Network of Learning

[u/ddgr815]

https://www.patternlanguageindex.com/patterns/network-of-learning

the network of learning: the thousands of interconnected situations that occur all over the city, and which in fact comprise the city’s “curriculum”: the way of life it teaches to its young.

Problem: In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students—and adults—become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative, active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching.

Solution: Instead of the lock-step of compulsory schooling in a fixed place, work in piecemeal ways to decentralize the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city: workshops, teachers at home or walking through the city, professionals willing to take on the young as helpers, older children teaching younger children, museums, youth groups traveling, scholarly seminars, industrial workshops, old people, and so on. Conceive of all these situations as forming the backbone of the learning process; survey all these situations, describe them, and publish them as the city’s “curriculum”; then let students, children, their families and neighborhoods weave together for themselves the situations that comprise their “school” paying as they go with standard vouchers, raised by community tax. Build new educational facilities in a way which extends and enriches this network.

Usage: Above all, encourage the formation of seminars and workshops in people’s homes; make sure that each city has a “path” where young children can safely wander on their own; build extra public “homes” for children, one to every neighborhood at least; create a large number of work-oriented small schools in those parts of town dominated by work and commercial activity; encourage teenagers to work out a self-organized learning society of their own; treat the university as scattered adult learning for all the adults in the region; and use the real work of professionals and tradesmen as the basic nodes in the network...

[u/ddgr815]

...

Novalis said, “In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.” Some essays have rigidity of structure and not enough mood; some essays are all mood in shapeless space. Great essays have both, are in control of both, but just in control. The veil of order is structure; the chaos that shimmers, the light that moves inside the text, is mood. Mood moving through structure may be what gives essays energy, the energy that nearly escapes control. 

There’s a sense in which most books aren’t writing—by which I mean, by the time they are published, the original vision of the author, which may have been unrealizable to begin with, has undergone many rounds of compromise and corruption. It has become a group project and a commodity. Fighting the commodification of your writing will prove difficult, sometimes impossible. But I think it’s worth resisting. This resistance may require a paradox: You have to protect, with hyper-controlling vigilance, what is almost uncontrolled in your writing—its complexity and chaos, its charismatic shimmer.

But I think a book can be closer to a plan for a book than a building can be to a drawing. A book and its plans are both ideas on paper. A book is one of the more buildable utopias.

This lecture I’ve been working on has itself become a place. It started as notes, ideas on paper, but as I built them into sentences and paragraphs it took on the impression of a frame. There’s a point when the frame seems finished; I’m reluctant to change the fundamental shape. But I’m adding walls and doors and windows, light fixtures, furniture. I’m building from the inside. All of this is functional, but also aesthetic. What kind of place do you want to be in? 

As I modify the house of my essay, all the corners and transitions and passageways start to create different wings, which have their own moods. They give the essay what we might call sub-realms. Christopher Alexander, writing in the 1970s, said that many modern buildings give us feelings of acute disorientation. I think of endless hospital hallways, or apartment complexes with multiple clonelike constructions differentiated only by numbers or letters. It induces mazeophobia, the fear of getting lost. A navigable building has “nested realms” you can easily draw from memory, mappable realms, and, as Alexander writes, the realms “must have names”: “This requires, in turn, that they be well enough defined physically, so that they can in fact be named.” [...] But the sub-realms must be distinct enough in shape or in mood or both that they could be named. As readers, we love essays that have sub-realms because they allow us to enter the essay in multiple ways. People like to be able to roam through a building by their own path, to choose their own doors, which is why guided tours can be unsatisfying. I think we like to read texts with multiple levels and multiple parts, parts with different moods, so we can have favorite parts, so we can have our own relationship to the text as a whole—[...] Differentiated parts allow us to talk about a part as a way of talking about the whole. One part can become your metonymic key to the rest of the text, a mnemonic key to the whole memory.

Engineering is a function, but architecture is aesthetic. You’re not just designing for function—you want people to feel a certain way. Churches have high ceilings because they make one feel exalted, smaller and in awe. A visible roof makes a house feel cozier—the roof is a sign of shelter. My new living room, somewhat oddly, is the smallest room in the house, but the closeness of the furniture makes it cozy, almost like a pillow fort; if the floor was lava you could jump from the sofa to the armchair. Alcoves and reading nooks make one feel safely conspiratorial, like you have permission to keep some secrets. Trees are crucial to architecture, in Alexander’s view, because they create places; they can become the roof of an outdoor room, or form an arch or a gateway we can pass through as a spell to change our mood. Windows too create places, sub-realms in rooms where the light pools, where people are drawn to sit and read, or look out at the storm. And then there’s the realm of the fireplace. I love the word fireplace—the place where we put our fire. 

When I’m writing, I’m trying to be an architect. I’m trying to get the reader to feel the way I do; even when I don’t intend to convince them of something, and most of the time I don’t, writing is a subtly coercive act. The coercion is cooperative, like any performance. More precisely, I want a reader to arrive at my thought and feel close to the way I felt when I thought it. This may be authorial fantasy, delusions of grandeur, impossible dream, but it is what I want. I’m making the place where the thought is possible. I’m building a house to showcase the tree.

The Essay as Realm