" seems to be the despairingly destructive driving force of our culture, an exercise that, if nothing else, serves to make our lives much much less beautiful and wild.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?"

I ask this question -- "plead" may be the better verb -- of those who are spending an increasing amount of time typing to chatbots, who are handing over important cognitive tasks and key decisions -- personal and professional -- to "artificial intelligence." I ask this question -- "implore" even -- of those who are hunched over their laptops or their phones, those who are watching television on multiple screens, almost every waking minute of their day.

Because this is what you've decided to do with your one wild and precious life.

"I don't know exactly what a prayer is," Oliver admits in that same poem, but continues, "I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, / how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, / which is what I have been doing all day. / Tell me, what else should I have done?"

Tech writer Taylor Lorenz tells Wired she spends 17 hours a day online. She does not want to "touch grass," she insists. She's a 40-something year old woman; she can do what she wants.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?"

What you decide to do with your one wild and precious life is up to you -- whether your prayers of devotion are to the computer or to "AI" or to social media and not, as Oliver might encourage us, to the grasshopper and other planetary intelligences.

What you decide to do with your one wild and precious life, where your attention and your prayers are directed, is also, of course, what you've opted not to do. And these decisions do, in fact, matter.

Lorenz (and plenty of others) like to argue that "there is no evidence" that social media (or the Internet or computers or ed-tech or television or video games or whatever) harms children – an exaggeration, no doubt, as there is evidence; they just don't like it. (They don't like Jonathan Haidt, to be specific. And I get that, I really do.)

Lorenz's latest newsletter cites the work of psychologist Christopher Ferguson, best known for his challenges to his field's prevailing research on video games: that there is a link between video games and aggressive behavior. Ferguson contends that claims about the relationship between violence and video games is not just exaggerated; it is non-existent, that is all merely a moral panic. This is the framing that Lorenz leans into with recent efforts to regulate social media too, which she explicitly links to the push to censor LGBTQ content online.

The right-wing movements that are actively seeking to ban books, eliminate academic departments, circumscribe what can be taught in the classroom, and yes, limit children's access to social media should not be ignored. Indeed, it is imperative that those who seek to curb Silicon Valley's power and influence over education and information delineate how their efforts are not politically aligned with the Moms of Liberty ilk.

But to frame any opposition to technology as a "moral panic" is a rhetorical sleight of hand in which one side gets to invoke "science" and "research" while dismissing the other as mere "hysteria." To dismiss people's concerns about what kids – any of us, really – are up to online as fundamentally reactionary, as censorious is more than a little disingenuous.

There is research (and plenty of it) that finds that various forms of new media – apps, games, and so on – affects us, affects how and what we think and know. I mean, of course it does. People are spending hour after hour after hour after hour – almost every waking minute of every day – clicking on things.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?"

What we do with our time -- online or off -- matters, and profoundly so. Everything we do shapes who we are. Everything we experience shapes who we become.

This belief is at the core of progressive education – contrary to those accusations above that arguments against technology only come from right-wing zealots – and certainly this belief is at the core of the work of John Dewey. In Experience and Education, he too turns to poetry to make his point, citing Tennyson: "...all experience is an arch wherethro' / Gleams the untraveled world, whose margin shades / For ever and for ever when I move."

But as Dewey argues, not all experiences are necessarily educative; and as repeated experiences can become habits, we might find ourselves adopting patterns that are incredibly destructive not just to our own learning, but to our relationships with one another, with the world around us – destructive even to democracy. We might find ourselves having been fundamentally changed by the behaviorist practices and libertarian ideologies that undergird every single piece of computer technology we use.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?"

At what point can you no longer even plan to do things with your one wild and precious life because these technologies have obliterated your ability to even imagine something outside their dictates, their designs for you?

Everything Everywhere All At Once:

Teaching a group is hard, so there’s a tendency to retreat to what works for individuals. Give everyone flashcards. Give everyone a computer. Every kid has a tutor. Every kid works on the app. This tendency is maybe especially strong in thinking about math facts, since they’re so heavily studied by special education and psychological researchers who tend to think in terms of individual support—the one-on-one intervention or study. The “Science of Learning” has a bias towards individual pedagogy.

This tendency should be resisted. Teaching a group is most viable when you’re able to teach them as a group. When you treat them as twenty single individuals, each on their own different path, the job also gets twenty times harder. Now, I’m not naive. I understand there are times when the different needs of students are too great for uniform expectations. But I think we’re often too eager to turn a class into a collection of individuals. Instead we can keep class vibrant, interactive, and engaging without asking everyone to retreat to their desks. The collective deserves more respect.

from Experience and Education by John Dewey

We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything.
All this means that attentive care must be devoted to the conditions which give each present experience a worthwhile meaning.

"The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
(Image credits)

Today's bird is the northern cardinal – a nod to Mary Oliver’s poem “Red Bird” in which the cardinal’s vibrant plumage stands in contrast to the dull browns and greys and blues of winter: “Red bird came all winter / Firing up the landscape /As nothing else could.” A fairly common bird in North America, particularly if you have a bird feeder, the cardinal can also boast being the most common state bird and the mascot to about a zillion sports teams.

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