Instruments of Learning and Discovery
A Commencement Address for UC Davis School of Education, June 11, 2014.
The philosopher of science Karl Popper wrote: “All life is problem solving.” He added that “All organisms are inventors and technicians, good or not so good, successful or not so successful, in solving technical problems.” What to eat? What to build? Where is it safe to live? All organisms including people like you and me have to figure out what to do each day to get food and find a place to sleep, and even more, what makes us happy.
If we accept what Popper says, then a person who is not solving problems is not really living, and an education that does not solve real problems is not really about learning, and a job that is only about solutions is not really working. We think that we are succeeding but in fact we are not failing enough. We are not experiencing life as trial and error.
Popper says: “Error correction is the most important method in technology and learning in general. In biological revolution, it appears to be the only means of progress.” We are by nature experimentalists, not perfectionists. This is how we learn, how we are programmed to learn. Taking the risk to experiment, and trying to solve real problems is how we find a better way, but it also means we might fail. It is how we learn to make progress. This is the experimental life, which I believe is key to us becoming artists, inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs and activists, and I believe it is cultivated by the kind of learner and teacher that we are.
Today, I want to illustrate this point by telling you about guitars and telescopes, and the Hallelujah Chorus.
I begin with the guitar.
A guitar is a musical instrument but it also a technology and a craft. Almost anyone can afford a guitar, and if you can’t, you could make one. It can be easy to learn and hard to play well. I want to emphasize the word play.
Learning to play guitar is an example of how practice trumps theory. You can’t learn to play by reading about guitars or music. It is a matter of practice and also finding people you can learn from. A novice player seeks out a guitar teacher. A player at any level learns from interacting with and playing with others who play guitar.
Not all those who play guitars know musical theory. John Lennon said that none of the Beatles could read or write music — that is, musical notation. They learned to play by ear. That is also true of Jimi Hendrix. His official bio states that Hendrix was “entirely self-taught” but his “inability to read music made him concentrate even harder on the music he heard.” He learned to play because he practiced incessantly, perhaps ignoring other aspects of his young life, such as school. When he left Seattle to perform in clubs in New York City, Hendrix didn’t have the confidence in his own voice to sing while he played. Others had to push him to do so and he discovered that he had a distinctive voice.
Hendrix became a master of guitar playing, who introduced innovative techniques that many others have since copied. One technique he created was based on recognizing a feedback loop. He noticed that the amplified sound from loud speakers caused the strings of his electric guitar to vibrate. I imagine that his ability to listen to sound caused him to hear something that perhaps others didn’t hear. Or if they did hear it, they ignored it and thought it was just noise. I imagine Hendrix walking up to the speaker and facing it with his guitar and trying to recreate on purpose what he was hearing by accident. He must have tried repeatedly to do this, and eventually gained control of this new sound. Hendrix applied this feedback loop to generate a sound that might not easily be represented as a series of notes, and it became a signature technique of his for making music. He transformed what could be an annoyance, a problem, into a form of creative expression. Feedback was something that could ruin a live performance, but Hendrix used it and integrated it into his performance. Hendrix didn’t just write music; he made his music come alive.
Now he also set the guitar on fire and smashed his instrument on stage and that too became part of his live performance.
Now let’s talk telescopes.
If you were to ask the young William Herschel who he was, he would have answered that he was a musician. William Herschel grew up in Hannover Germany and by the age of fourteen, he learned to play “an astonishing array of instruments — the oboe, the violin, the harpsichord, the guitar and a little later the organ.” He had “an early fascination with musical notation and the theory of harmony.” At eighteen, his parents had him smuggled out of Germany, which was at war with France, and he ended up in London. He had no money and seemingly no future in a new country where he did not speak the language. He lived sparely and earned a modest living by teaching music lessons, and playing in bands and working as a church organist.
We don’t know William Herschel today as a musician because in February 1766, at age 27, Herschel began keeping a journal of what he did at night. Night after night. All night long. What he did was keep a record of his astronomical observations. He was up all night gazing at the stars and he had managed to acquire a small collection of telescopes.
Herschel knew about two kinds of telescopes: one type was called a refractor and the other was called a reflector. The refractor telescope created by Galileo was good for observing the moon and the known planets but it was inadequate for looking much deeper into space. Newton had come up with a different type of telescope, known as a reflector that contained a large mirror for gathering light. If the refractor telescope was good at magnification of close objects, the reflector telescope enhanced one’s ability to see dim objects that were far away. Herschel realized that he could improve the reflector telescope by using an even larger mirror and making it out of metal, not glass. Because he could not afford to have one made for him, he decided that he would make it himself.
According to Richard Holmes in his book, The Age of Wonder, Herschel by 1774 had “created an instrument of unparalleled light-gathering power and clarity.” He was the first to be able to see that the Pole Star or North Star was not one but two stars. Holmes writes: “By this means Herschel began to build up an extraordinary, instinctive familiarity with the patterning of the night sky, which gradually enabled him to ‘sight-read’ it as a musician reads a score.”
Herschel’s significance, according to Holmes, is that he “began to conceive of deep space,” exploring beyond its surface to the depths of “… a great unplumbed ocean of stars.”
On a cool, spring night in Bath, England, Herschel discovered an object in the night sky that “had changed its place”. It was an object that had been catalogued as a star but Herschel’s telescope allowed him to investigate further. At first he thought it might be a comet and notified the Royal Society. Only later did he assert that it was the seventh planet of the Sun, what was eventually named Uranus. This professional musician and amateur astronomer made a discovery that changed our understanding and changed his life. The King granted him an annual stipend to come to Windsor to live so that the royal family could have access to his telescopes. Herschel continued building telescopes to sell to others so more people could have better instruments with which to make astronomical observations.
Yet Herschel held the belief based on observations with his telescopes that the moon was inhabited by extraterrestrials he called Lunarians. He believed he had discovered their colonies. Fortunately for him, he kept these notes in his personal journal and did not publish them. He had his experimental successes and failures.
As Herschel gazed out at an ocean of stars, Jane Addams looked deeply into the sea of humanity in an industrialized Chicago. Her father was a miller and she admired the discoloration of his hands as a child, and she wondered how she would develop hands like his. With her intellectual gifts and determined spirit she became a social activist and advocate for the poor. Her adult life was devoted to improving the daily lives of immigrants who worked long hours in factories for low wages and lived in crowded conditions. Life was unsafe, unsanitary and unhealthy. Addams went to live with the immigrants in their neighborhood, establishing what she called a Settlement house known as Hull-House. Addams was hands-on and she worked inside the community to observe the patterns of life and look for ways to improve the lives of those who lived in poverty. She was a community builder.
She called Hull-House “an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city.” Addams created associations, clubs and social centers, turning “disused buildings into recreation rooms, vacant lots into gardens” — and she established medical clinics and schools. She was an organizer of spaces and a developer of innovative services. She began to invent the social fabric of a city that lacked a safety net for its poor.
She saw what was happening to children of immigrants whose parents were away at work, and she created activities and a place where they could come every day instead of being locked inside or roaming the streets. She believed in the power of recreation, as much as education, for adults as well as children. That meant she organized hikes and built swimming pools as well as establishing debating clubs and poetry readings.
Addams consistently described the process of experimentation as how she went about her work. “We continually conduct small but careful investigations at Hull-House, which may guide us in our immediate doings.” She added that “Some of the investigations are purely negative in result.” Addams did not start out with a fixed set of solutions. Hull-House became a platform for experimentation, where people with ideas ran trials to learn more about the problems and the people involved as well as develop possible solutions.
In her book “20 Years at Hull-House,” Addams describes her many social experiments such as methods for trash storage and removal, improving the diet of immigrant families whose working mothers had not the time to cook nutritious food, and protecting children and young women from exploitation. Some referred to the settlement as a “sociological laboratory” but she was clear that such experiments were taking place not in labs but in life.
Addams describes organizing a meeting of the tailors union at Hull-House where the tailors asked “for our cooperation in tagging the various parts of a man’s coat … to show the money made to the people who had made it.” How much did it cost to cut the cloth? Or to sew the buttonholes? Or the finishing? What part did salesmen take of the final price and how did rent figure into the cost? She wrote that the “desire of the manual worker to know the relation of his own labor to the whole is not only legitimate but must form the basis of any intelligent action for his improvement.”
Addams expressed her vision of the community she sought to create. “In a thousand voices singing the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel’s “Messiah,” it is possible to distinguish the leading voices, but the differences of training and cultivation between them and the voices in the chorus, are lost in the unity of purpose and in the fact that they are all human voices lifted by a high motive.” She uses this analogy to describe what her Settlements try to do — the community receives “in exchange for the music of isolated voices the volume and strength of the chorus.”
Have you ever been to a community performance of the Hallelujah Chorus? It is a beautiful thing on its own terms, produced mostly by amateurs — in much the way that Addams describes. This is not a passive experience. The audience is actively participating — each is contributing to the volume and strength of the chorus. Active participation builds community, and democracy.
If you take the creative power and individuality of Jimi Hendrix, combine it with the natural curiosity and dedicated application of technical ability of William Herschel, and add to it the social spaces and community building represented by Jane Addams, this is what I see that is so exciting and significant about the maker movement. Creativity, curiosity, collaboration and community. In a context of endless experimentation.
This is what learning is at its most authentic and what education aspires to be. This is the kind of life that our communities should foster, not for a few but for all and especially for our young.
UC Davis School of Education Associate Dean Paul Heckman, whom I want to thank for this opportunity to speak to you, introduced me to a phrase from Jerome Bruner that authentic learning is “deep immersion in a consequential activity.” That phrase perfectly describes what is so magical about making and learning to make. Making is immersive play — and the consequential activity is problem-solving. We discover real-world problems that need solving, and that helps us cultivate our own creativity and technical ability. Like music, making is a universal language for playing and learning with instruments for discovery.
We are living in a new age of wonder. It’s an amazing time to be alive with new inventions and new creative industries that are emerging. We also are living in an age when the industrial order is being disrupted, and the nature of work is changing. Science and technology are driving this change. They can be used to solve problems, which may benefit us all. That is what makes me hopeful. Yet it is also true that science and technology create new problems. Life may get better but not necessarily for all. So, even as we prepare for change, we must prepare ourselves to confront what Addams called the “cruelities and stupidities of life”, and strive to overcome them and help others to do so. You, who will come of age in this future, and be part of this change, have your work cut out for you. You must act not knowing if the outcome will be “good or not so good, successful or not so successful,” to recall Popper’s thought. That is really what it means to be an experimentalist.
I see the maker community as an experimental community. It is also a creative community consisting of artists, inventors and technicians who like solving problems. I invite you to participate as makers and as educators. Making is not easy but it is more rewarding than things that are easy. Truthfully nothing is really ever easy but thankfully we don’t know that when we start out.
I didn’t know that a maker movement would emerge when I started a magazine for people who love to tinker and do cool projects. However, I gave the name to a community and I have devoted ten years of my life to building and organizing it. I followed an idea, gathered evidence by talking to people and tested it out in a variety of ways. I organized resources, developed a team and we produced an old-fashioned print magazine that re-invented Popular Mechanics and Popular Science for the 21st C. We created a feedback loop so that people told us what they make and how they made it. We learned that what we were doing mattered and it encouraged us to continue the work. We invited the maker community to share their projects through Maker Faires, like the largest one in San Mateo three weeks ago that attracted 130,000 people. Maker Faires have spread in size and number around the world with many unexpected outcomes. All of them celebrate makers and help us discover in our community our capacity for invention and resourcefulness. A maker wrote to me after the recent Maker Faire:
“I can’t tell you how good it feels to realize you’re a part of a larger community, and that’s the gift that Maker Faire has given me. I didn’t even know this existed before now, and I can’t thank you enough.”
To see yourself as contributing to a larger community is an important incentive to create and innovate. That is what we can learn from Jimi Hendrix, William Herschel and Jane Addams.
I say this to you, you graduates who should be proud of what you have accomplished, now you must think even more deeply about what you can do to make change. But don’t just think, it is time to start your practice.
Choose your instrument and find your voice. Listen for the feedback and get as close as you can to its source. Figure out how to look beyond what you can see with your own eyes and invent better lenses to see what is out there in greater detail. Believe in the star-potential of every human being but remember to gaze at the fullness of the night sky. Look for really interesting problems.
Finally, follow your passion to create and make — yes, certainly do this — but also, let your compassion for others lead you to serve a community that you care about deeply.
I say to you — Hallelujah. Say with me, Hallelujah!
