This is the first in a 2 part series of posts based on an interview with Dave Pollard. Come back tomorrow for the next post in the series, subscribe to the blog, or become a fan on Facebook. Read other posts from the interview»
One of the keys of complexity theory is the idea that systems self-organize optimally. I think that’s true for us in social environments, and can certainly be true for schools.
I had a pivotal experience in my last year in high school. I had a very, very happy young childhood, but then when I reached school age—the age when peer pressure starts to mount, I found that, I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand why kids were being mean to each other. Why they were dishonest. All of this just kind of threw me, and so I went through a number of years in my middle years of schooling, that were very unhappy, and not very successful.
In my second to last year of high school, I was almost ready to drop out.
In my last year in high school, they decided to do a pilot project, which they called Independent Study. The purpose of that pilot project was to allow outstanding students to be exempt from classroom attendance and only show up for tests. As long as we maintained at least a B+ average in our test scores, we were allowed to remain outside the classroom and, essentially, to teach ourselves. The theory being that it would free up teachers’ time to focus on the students that really needed the help. Somehow, I lucked into it.
I hated going to school, so this was perfect for me. I connected with some bright students and within about a month into that year, we had kind of created our own self-teaching unit. We would spend about an hour each day teaching each other the curriculum and checking each other’s work. And then the rest of the school day, we would go to museums or the science center or art galleries. Or we would just sit out in the park and talk about philosophy.
I began to read all kinds of stuff that was never on the high school curriculum. And in the course of that, two things happened. The first was academic: my grades went from a 67 percent average the previous year to a 94 percent average. I was one of the high scorers on the province-wide final examinations. Our group of “Independent Studiers” also won the lion’s share of the scholarships that year for the entire province. That really attested to the power of this experiment, of letting people teach themselves, of letting them direct their own learning.
The other thing that came out of that experiment is that I discovered a passion for writing. I had been terrible in English, but through this class, I discovered that I loved to write. I just kept writing and this group of friends kept telling me, “Oh Dave, that’s a piece of shit. This is what you should be doing.” And they taught me. Soon my work was being published in the school ‘s literary journal. I went from being somebody who couldn’t stand English class to being a writer. And that all happened in one year, through unschooling.
That’s why I’ve become such a fanatic advocate of the unschooling process as the means to really discover yourself and what you’re good at and what you love doing—and therefore, what you’re meant to do.
The reason this unschooling worked was not only that it was self-directed, but that it was collaborative. The group of us essentially self-organized into a learning unit. And human beings are really good at doing this. If we’re facing a problem, we’re really good at self-organizing ourselves. We don’t need to be told what to do. But we’ve created an economy where it’s expected that you will be told what to do, and that you will do that. And I think that’s a terrible waste of talent, and a lost opportunity for joyful work.
For personal reasons, partly relationships, and partly the fact that I have struggled with depression for much of my life, I lost my way after that year of high school. It took me a number of years to pick myself up. When I finally did, I found myself in British Columbia, cold and hungry and poor. I needed a job. So I walked into this building that had an opening for a computer systems analyst, in Victoria BC. But I didn’t get that job.
As I was walking out, though, I decided to visit a company that was in the same building – the predecessor firm to Ernst & Young, and I said to them, “I don’t know what debits and credits are, but I’m a quick learner and I need a job, and I’ll work really hard, and I’d like to be given an opportunity to work for the company.”
To my astonishment, they gave me an hour of their time. One of the senior partners told me exactly what I needed to do to qualify for a job at the company. So I took some courses they’d recommended and a couple of months later, I applied for a job there, and also, at the same “job fair”, with six of their competitors. Ernst & Young gave me the lowest offer, but I took it because I was grateful for them having helped me out when I had just walked in off the street. That was the start of a 27-year collaboration with them.
After I took the job, I discovered that one aspect was helping entrepreneurs—and I loved doing that. I loved when entrepreneurs would come up to me and say, almost in tears, that the expertise that I had shared with them–what I had taught them, was the difference between them still being in business and not.
That was enormously satisfying. And also to hear them say that it was my ability to do this kind of lateral thinking, the fact that I could read about something or hear about somebody’s experience in one industry and apply it somewhere else—that just led me to believe that that was my sweet spot, and that there was a need for this. They were the best years of my work life.
Canada has a terribly vulnerable economy. We are very dependent on natural resources and commodity prices. And we are very dependent on being employed by foreign companies – foreign-owned businesses employ a very sizeable percentage of Canadian workers. The way to make the Canadian economy more resilient and healthier is to wean ourselves off that dependence on our natural resources and foreign employers. And the way in which we can do that is through entrepreneurship.
What’s next for me? Well, I don’t think there’s much doubt that it has to do with environmental activism.
I was a radical environmentalist as a teenager. When I took up the blog in 2003, it quickly became the focus of my attention—to rediscover the state of the environment and what individuals can do to make our world a better place.
I invested a lot of time and energy into researching our environmental situation and determining what we could actually do. Now that I’m in a position where I can retire, it’s time for me to stop just writing about what you can do to make the world more environmentally friendly, and act.
I think we’ll need a combination of three things to make the world a better place. So-called “destructive” activism, where you’re actually obstructing the damage that’s being done by major polluters. Personal actions, such as recycling and learning to grow your own food. And the creation of new models, like intentional communities, permaculture and the transition movement.
Just like building an enterprise, it’s not what we do individually that really matters. It’s what we do collaboratively that will determine our success. ♦
Dave Pollard believes that human civilization is in its last century and is attempting to fulfill his responsibility who will rebuild a new civilization out of our ashes by living life in the sweet spot. Read his blog. Follow him on Twitter.
Published Friday, November, 6, 2009