Sometimes the world of learning and education seems to exist in a “special zone” where the deeper mysteries of reality don’t “come into play”. This is understandable in that we as a country separate the state from religion in many aspects, and we are often (not always) a pragmatic people. We want our education to “work” and be “measurable” when it comes to results.

Oddly, we may not be pragmatic enough if, when designing optimal DLE, we exclude certain areas of human experience and existence. Learning occurs within a personal narrative…we tend to not even perceive things that don’t “fit our story”, much less learn them.

For most Americans, their personal narrative includes some relationship to a religious story wherein a God plays a huge role. And again for most Americans their personal narrative relates in some way to the narrative story and stories of Jesus of Nazareth.

We might recall the young “hackschooler” LaPlante describing certain aspects of being that had to be in good shape for learning to occur. There was a spiritual dimension in his description for happiness, and happiness was part of the goal of learning, in LaPlante’s world view.

Motivation for learning is a very complicated thing…it’s a built in quality of being human…but it takes place within a particular personal narrative too. Much of what goes into the “makeup” of personal narratives in America is based on the stories that religion has inculcated deep within our psyche. Therefore, some portion of our motivation for learning is based on those stories as well.

“Teaching” and “Learning” involve forms of communication. It would seem that those forms need to relate well to the stories and narratives that most Americans carry around with them in day-to-day life; and many came from religious “upbringing” through that enormous compendium of stories, the Bible.

In today’s NYTimes, there’s an article by a writer about politics and the stories of Hans Christian Anderson, and the “story” is about Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard-the-Great-Communicator

The writer is fascinated by a couple of things that pertain to our task as “DLE” creators/ promulgator. One is Kierkegaard’s struggle to make sense of the Christian narrative using contemporary mindset, and also his struggle to communicate what he came up with. He developed a style of communication that this story says fits our time well…and this style is described as “indirect” or “dog whistling“.

I don’t understand exactly what “dog whistling” might entail, but perhaps we need to get good at it to enable our DLE. And if we are to understand well what motivates learning in US, we may need to consider some aspects of various religious narratives our “students” are living within.