Somehow, music and poetry manage to change people’s lives. They do this despite the fact that they are usually packaged into small units of content…things taking perhaps just a few minutes to receive and understand. In that space, over centuries if not more, they have managed to capture countless deep truths about the human condition.
Is there any reason education can’t do the same thing? Is there any reason education has to come only in hour-long lectures, year-long courses, 300-page books? Maybe we can make educational appetizers as well as entrees. I can think of a few places this has happened (Schoolhouse Rock, when I was a kid, for example), but not many.
I suppose one reason it’s easier for music and poetry might be that they speak to universal human experiences, so it’s stuff people already know and can connect to when prompted in the right way, whereas much of the material I’d like to deliver in these smaller chunks is not known in advance. Still, there ought to be some way of doing it. Maybe just little inspirational pieces or stuff that can be understood without many prerequisites. And I want music in there, too, and comedy, and drama. If everyone is so saturated with media overload so as to have developed some form of information-processing ADD (and it looks like they pretty much have) then we educators can either sit around lamenting it or start administering antidotes. Of course I’m not calling for the dissolution of longer-term learning projects; I just want more diversity. Shorter pieces, as well as longer ones.
