Friday Note: The pedagogy of progress
Happy Friday, everyone.
It can be easy to take the good, the clean, the beautiful, for granted—to flip a switch and not think twice about the lights turning on, or to open the door to the cupboard and casually grab our breakfast.
Indeed, what often stands out and grabs our attention is the bad and the broken: the dead car battery, the potholes on our commute, the sodden and beat up package on our front step.
As frustrating or urgent as it is to address these and other challenges that arise in life, it’s the good that should stand out to us. Everything amazing that makes up the world we live in today had to be built—from the ground up, with tremendous effort to hold one’s place amid setbacks, maintained lovingly, with thought, perserverance, and tenacity.
The world in its natural state is not neatly packaged, ready for us to enjoy. We have to build it.
As psychologist and founder caoch, Gena Gorlin, describes in her piece, Death is the default:
Dysfunction, ineptitude, hunger, and death are not a personal affront or a divine punishment for wrongdoing; they are defaults. Operational excellence, competence, abundance, and flourishing are always and everywhere achievements, the distinctly human mode of overriding nature’s defaults. Figuring out how to wrest order from chaos—whether as an individual or as a family or as an institution or as a culture—is what we do; it is a creative challenge afforded to us by the miracle of having escaped entropy for this long, and by the grace of all the fellow human builders who’ve gotten us this far.
To go deeper into the topic of progress, especially the importance of understanding how the world we live in today came to be so bountiful, and how this informs our pedagogy and curriculum, I wanted to share a podcast episode where Matt Bateman, former executive director of Montessorium and current board member at Higher Ground, interviews Jason Crawford, author and founder of Roots of Progress Institute.
Enjoy!
Have a great weekend!
Ray Girn
CEO, Higher Ground Education