Education 2.0: The Importance of Ownership

Here are the two paragraphs that jumped out at me:

I was hiking with my son yesterday. It was a long hike for a boy his age and he asked me, “Dad, do your feet hurt?” I turned my head as we walked and said, “Yeah. They hurt. But not all hurting is bad and you wanted to get to the top of the hill. Do you want to stop?” He thought about it for a long while, ten, maybe twenty steps and said, “no, but my feet hurt too. I’ll be glad when we get to the top.” Ed 2.0 won’t make our feet not hurt. We’ll just be hiking to more wonderous places.

and...

Ed 2.0 is about encouraging ownership - genuine heartfelt ownership of one’s own educational destiny. The institutions will transform faster than we can keep pace. Between the cracks of our existing educational infrastructure will grow varied species of educational delivery the likes of which we have never seen and cannot possibly forecast. What our students will need is a love of learning but we should not mistake this for an easy love affair. A love of learning is a hard relationship. Learning hurts sometimes. Learning is scary most of the time. It’s impact is all-too-often proportional to its agony. As Benjamin Franklin described it, “Those things that hurt, instruct.”

I'm spending my professional life teaching business to adult learners. There seems to be a very significant and visible difference between people who understand that learning is sometimes difficult (but that's okay), and people who believe that everything should be easy or simple. The former inevitably grow, and the latter give up or stagnate.

I'm also competing, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, with MBA programs. Compared with self-education, many of my readers consider MBA programs a form of "easy mode" as if it's a good thing - they know they probably won't learn anything practical, but the structure is handed to them, but at least they'll "complete" it and get a sheepskin at the end. Some choose the safe, predictable path instead of taking ownership for their own learning - even if it's more expensive and less valuable. (Most individuals who take ownership for their own learning in MBA programs are the people who don't need them in the first place.)

I really wonder if "ownership" can be taught. If so, I'd like to teach it.

I like to distinguish between "vanilla fun" and "Nietzschean fun" (after the German philosopher). You get to experience the latter by simply pushing your pleasure button over and over like the rat in the experiment (drugs, sex, dancing,food, etc). You get to experience the latter by cultivating a sense of self-development through willing submission to some sort of (often painful) discipline which makes you grow out of yourself. You have be excited about growing, rather than trying to hold on to who you already were, in order for this "fun" to be fun; a lot of people grip ferociously to who they are and don't want to self-overcome, and so they can't really become learners. Math homework, physical training, etc -- all Nietzschean.

Don't get me wrong -- the former should be part of everyone's life. But so should the latter.