Learning is Natural

Learning without school mimics life in the natural world

“Look deep into Nature, and then you will understand everything better.” ~ Albert Einstein

Learning is one of nature’s most elegant devices. We begin learning while we're in the womb. Our innate curiosity propels us to investigate and remember so many things – and to forget or temporarily file them away if we find they're no longer useful. However, we humans are the only species that sends our offspring to school in order to be taught to learn!

Unschoolers – which I prefer to call “life learners” – do things differently. This type of living and learning without school can be seen to mimic nature. Life learning takes place in an environment that, like nature, is participatory and self-managing, rather than being run by a hierarchy of outsiders as in schools. As in nature, individuals of all ages can manage their own learning behaviors by setting personal standards and evaluating their performance in relation to these standards. That is, of course, how children develop until school teaches away that power and turns naturally active learners into passive receivers of managed information.

The mimicking of nature is called “biomimicry” and comes from the Greek roots bios, meaning ”life,” and mimesis, “to imitate.” By examining and emulating nature’s models, processes, patterns, and elements, the goal of the practice of biomimicry is to create new ways of living and of designing policies, organizational systems, and products that are well-adapted to life on earth.

An early example of biomimicry (although it wasn’t called that at the time) is the study of birds to enable human flight. Although never successful in creating a “flying machine,” Leonardo da Vinci was a keen observer of the anatomy and flight of birds, and made numerous notes and sketches on his observations as well as sketches of various “flying machines.” Likewise, the Wright Brothers, who finally did succeed in creating the first airplane in 1903, reportedly gained inspiration for their airplane from observations of pigeons in flight.

In their book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart suggest that this is the most sustainable path to creating change, rather than merely adapting and trying to improve harmful ways of doing things. “Being less bad is not the same as being good," they write, in reference to caring for our environment.

And that brings us back to our education system. Why settle for the least harmful alternative when we could have something that is better – something that mimics nature’s ever-adapting and evolving attempts to remediate damage and create optimum conditions for growth?

Our warehouse/prison model of schooling processes students in preparation for the past rather than the future, and either ignores or denies the potential of new technologies and emerging worldviews. So educational reformers should be building entirely new paradigms, rather than merely tinkering and ending up with something that’s arguably “less bad,” as they’ve been doing for decades. And I think nature provides great inspiration for that!

Biomimicry would suggest that education should be decentralized, self-regulating, co-operative, non-coercive, resourceful, always adapting and shifting in response to new information and changing conditions, active and always in motion, with built-in feedback mechanisms for the learner. As life learners demonstrate, that's exactly how children learn if left to it!

Clearly, nature wouldn’t create dedicated school buildings full of desks. It wouldn’t keep kids indoors all day and even get rid of outdoor play time in favor of sitting at those desks. It wouldn’t create a one-size-fits-all, top-down hierarchy where there is a high ratio of young students to adult “experts,” standardized curriculum, tests, or grades. Notions such as passing and failing or report cards wouldn't be necessary.

Instead, a biomimicry-inspired education system might resemble the way honey bees collaborate as they make decisions about selecting a new hive. They choose the best site through a democratic learning process that humans would do well to emulate, according to Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley. In his book Honeybee Democracy, Seeley describes the elaborate decision-making that bees use. It is similar to how neurons work to make decisions in primate brains, he says. In both swarms and brains, no individual bee or neuron has an overview but, with many independent individuals providing different pieces of information, the group achieves optimal decision-making.

Collaboration is, indeed, an important part of the new kind of networked learning environment that is developing to replace the factory model we’ve been using for the past while. However, in school, collaboration is called cheating!

The centralized, top-down organization of traditional school systems means they aren’t even focused on the needs of individual children, let alone including them as collaborators. Instead, schools serve the educational industry of text book manufacturers, test creators, and teacher training. Aside from providing effective day care, their mandate includes feeding the economy with future workers and consumers.

Nature, on the other hand, operates more sensitively. It creates habitats where each organism is adapted to its place and its conditions. As habitat conditions change, organisms are continuously developing and changing in order to survive. The maverick American ecological economist and author Herman Daly, who died in 2022, once pointed out that as a species, our habitat conditions have changed as our population has grown and evolved, but our strategies have not. So, too, with education.

Nevertheless, out along the edges of traditional education, life learners/unschoolers are merrily and effectively following our instincts and designing a “new” way of living with children and young people that's based on billions of years of natural development. And if the biomimicry model is good enough for designing better functioning organizations, efficient high-speed trains, replacements for buttons and laces (think Velcro), and passive air conditioning, then it’s a great model for reinventing and revitalizing how our families live and learn. After all, learning how to live and adapt within our habitat is just, well, natural.

Parts of this post originally appeared in an article in Life Learning Magazine.

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