Solitude, Shallows and Education

I came across an interesting little article on the importance of “solitude” within the education sector. For me, to a point, it parallels some thinking and reflection that Nicholas Carr has developed around what he calls “the shallows” (see his The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains). Are there parallels with our experiences of church-belonging…? Are churches / discipleship education dealing with different issues, for example, rather than “activity” the challenge is more around passivity…? 

Here’s an excerpt from the article which is an interview with Diana Senechal, a New York Public school educator and author of the very recently published Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture 

“…Solitude is not about being in a hut out in the woods or being out in the desert or living without other people around. I define solitude as a certain apartness that we always have, whether we’re among others or not. It is something that can be practiced — maybe to think just on one’s own, even when in a meeting or in a group and so forth — but that also has been nurtured by time alone. So there’s an ongoing solitude that’s always there, and there’s also a shaped or practiced solitude, which requires both time alone with things, to be thinking about things and working on things, and time among others when you nonetheless think independently…

… I’m not a psychologist, but in the classroom and in many discussions on education, what I see is an emphasis on keeping the students busy from start to finish. Not letting a moment creep in where they don’t have something specific to do, something concrete where they are actually producing something. So if you keep them busy, busy, busy, and doing something at every moment, then supposedly they’re engaged. And when supervisors walk into classrooms and look and see the students writing and turning and talking, their conclusion is “Oh! What an engaged class!” The problem with that is then students don’t learn how to handle moments of doubt, or moments of silence, or moments where they have to struggle with a problem and they can’t produce something right on the spot. So, the students themselves come to expect to be put to work at every moment. If you want to give them something more difficult, you have to expect a little uncertainty. You have to expect a little bit of silence, a little bit of an awkward pause where they don’t know exactly what to do right away. What happens in this focus on visible engagement, we lose something that may go deeper, where students may have a chance to wrestle with something that’s a little bit above his or her head and where the answer is not immediately apparent…”

Comments

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Lovely, and I understand this better now :)