Awe: Education's Essential Ingredient

In this episode of The Conscious Classroom, Amy Edelstein reflects on the role of awe and wonder in learning and how it's incumbent on us--the educators--to teach in a way that evokes that sense of being moved with what we teach, why we want our students to learn it, and what we define as the markers of successful learner. 

Learning for mere information or test-taking ends up primarily being transactional--not transformational. That's also one of the issues with the use of AI--information without the learned and transformative impact of engaging with the learning process. It smooths out our thought process, homogenizing, and flattening out the creative wrinkles which are the most interesting thing. 

This is an episode you'll want to listen to and share with a friend. 

Transcript

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Welcome to The Conscious Classroom

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Hello, welcome to the conscious classroom. My name is Amy Edelstein. I'm your host, and I'm very happy to be here today, where we're going to talk about the value of connecting all of our subjects to the frontiers of scientific research. And the reason why is not only to validate the understanding of young people and the principles and parallels that we're making between the measurable world and the inner world, but it's also to create that incredible sense of awe and wonder. In our age where it's easy to get answers with the click of a button. And when that happens, and I'm sure you've probably experienced that, when you get an email response or a text response on a question you asked from a colleague, and it's about this long and it's filled with bullet points, and you know that they didn't generate it, that they put a prompt into their AI and spat it out and text it back to you. I bet if you're anything like me, you don't really read the whole thing with much care. Because you sort of feel like if they didn't think through the answer themselves or the situation or the technical question, even if they got support from an AI, if they didn't massage it with their own hard mind, it's hard to put the time into absorbing it. So what's happening is we're getting accustomed to skimming on the surface. And when we skim on the surface, we lose awe and wonder. And when we lose awe and wonder in learning, we lose the heart of it. We lose the heart of our humanity, we lose the heart of creativity and innovation. And we relate to information in a transactional way.

From Transactional to Transformational Learning

SPEAKER_00 3:12

And information is not meant to be transactional. Information is meant to be transformational, whether we're transforming issues like too much carbon in our atmosphere, which is causing all kinds of problems. And how do we decrease that? To too much concentration of wealth and too many people in dire need. How do we resolve that? To too much limitation in our own emotional experience and not enough freedom and awe and sense of presence and wonder and feeling awake, feeling that vast expanse of being, the dimension of being of life itself. We want to think about knowledge as transformational, not transactional. Not, I'm gonna learn this to get a grade on the test, I'm gonna learn this to get a better job, I'm gonna learn this in order to, I'm gonna learn this to it's we take in nutritious food. It feeds and fuels our being so we can live in this world in an amazing way.

Building Inner Strength Through Awe

SPEAKER_00 4:36

In at inner strength, in everything we do, we're building in that sense of awe and wonder. And it's the way we run our organization as well. We're very practical. There's a lot of money to raise, there are salaries to pay, there is curricula to plan, there are partnerships to establish with after-school programs, there's a digital platform in prototype. There's a lot of work being done, but at the heart of it is the always the context, the container, the framework of awe and transformation. We're not here to go through life at the same level as when we emerged in this particular historical pathway. We go through life in order to evolve ourselves, to really grow and develop and become and stretch beyond our boundaries. The adolescent years are the perfect years to seed in the habit of transformation and growth. Too often our educational systems are too transactional. What they measure is what they can test for, and what they can test for maps onto an earning plan and a higher learning plan, which are important in and of themselves. What's missing from them often is the human dimension of what's the order of our humanity? Are we growing our humanity? Are we stretching ourselves in order to be like those beings we feel have really evolved their inner nature? We're all human beings. So I think even most of the great saints, at least the contemporary ones, have stories from disciples who've seen them with human frustration, human anger, human irritation. It's part of dealing with the world of limitation. That's okay. Even the Buddha got sick in his old age. It's part of having a human body. And the Buddha, even if you're not Buddhist, being an exemplar or a role model or an archetype of someone who has radically evolved their inner selves. And so if you think of what that archetype would be, we still have human form, so we still have these limitations.

The Science of Inner Change

SPEAKER_00 7:41

What's wonderful about bringing the science into the inner dimensions is that you have to relate to this principle, to the principles of constant flux and change. Water is solid, liquid, and gas depending on conditions. Energy and matter change and move. When we teach teens that our emotional life is malleable, plastic, like our brains are malleable and plastic. We can always grow and learn and change habits. Some might be quite difficult to change, some might be easier to change, some we may not successfully change. But with habit and effort and repetition, we can see observable differences. Just like an athlete can see observable differences if they practice, a musician can see observable differences if they practice. If we practice the art and science of kindness and care and friendship, if we practice and learn the art and science of in a non-judgmental and observational relationship to thought, so we become more sensitive to what the random thoughts are in our minds and whether they're reliable or not. We think all kinds of things, and sometimes those things are not very reliable. I have all kinds of random thoughts go through my head. Simply learn through much practice, and maybe bumping into a few brick walls, too, along the way, that some of those thoughts just aren't very reliable. So I give them less credence. But we have to learn and we have to practice. And that's what the inner strength skill set is designed to do is to bring in the science of brain development, bring in the science of physics and biology and evolutionary theory, and bring in the practice and exploration of our self-sense and how we evolve, how we relate to the world around us.

Teens Need Room to Grow

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Working with teens, we see that it at that stage, there's so much that's coming to the forefront in their experience. They're growing out of childhood, they're able to form deeper relationships, they're able to love passionately, they're able to feel righteousness, they're able to have a sense of good and ill and to desire to change the world in profound and significant ways. Now, oftentimes they're told directly or through cues to tap down that passion. It's not appropriate in class. Don't talk too loud. Raise your hand or do your homework. Don't think about that now. You have too much to do. That's the time to think and experiment and write and explore. That is the time when new patterns of thought start to arise. That's the time when young people need playgrounds for inner development. They need to be able to explore philosophy. They need to be able to explore emotional relationship to the world. They need to be able to explore values in relationship to their the culture they live in or the culture that they came from. They need time and community to reflect on all these things. And they need different perspectives. So it's not simply a personal exploration. It's not simply, how am I feeling today, or what was my trauma, or what do I believe in? It's too small a framework.

Big Questions and Safe Exploration

SPEAKER_00 12:42

How does brain science work? How does evolution work? How does cosmology work? How does biology work? How does botany work? How does that relate to how human beings work? How do archetypes work? How's mythology work? How do institutional structures work, of government or organized religion or school systems? How do systems work? How do we analyze our own experience in terms of big systems all around us? Instead of seeing us trying to dissect ourselves to figure out what's going on looking through a microscope, or we only see one cell at a time. When we give young people the environment to explore, and we give them a safe environment to explore in. Not that there isn't danger, but the safety comes from mentorship, love, encouragement, positive expectation, support, recognition of their talents, affirmation of their skills and their qualities. That's what creates a safe environment. On a vision quest, young adolescents would be sent off to fend for themselves for several days in the wild. And so the teen going through their rites of passage would feel the fear and terror and difficulty, and they would find their strength by rubbing up against that friction, by rubbing up against those difficult edges. But they'd always be in that context of a loving and affirming community that believed in their capacity so they could emerge out the other side stronger with self-confidence.

Finding Strength in the Himalayas

SPEAKER_00 15:11

I went to the Himalayas when I was 20 and had my 21st birthday there and spent 12 months pretty much walking on my own in different parts of the Himalayas in the mountains without a cell phone. They hadn't been invented yet, without GPS, hadn't been invented yet, or at least wasn't accessible to the world. I had a paper map and my tennis shoes, and a lot of gumption. And I met people and I learned from them and I learned their languages and I watched their ways of life, and I grew so much from having to struggle up against my own sense of limitation or my own rough edges, to learn by observing, to learn by testing, and to find out of that that profound recognition of self-sufficiency, which also comes from the recognition that as important as community is, ultimately we are the only ones who can take responsibility for our own minds. So when I work with young people, and in our ethos and in our strength, it always comes from a place of wholeness first. We recognize the inherent wholeness of each one of us and recognize all the rough edges and areas that need to grow and develop. We're a work in progress. Wholeness does not mean that we've stopped or come to the end. Wholeness has to do with that essential quality of beingness and goodness that is part of the fabric of the cosmos. Our earth is always changing and evolving, but it is also whole. It's a planet sustaining life. So seeing the holes within the holes within the holes, that nested quality of our capacities gives the sense that there's always another concentric circle to expand into without rejecting the past as having been flawed at a fundamental level. Now we may have messed up. We may have had actions that were very flawed, but we can only really deal with them from this place of recognition that each moment, each incarnation of ourselves from moment to moment is whole as it is. And references in science can help us with that. Equal and opposite reactions. Energy is transformed, not created or destroyed. How can we understand those things? How can we apply those things to our inner understanding? And these are questions that are ripe for adolescent exploration.

The Cost of Losing Wonder

SPEAKER_00 18:44

Removing this sense of grappling with the essence of life from our curricula as a whole for young people is doing them a profound disservice. It is contributing to that sense of anxiety, of self-doubt, of inadequacy, of withdrawal, of disengagement. It's a profound disservice to remove the room for awe and wonder in education. And it has impacts, very practical impacts, on our working world and on life as a whole. If you have a disinterested, fearful adolescent filled with self-doubt, who's never been through these frictions of rubbing up against themselves and finding out what they really believe in and what they're really made of, then when they come into the workforce, they're going to be looking for affirmation all the time. They're going to be shirking challenges. They're going to be avoiding, acknowledging their limitations and where they need to grow and learn from. They're going to be hiding. That doesn't do the workforce any good. It doesn't do them any good. It doesn't do our future any good. Bringing back awe and wonder into the classroom, into all manners of education. And when I think of classroom, I think of myself as a lifelong learner. I'm constantly learning from people, from books, from life, from meditation, from teachers, from my husband, from my colleagues, from my employees, from the business structure, from the education structure.

The Classroom of Life

SPEAKER_00 20:51

Classroom to me is the vast expanse of life. It's not the rigid four walls, but sure more and more removed from the natural world. Many of the schools I go into, they have the shades pulled during the day because they reflect off the screens. So you never know what time it is, there's no fresh air. We're preferencing mechanisms over nature. We're divorcing ourselves from the world as a whole and wondering why we feel so adrift and alone. And a lot of these attitudes are formed in adolescence, because in adolescence is really the time when we're leaning in, figuring out life. It's the time of life when those questions of individual identity. And habits of mind really form. And those habits can be ones of curiosity and leaning into the world as a whole, and leaning into experience, leaning into community, leaning into relationships, leaning into growth edges, leaning into the unanswerable questions. Or they can be one of indifference. And our future will play out the outcomes of what happens of where we have young people focusing.

Lenses of Wonder

SPEAKER_00 22:41

I recently was talking with a really wonderful innovator and educator, and she was saying that she did photography of, I don't know how she put it exactly, but photography of astronomical environments. She said when you look up in the sky, you can't, with your camera, you can't see that much until you put very specific lenses on your camera. When you put those lenses on, this phenomenal world opens up. The different colored gases and swirls and light and shades of hues of different colors that you just can't imagine that aren't visible to our normal eye. But when you put these lenses on and they filter in certain things and out other things, you see a different view on what's happening there. And it opens up just such a vast sense of wonder and love and reverence for the cosmos. That is exactly what we want to do in our education world, is give students these different lenses that will reveal and reflect the world and themselves in different ways, so that they'll see colors and movement and shape and presence that they couldn't see without those lenses. And some of those lenses are science, cosmology, deep time evolution, biology, neuroscience. Some of them are historical, some of them are cultural, some of them are mythic. And some of them are simply the penetrating presence and care and companionship of ourselves with ourselves, with our own experience. And so I understand more and more now why 30 years ago or so the Dalai Lama initiated these mind and life dialogues to really put his keen mind into talking with scientists. And at first, at first, I thought it was to create a bridge between East and West and to validate the meditative sciences with the scientific community of the West. But I think it was more than that. I think that that those different lenses that open up ways to understand the self are an important part of wonder. So we want to be open to all different ways to learn. We want to be open to different fields. We want to be generalists as well as specialists. We want to be open to ways of being moved.

Learning as Mirrors

SPEAKER_00 26:09

And these are questions that I've been grappling with. So how to write the curriculum in a way that it evokes that wonder, even if I'm not present or my instructors aren't present. How do you put in text what evokes? And then how do you design an AI assistant to support the learner and deliver that text and be able to answer questions on the spot while maintaining that sense of challenge and constantly mirroring back to get the learner to investigate and open up. In my four years in India and the different teachers I went to see, the ones that inspired the most were the ones that always were like mirrors. They reflected back. They shouldn't often offer any answers. They ask questions. Are they reflected back? One's own confusion. And through seeing that confusion reflected back, it's like, oh, actually, I know the answer to this. Or maybe I don't, but now I know which part of myself to sit with, to lean into, to be. Inner freedom is always going to be an individual matter that happens in our collective, in our shared life. We're never alone. We're never separate from the world as a whole. We can feel lonely. We can feel alone. We can even go to the top of a mountain and sit in a cave. But there's still going to be birds and microbes and lichen and rocks and minerals that have been evolving and transforming through the pressure of the earth. Mountains that jut up and then crack off and avalanches that happen. There's always change, it's always connection. When we wake up to the interplay between our inner world and the outer world, we recognize that there are no hard separations between psychology and biology and emotional life and physical life. It's all interrelated.

Living Our Deepest Values

SPEAKER_00 28:47

So as we think about what's our relationship to learning and knowledge and education, I always come back to what's our relationship to our most deeply cherished values? What are our inviable values? Those ones that we cannot transgress, the ones we cannot go against. And what does the expression, the living out of those values look like in the world? This is what I believe we always want to be leaving as an open question between us and the people around us, those we educate, those we collaborate with. And to have a real exploration that goes deep and is transformational, transformative, we have to be responsible for our emotional life. As adults, that especially adults who work with young people or in any form of education, we must be adults. We must be mature and responsible for ourselves. And when I hear stories from colleagues about work meetings where that had to be shut down because people were screaming at each other, and where there's no room for exploration and respect and collaboration and just learning from different points of view. So on that note, I invite all of us to live at the edge of our capacities so that we're always growing and learning and leaning into life rather than eroding the ground under our feet, which always destabilizes those around us. So it's for the sake of everyone. There's no separation, as we talked about before. So I invite you and encourage you to keep learning, to bring your learning into the classroom of life, to mentor those around you, and to always have a full heart. So thanks so much. Till next time.