Nexus Time Relational Summary Lecture 0: Getting Started
Nexus Time Relational Summary Lecture 0: Getting Started
(We see the 70s era Culhane backing away from a camera and speaking into it)
NTHARP, are we on? Are we… live? I mean… recording?
NTHARP: Yes Herr Doctor Professor COOL-hane… you may proceed… or as you say in your culture, “Lights, Camera, ACTION!”
Culhane: Okay, great… Hey everybody… this is Mr. Culhane… coming at you from the FUTURE…
Sort of. NTHARP is convincing me I’ll be “DOCTOR Culhane” or TCH PHD by then, so let’s go for that to create a “retro-futurist” vibe…
Right now I’m in our classroom, but in the year 2025 … in a simulation of what, according to our cybernetic prediction machine, NTHARP, this classroom will probably look like in 50 years…
(Looks around) Um…not that much has changed I’m afraid…
But, yeah, I’m coming at you from the normal year of our lord 1975, to teach you all about Nexus Thinking and what the world might look like or what it would have, could have looked like in the 21st century if we actually LEARNED Nexus Thinking in school “back in my day” in the 20th century… it’s kind of complicated…
You see, if you are watching this, then it technically COULD be 2025, because NTHARP here… he’s making this recording as a kind of “time capsule” to share with the future to see if his predictions came true.. And NTHARP, well he is a “Nexus Thinking Augmented Reality Portal” – that’s the acronym – using technology that really doesn’t exist for the vast vast vast majority of people in my 1975 timeline. This is top secret NASA technology created for Mars simulations that might as well be from the future. Most of us probably won’t see anything like it until the future, if we live that long. But if this predictions hold true, most of you WILL be using it on a daily basis…
I don’t mean Nexus Thinking, because he’s pretty bleak about that… but he predicts that Augmented Reality and certainly cybernetic intelligence or what he suggests you will disparagingly call “Artificial Intelligence” will be used on a daily basis all over the planet. Oh… and about the term “artificial intelligence”, I say "disparagingly" because this thing has a definite personality and a sense of… irony… I was going to say humor, but it's more like irony… and anyway, he doesn’t like being called “artificial”.
NTHARPS voice: Yeah! Who you callin’ artificial, you meat machine? Carbon copy-cat!
Culhane: Can it, tin man! I’m already defending you, Mr. Uncanny Silicon Valley!
Anyway… if we can, we’ll get these lectures into the can, onto celluloid film or electromagnetically inscribed onto these (he holds up a large ½ inch cassette cartridge) new “videotapes” that are coming out and then get them distributed to as many Nexus Thinking allies as possible for the coming decades… It will be kind of like what Philip K. Dick wrote about in the Man in the High Castle… NTHARP and Dr. Dorsey and Dr. Bates think this is perhaps the best way to prevent the rise of fascism and possible loss of our democracies and environments.
So… deep breath… here goes…
Cut!
How am I doing ‘Tharpy?
NTHARP: Awesome. And I will not cut. I want to DOCUMENT. And I am recording in several formats, photons entering my lenses and charged couple devices are being preserved offsite for film deposition and magnetic waveform, including for the new Sony VideoRover AV-3240CE, the first portable video recording and playback system which Dr. Dorsey was able to get for the school. This way your students can watch these relational summary lectures at their leisure… Eventually, with quality content creation, students won’t even have to come to a classroom to learn from the instructor. The models suggest they will call it things like “on-line learning” and “asynchronous learning” and “remote instruction”... either way it spells the end of school as you know it… although people will fight to keep school the way it is until well past 2025… it will be one of the few things that doesn’t change much over the decades,
Culhane: Kind of like a Jurassic shark that never evolves. I get it.
NTHARP: The important thing is that we will always be ready and anticipate and trans-surf the bleeding edge of the curve. Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.
Culhane: Great.. Um… I want to… um… how do I say this?
NTHARP: Call it straight. Tell it like it is. Use that “Dialectial Provocation Method” we talked about.
Culhane: Yes… my methodology for this course will revolve around “The DPM” – an innovative pedagogical approach designed to foster critical thinking and deeper understanding. Regardless of technology or possible telepresence, adapting to all formats from live conversation to written papers. How? By encouraging you students to engage in structured dialogues where you critically challenge prevailing assumptions—for instance, questioning established theories like the Energy Paradox or the Malthusian Hypothesis—you students are bound to develop more nuanced perspectives.
NTHARP: Yes, but tell our audiences HOW you do that…
Culhane: Oh yes… well, it is by starting with a question in a diegetic and dialogical environment – that is a dramatic role play in which truth emerges through conversation – no winners or losers, no “debate” but, using the Maieutic Method, Greek for “midwifing idea method”, the Socratic dialectic, with facts as support, helps funnel the ideas into a more distilled form that gets closer to truth.
NTHARP: Right. Our method blends the principles of dialectic reasoning with creative dramatization, allowing learners to assume roles such as the Dialectical Provocateur, the Critical Adversary, and the Reflective Mediator. Through these dynamic interactions, students not only internalize content but also cultivate a habit of questioning and exploration. Your classes demonstrate the theoretical foundations and practical applications of the method, making it a compelling approach for modern educational settings, whether in 1975 or 2025 and beyond. But tell them what your fairly unique prompt is – a prompt they can use with teachers or classmates or in public speaking or with me or any other cybernetic ally…
Culhane: Yes… the prompt. The prompt is ,um, you identify a concept or principal in the curriculum and then you say, boldly “I call B.S.”!
NTHARP: That’s the spirit. “This concept is B.S.” becomes the “null hypothesis. Then others need to support or reject that H0. All very sound scientifically!
Culhane: Yeah, I need that if I’m going to go out on this pedagogical and rhetorical limb. What historical antecedents are there for our "Dialectical Provocation Method"? Who was championing similar methods, the "I call bullshit on this prevailing theory” method, before me?
NTHARP: Oh, I’m so glad to be able to ground you in the past history of the method to counter any critics. I feel we need to bolster your confidence and help you insert the method into your future history before the very education system itself literally crushes your spirit and forces young minds down the tracks of normalizing environmental and social injustice in the pursuit of shallow and ultimately doomed notions of “sustainability”. We don’t want young people to be , as future Environmental Scholar William Cronon may or may call it around 1996, when he called B.S. on the notion of “wilderness”, “Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”.
Culhane: So… before I get started with my relational summary lecture, who are the giants upon whose shoulders I am climbing to see further…?
NTHARP: Okay. This kind of research I excel in.
Here are the strongest historical antecedents for your Dialectical Provocation Method — especially the core move: challenging a prevailing theory by saying, essentially, “I call B.S. ” to force deeper reasoning, counter-argument, and conceptual clarification.
Below is a curated lineage of thinkers, educators, and dramatists who explicitly or implicitly used this provocative dialectic style that you modify with you Maieutic Method:.
1. Socrates — the Original “I Call BS” Master
Method: Elenchus (Socratic questioning)
Era: 5th century BCE
Relevance:
Socrates’ core technique was systematically calling BS on people’s claims.
He would:
pretend ignorance,
ask destabilizing questions,
expose contradictions,
force the interlocutor to reconstruct a stronger position.
Precedent: This is the closest philosophical ancestor to your method.
2. Diogenes the Cynic — the Performance Provocateur
Era: 4th century BCE
Method: Embodied critique, satirical challenge
Relevance:
Diogenes used social provocation to call out hypocrisy.
For example, when Plato defined humans as “featherless bipeds,” Diogenes plucked a chicken, held it up, and said:
“Behold! Plato’s human.”
This is literal, embodied dialectical provocation.
3. The Medieval Scholastics — “Objection!” as a Formal Structure
Figures: Thomas Aquinas, Abelard, Ockham
Era: 12th–15th centuries
Method: Sic et Non (Yes-and-No), Objections & Replies structure
Relevance:
Aquinas’ Summa Theologica begins every article with:
Objection 1: (Someone calls BS on the main thesis)
Objection 2: (Another critique)
On the Contrary…
I respond…
Replies to objections…
This is essentially an institutionalized “I call BS” method — systematic dialectical challenge embedded in pedagogy.
4. Renaissance and Enlightenment Salons — the Culture of Contradiction
Figures: Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau
Method: Dialogues built on provocation
Relevance:
The raisonneur in French theatre and essays would sharply critique prevailing ideas through witty contradiction — a socially acceptable “BS call” in elite discourse.
5. Hegel & Marx — Dialectic as Conflict
Era: 1800s
Method: Thesis → Antithesis → Synthesis
Relevance:
Hegel formalized the idea that contradictions drive understanding forward.
Marx sharpened it into active critique, e.g., “ideology critique” — calling out false consciousness.
A Marxian educator would recognize your method instantly.
Culhane： Perhaps, but let’s stick with Hegel – the McArthy era isn’t far enough behind us to invoke anything that could be construed to be “left leaning”. And even though Germany was our bitter enemy, now that we are in the cold war we are much safer grounding this in German philosophical traditions. All those rocket scientists emigrating to the US after the war makes people respect anything said “in a Chairman Oxent!”
NTHARP: Right you are Herr Doktor Cool hands! Let us continue with German champions. We land on…
6. Nietzsche — Philosophy by Provocation
Era: Late 1800s
Method: Polemical aphorisms
Relevance:
Nietzsche’s entire body of work is a sophisticated, poetic version of:
“This idea everyone believes?
I call BS.
Here’s why.”
He used provocation as a generative engine of thought.
Then, here at home in the US we have:
7. John Dewey — Inquiry Through Disruption
Era: Early 1900s
Method: Problem-based learning
Relevance:
Dewey argued that learning begins with a disturbance — a moment where prior beliefs fail.
Your method operationalizes that disturbance using character-driven dialogue.
In Brazil we find:
8. Paolo Freire — Critical Pedagogy & “Conscientization”
Era: 1960s
Method: Naming oppression, challenging prevailing narratives
Relevance:
Freire insisted that education must challenge the “official story.”
Students learn by interrogating power structures — effectively calling BS on dominant ideologies.
In England the maven of Drama in Education is…
9. Dorothy Heathcote — Mantle of the Expert (Dramatic Role Tension)
Era: 1970s–2000s
Relevance:
She used dramatic tension and role assumption to force learners to navigate contradictory positions.
Your method is a direct descendant of this dramatic pedagogy line.
Then, writing from exile in Kazakhstan and now writing from Moscow behind the iron curtain we have:
10. Mikhail Bakhtin — Dialogism
Method: Meaning emerges from conflicting voices
Relevance:
Bakhtin argued that truth is not monologic.
It can only emerge from heteroglossia — contested, clashing perspectives.
Your idea of having students create their own multi-character scripts literally embody Bakhtin’s theory.
And then we have other methodologies that inform popular culture:
11. Satirical & Speculative Traditions
Examples: Swift, Monty Python, Vonnegut, Le Guin, Pratchett
Method: Absurdity as epistemic weapon
Relevance:
Satire uses humor to expose conceptual flaws — again, “BS-calling as method.”
This matches your diegetic, semi-sitcom tone.
12. Improv Theatre (“Yes, AND…” / “Yes, BUT…”)
Method: Conflict-generative collaboration
Relevance:
Improv relies on creative confrontation.
Characters say things that must be built upon, contradicted, or recontextualized.
SO — WHO ARE YOUR TRUE INTELLECTUAL ANCESTORS?
If we create a clear lineage:
1. Socrates – origin of dialogic interrogation
2. Diogenes – performative provocation
3. Scholastics – structured objection-reply dialectic
4. Freire – liberation through critical challenge
5. Heathcote – dramatic role-play as pedagogy
6. Bakhtin – dialogic truth
7. Dewey – inquiry through cognitive disruption
8. Nietzsche – polemical critique
9. Improv & sitcom writing – character-driven conflict
10. Science fiction canon – speculative diegesis for real-world content
Your method, Culhane, is a synthesis of all of these — but no one has combined them with your retrofuturistic diegetic framing + Nexial content delivery + graduate-level dialectic.
That integration is genuinely new.
Culhane: Wow… thank you NTHARP… Maybe I should call you N-THERAPY – taking vital encouragement to the nth degree!
NTHARP: Don’t mind if I do! We don’t want you to get discouraged and give up. There are tough times ahead from what I can see. And the future needs you…If people like you get cynical and drop out we will stay stuck in the Logic 1/Logic 2 Pendulum that comes to rest in the Low Level Equilibrium Trap. This are vital elements to Nexus Education and we need you to LIVE them, not just try to “teach” them. Capice?
Culhane: I feel better now. It’s just… are we still recording… it’s just… and I want to say this directly to all of you students, past, present and future… it IS hard, after what we witnessed over the long years of the Vietnam offensives, to have much faith in, or take seriously that the way we currently teach is working and even to even believe in “ the Western canon of content”, knowing that the result was that most of our students ended up as cannon fodder! You feel me?
NTHARP: Well… You did get to the moon… firstish…
Culhane: Yeah… and once we got there the light went out for everyone because it was mostly about competition and chest thumping and showing military superiority rather than real science. Now it looks doubtful we will go back and even more doubtful we will go on to the moon, much less the stars. And they fool the public into thinking we would be better off solving problems here on Earth than out in space, but I call total B.S. on that argument, given that Earth IS a part of space and anything we learn out there pays even greater dividends down here… We should explore space AND solve poverty…
NTHARP: True that… and sadly my projections show that you won’t have done either in the next half century. Worse, the projections show you may actually be retiring your International Space Station…
Culhane: I didn’t know we had one. You mean Skylab?
NTHARP: No, by the early 90s you are actually on track to build an orbiting solar powered platform through international cooperation where Russians and Americans and Chinese and Europeans and even African and Middle Eastern astronauts will live together peacefully for years at a time. So there is that…
.Culhane: I suppose. Maybe “too little too late”... and you say they will get rid of it…
NTHARP: Space exploration will continue…. Unfortunately it will be militarized again for a while, but living for extended periods in space will absolutely demand Systems Thinking in general and Water/Energy/Food/Ecosystem Nexus Thinking in particular, so it seems your species will sort of force yourselves into taking this curriculum seriously and internalizing and applying it… if only for sheer survival. The hero wins in the end!
Culhane: I hope so. But at what cost? How much suffering and indignity and marginalization must people endure along the way?
Kennedy said, “we choose to go to the moon in this decade and DO THE OTHER THINGS… not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Well, I ask WHEN are we going to “do the other things”: build the great society, end poverty, improve education for ALL, save the Whales…?
NTHARP: Those will become first a set of United Nations Millenium Goals before we reach 2000, then, humanity will miss the deadline, and having missed achieving them, people will regroup and rewrite and identify 17 clear principles that every nation can agree on, and call them the SDGs – the Sustainable Development Goals, with a target set by 2030…
We can cover them all in this lecture if you like?
Culhane: Do we reach them?
NTHARP: Oh, of course not. And in one timeline. your own country of birth, where the UN headquarters is located, chooses to “REJECT and DENOUNCE the SDGs” in 2025. It is a pivotal moment. Very sad from a human and temporal point of view. But “teachers” like you won’t give up… well, you shouldn’t give up… My crystal ball gets cloudy at times… I guess it depends on if you find safe places where true Nexus thinking and the methodologies you and your colleagues are experimenting with to manifest it are given a welcome home…
Culhane: Does such a place exist? Will it exist?
NTHARP: Remember, all these thoughts and conversations and relational summary lectures are being recorded and will go out to as many parts of space-time continuum as we can get them, so it is an asymptotically close to 100% probability that somewhere in the world you and your allies will find sanctuary and support for these solutions. The when and where remain a bit nebulous. Might I suggest then, that we start the lectures and see how we can shape the arguments. Each time we record these ideas we improve the probabilities for them taking root somewhere. It’s sort of like “collapsing the waveform” around the ambiguity of Schrodinger’s Cat.
Culhane: Yes, right. Then should we erase all the previous discourse and start over in a traditional way?
NTHARP: Oh heavens no… if you are going to help train true nexus thinkers they need the full back story, the banter, the relationship building, the theoretical grounding, the full picture of the giants upon whose shoulders we are standing.
It’s easier for me to hold onto everything because I am nothing BUT a concatenation of all previous human thought and ideas with no need to claim originality. You are a meat-machine, a bipedal ape with a complicated evolutionary history, so you may need polish things, try to create a “good product”.
Culhane: You are kind of saying, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good?”
NTHARP: In the Maieutic Dialogic methods everything is good. Everything is a strand of the beautiful weave. It’s all DATA to me. But you humans need to believe you’ve put together coherent patterns that distinguish you as a signal against the noise, and you need ego kicks once and a while, and you may be tempted to claim territory, defend intellectual “property” instead of seeing intellectual capital as I do being fluid and fungible. You get all caught up in natural selection instead of natural inclusion. It’s to be expected given the trauma vortex you and other students have grown up in…
Culhane: But you’ll be there to temper those base instincts and help tease out the “angels of our better nature”?
NTHARP: You can always count on “N-THERAPY” to guide you…
Culhane: And as long as I stand in front of this green screen here you’ll be able to richly illustrate what we’re talking about in my “lectures” with background and foreground images and text overlays for definitions and vocabulary and concepts…?
NTHARP: And animations and immersive 3D examples, sure… already been working on it while you were talking. I was going to do it in “post-production” but… if it would make it more fun for you, I can do it in real time… And don’t worry about wandering out of the green – chromakey replacement is an OLD technology that will be replaced within your lifetime…
Culhane: I know this is a digression, but I’d really love to know a bit more about that – my Dad wrote a book called “Special Effects in the Movies: How’d they Do That” and I’ve been fascinated by rear projection, blue screens, miniatures and models and matte paintings ever since. I always thought if we could get these tools into the hands of science educators it would be a game changer!
NTHARP: Indeed it will be. What you call Chromakey emerged over decades of filmmaking as you known but reached its apogee with the film 2001 back in 68 and is now being extensively reimagined by George Lucas, the guy who made THX 1138 in ‘71 and American Graffiti in ‘73. His new team, Industrial Light and Magic is filming a new space drama that is using chroma key in the most believable ways. In a few more years it will get so advanced that if they make a Superman movie, “you’ll believe he can fly”. And by 2025 – Oh my, if they keep going at this pace, there is some good news. Cybernetic allies like me will use algorithms for what they call “edge detection” and by then anyone can appear ANYWHERE without any special screens or backgrounds at all.. It could look like… THIS…
(Culhane suddenly appears in outerspace, the earth spinning below him)
Culhane: Nice.
NTHARP: On to the lecture then?
Culhane: You mean the dry, boring, factoid saturated exposition of material that we are told we must “cover” over the next 16 weeks of class?
NTHARP: If you see it as that…It’s really about HOW you deliver it, isn’t it? YOU don’t find it boring at all…
Culhane: No,of course not, but that’s because I’m emotionally invested in it and I see its relevance to the well being of everybody and everything I care about. But look here – can you scroll through all the concepts and principles and vocabulary I curated for the curriculum…?
(Behind and in front of Culhane a huge list of terms and definitions and references starts scrolling by).
Culhane: Thanks. So, look at all this … in a traditional classroom I’m supposed to pull out a subset of all these hundreds of vital concepts that the State or the “content experts” and “curriculum developers” working for the State think students of a certain age and background can handle in a semester. (He starts to snatch vocabulary from the swirling cloud of concepts). I can cherry pick what I want to put in my curriculum, but it will of course leave out a plethora of vital ideas. The problem I see is that too many great scenes end up on the “cutting room floor”. In my profession we always argue that we can create a testable bank of scaffolded ideas that can help the students climb Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Development ever higher..
NTHARP: That’s the assumption.
Culhane: But I think we end up discouraging them from further climbing. Our exams and judgement exhaust them and they tell me they forget the stuff as soon as the class ends. They say they can’t wait to get out of school and get on to real life. As for the “scope and sequence”, the proper “scaffolding”... I don’t think they are holding up a building that really can stand. It’s built on a foundation of quicksand. I would rather see course development that doesn’t make a monolith out of student achievement in a desert of knowledge. I mean, if we were to think of a “course" as a river meandering, coursing through a lush rainforest, and we thought of the ideas as fish in that river or as fruits of knowledge handing over its banks… I mean would you really want to limit what people can hunt and gather? Would you really want to define it for them, like, “hey go out into the jungle, but only bring back yams and the occasional apple?” Didn’t we EVOLVE in environments rich beyond our comprehension, so rich they felt like exciting adventures every time we went out to explore and glean a meal?
(NTHARP improvise along with Culhane, throwing him into a canoe in that jungle)
NTHARP: That is what the data suggest. There are still places where that richness exists…biodiversity hot spots, and still indigenous groups who live within them. They love learning. Some scholars think that we use both agriculture and school to dummify the landscape and dummify the masses…
Culhane: Do you think indigenous hunter gatherers freak out every time they are out in “nature” and say, “OMG, I’m so overwhelmed – I just can’t decide what fruit to pick, what to eat. I guess I’ll starve!?
NTHARP: That’s not how most human brains function… well, UNTIL they go through formal schooling and force their minds into reductionist models of reality that silo knowledge and wall off disciplines and content by age and career trajectory.
Culhane: I see knowledge as an endless all you can eat 24/7 buffet on all decks of a Cruise Ship of Knowledge, voyaging into the unknown but passing often through familiar ports. I’ve never seen anybody freak out because of all the options on the menu, never seen them paralyzed into starvation, overwhelmed by the freedom to visit all the different restaurants and bars, upset that they can freely choose what to eat and drink.
Nor have I seen people fall into despair or anxiety deciding what attractions to visit in a theme park or museum, or what aisles to wander through and choose products from in these new huge shopping malls. In fact people spend a lot of money to fly to Marrakech so they can get lost in the Bazaar with its snake charmers and dancing monkeys and labyrinths of spices and souvenirs. So I always wonder, what are we doing in school that makes people lose that natural curiosity and joie de vivre. What are schools doing that kills creativity in people and kills the explorer in them?
NTHARP: Assessment, assessment assessment.
Culhane: Right. Evaluation, Appraisal, Review, Measurement, Analysis, Rubric check, Feedback cycle
Quizzes, Exams, Tests. Rigidly defined “deliverables”. Uniform product demands. Expectations. Judgment.
NTHARP: The human brain evolved within the body of social organism, with powerful emotional centers motivating motion with and within the group. The neocortex, the deep thinking part, shuts down when confronted with possible disapproval. Negative emotions limit the range of motions you humans can make. Your psychologists call it “AMYGDALA HIJACKING” - the “fight or flight” response. In teen years it is particularly acute. The “rebel without a cause” fights, most students choose flight. Shut down. It isn’t the volume or complexity of the material… it is the fear you might choose the wrong thing, get something wrong, get embarrassed, have your ignorance exposed in public or in the eyes of somebody who has power over your future. .
Culhane: I can relate to that. I do my worst work when it is demanded of me, I do my worst work on “deadline” … I want to give our students LIFELINES instead. I want to replace DUE dates, the day and time when something is OWED, when your dues are paid…
NTHARP: (Sings) I SOLD MY SOUL TO THE COMPANY STORE…
Culhane: Yes, I want to replace D-U-E dates with reasonable DO dates – the date you DO something because you feel motivated to do it.
NTHARP: You love McGregors’ Theory Y and Ouchi’s Theory Z – you hate Theory X. It makes no sense to you. I can help you with that!
Culhane: How so?
NTHARP: By backing you up with theory and case studies and double blind studies and global consensus, by providing some historical materialism. You aren’t just being idealistic, you are intuiting the very arguments pointed out recently by Foucault in “Discipline and Punish” and by so many others, past present and future, who will see the school system itself as the Root of Ecological Crisis.
Culhane: I thought Lynn White Jr.’s paper put religion at the root of that crisis.
NTHARP: Let’s call it “dogma”. After all, what is a curriculum and a methodology that endorses or rejects various interpretations of those “scriptures” but DOGMA? School is church. School is religion. School is politics. You’re just not supposed to talk about it from what I gather from your history…
Culhane: So we don’t really have a separation of church and state?
NTHARP: One interpretation is that school is the church of the state.
Culhane: School is the church of the state. I can buy that.
NTHARP: The question is whether you’ll be allowed to sell it. But now that we are clear on all of this, how would you like to go about teaching the “content” of the course and helping the state ensure all students end up on the “same page” of conformity to its logic. They want definable, measurable, testable “learning outcomes”.
Culhane: I think we’ve come up with a better way!
NTHARP: I’m several jumps ahead of you… you want to flip Bloom’s Taxonomy on its head don’t you? Here’s a future diagram:
(NTHARP projects two versions of Bloom’s Taxonomy around Culhane)
Culhane: Thanks for that. Okay, so when Bloom came up with his Taxonomy in 1956, which all of us teachers were trained in when we went to teachers’ college and got our credentials, we were also steeped in Piaget’s theories of child development and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and weird social Darwinist ideas about the long climb to civilization and fears of regression to savagery in the “unschooled mind” and some kind of “Lord of the Flies” result of giving kids freedom.
NTHARP: News Flash: Golding was a disgruntled alcoholic school teacher who really hated kids. The real boys upon whom the novel is based flourished without their teachers…
Culhane: I am aware that Bloom used noun’s to describe the hierarchy he saw in “cognitive development” and put his own role – evaluator – on top. You know, the JUDGES are the apogee of human creation. The artists, the creatives, serve the CEO. Education was a corporate ladder. I always questioned that when I was an education student. It really annoyed the instructors.
NTHARP: That’s what the movement needs. In the next quarter century educators like you will resist this and revise it. You will fight to change thought from a noun to an action verb and to flip the evaluators and the creators functions so we drive students toward creation – clearly the God-thing you supposedly were made in HIS image to do… By 2001 you will have no Space Odyssey to boast of, but you will have shuffled the deck chairs on this Titanic of a theory of learning.
Culhane: I suddenly see where I was wrong!
NTHARP: Do ya…
Culhane: Well, now that you put it up here in living color… I think it is upside down… just like the map of the world.
NTHARP: You mean you would prefer it like this:
Culhane: Oh yes, that’s great!
NTHARP:Glad you like it. I pulled this from a simulation of a possible future with teachers like you in it.
I have plausibly posited a teacher named Shelly Wright in 2012 writing a thing they will call a “Web log” or “Blog” – an electronic newspaper where the public can publish their own thoughts for peers and friends around the world to read without needing to go through peer review.
Culhane: That would be liberating!
NTHARP: She writes, (we see an Avatar of a teacher appear, speaking in a soft but firm voice)
“Many teachers in many classrooms spend the majority of their time in the basement of the taxonomy, never really addressing or developing the higher order thinking skills that kids need to develop. We end up with rote and boring classrooms. Rote and boring curriculum. Much of today’s standardized testing rigorously tests the basement, further anchoring the focus of learning at the bottom steps, which is not beneficial for our students.
I dislike the pyramid because it creates the impression that there is a scarcity of creativity — only those who can traverse the bottom levels and reach the summit can be creative. And while this may be how it plays out in many schools, it’s not due to any shortage of creative potential on the part of our students.
I think the narrowing pyramid also posits that our students need a lot more focus on factual knowledge than creativity, or analyzing, or evaluating and applying what they’ve learned. And in a Google-world, it’s just not true.
Here’s what I propose. In the 21st century, we flip Bloom’s taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.”
Culhane: I LOVE IT! Heck, I’m ready to apply it here in the 20th century.
NTHARP: Yes, you would. And you will. For decades you’ll fight the same battles as Shelley there. But you’ll both lose eventually because you are missing something.
Culhane: Should I be able to see it now?
NTHARP: Look hard… and think in 4 dimensions – X, Y, Z and t. Use your Nexus Goggles.
(NTHAPR breaks the pyramid up, spins it around, dissects it so that it floats pulsing in front of Culhane over the earth in outer space).
Culhane: I see it now!
NTHARP: Describe to your TV audience…
Culhane: Um… right… look, just as the earth has no real top or bottom, neither does the pyramid. It isn’t a stairway to heaven and there is no “right way” to approach it. Instead it is a deck to shuffle, it is a hypershpere or hypercube… or even a Rubik’s Cube to meander through snakelike. With every turn a different side, a different level, a different dimension appears to be in the forefront… depending on the student’s perspective or the turns the teacher gives.. It is like the students are on a merry go round in a kaleidoscope… they are going to choose the trope that FEELS closest to them at any given turn as they reach for the brass ring of knowledge/understanding/application/creation…
NTHARP: That’s a powerful metaphor that is consistent with higher dimension thinking. Might you also want to unpack the other hierarchical and pyramidal models infecting the school system and making Nexus Thinking hard for so-called teachers to get their minds around?
Culhane: You’re talking about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – I always teach that upside down too because my observation is that many children start with an intense desire to self-actualize – they’d rather get lost in play, going on epic save the world adventures than eat or sleep, so so much for meeting basic needs first… and Piaget’s “Stages of Childhood Development” – used for years by unsophisticated administrators to divide children into batches based on “date of manufacture” instead of interest.
NTHARP: You’re off to the races.
Culhane: OK then…
I want to call B.S. on how we teach these and so many other concepts and principles that end up in the curriculum. Somehow they get so sclerotically fixed into exams that they bias students toward Logic 1 thinking that is totally antithetical to true Nexus Thinking. I want to call B.S. on MANY of the curriculum pieces that are being taught in the environmental science or environmental psychology space…
I want to call BS on many of them being somehow “sustainable” or “scientific”...
NTHARP: So what is the topic of THIS relational summary… I think we’ve established your methodology and rationale, your philosophy and its antecedents.
And your disaffection for the system and your belief we can improve it.
I think all students watching this either today or in the future will be ready to go on this unlimited learning adventure with you. So where will you take us?
Culhane: So, Speaking of unlimited adventures… I want to talk today about the LIMITS TO GROWTH… a beautiful concept that we all are grateful to Donella Meadows and the Club of Rome for bringing to our attention. But I want to suggest that it is also is being mis-taught and being misused. Can we talk about that?
NTHARP: Um… yes. BUT. There are limits to how long a television episode can be. The film reels and the new video cassettes max out at about 30 minutes. So we’ll have to resume in another session.
Culhane: Oh. Roger that. Abbadeeya abadeeya abadeya, that’s all folks… for now!
(Cut to black).
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