She’s telling me about how the tutor makes them memorise things - no ‘crutches’ (like words on paper) are allowed. And this course she’s in … well, the learning is driven a lot by getting up there and doing things with and in front of others.
She tells of one particular instance where they had to go to the river mouth at dawn to perform karakia. Her story moves me through her experience as it veered from surprise to fear to delight.
What? I can’t have the words in front of me on the day!
Argh! What if I forget?!?
Yeah! I got through it!
Sure, she and others fumbled and it wasn’t perfect. But she also tells me how - without the paper - she only had her mind and feelings, so she got to actually put herself into it.
In other words, the performance was full of personality because it was a little ‘rough around the edges’. It spoke of who was involved, right there, right then. We might say this reliance on the self connected them in a way that depending on the crutch wouldn’t have.
Those rough edges that come with someone acting under their own steam is where power lies. We all know that rough things have more surface area and thus more ways for it to connect with other things. Actually, it’s more than connect. Those rough edges allow more ways for things to fit together in grippy ways.
That feels important.
Anyway, as she’s telling me this story a word comes into my mind: insourcing. I like it. It makes me think about the importance of building up our source of inner power and not being dependent on other things. Hell, we might even say it’s a way to reclaim our sovereignty from the amoral bastards who seek to ‘nudge’ our behaviour to their own ends, make us dependent on them and mine us for profit.
We’re outsourcing so much now. The great smoothing out of experience and personality is upon us. It’s isolating us as we slip past each other, unable to find things to connect with other than ambition and perfection.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this word insourcing. What follows is a rough sketch of what I think it opens up for us, as well as why it’s important.
I think that insourcing is a powerful vehicle for idiosyncratic assertion. By taking things that sit outside of us and deliberately drawing them within we act with agency, and reduce our dependency (eg, on Google). This conscious process allows us to think, relate, and ‘engage with’. It develops inner knowing, and with that comes awareness of who we are and how we can connect.
The knowing that comes with insourcing is what allows us to act with purpose and feel nuance in the world - we become familiar with what we are surrounded by because it too is within us, and this gives us power.
Perhaps insourcing is a way for us to grow and develop our rough edges, not so they get smoothed out but so they become better at helping us connect with what and who is around us?
“... he knew it by heart. Which meant that he was in the best possible position to realise that he had never really heard it before.”
Aldous Huxley, The Island.
We feel this kind of power acutely with music. Well, I do. I’m sure you’re familiar with the feeling of consuming a song or album, giving that repeat button a heavy workout. Over and over the sounds wash into us, become part of us, and eventually we can summons them on demand, the music becoming an internal soundtrack to our experience. We know the song deeply, and that depth allows us to ride waves of anticipation when we experience hearing the song in different contexts. In concerts the best musicians play with our familiarity, confounding it now and then to add more delight to our experience. The kicker is, this only happens if we know it well enough to know that we’ve never heard it like this before. That knowledge of what’s novel gives power and meaning to our response.
An ‘insourced knowing’ is key. We can’t outsource this without sacrificing our ability to be fully-fledged participants in our world. When we do, we undermine our ability to act with agency.
Choice is part of this too. That song you love – it was a conscious choice you made, even subconsciously, to bring it within. Initially it touched you somehow, sure, but the over-and-over bit, that’s all you. But we are surrendering this to a large degree now. Spotify pushes playlists at us and we skim from song to song, playlist to playlist, often not even really listening. Active time spent listening to an album seems to be disappearing. What a loss, for this kind of listening is interactive. Our minds hum when we do it, which is a way of saying we are Thinking.
“I was pursuing the right goals, Gabriel said, but just needed more structure.”
Delaney swallowed, coating her throat, determined to speak.
“Less freedom,” she managed.
“Exactly!” Kiki said. “If I want to meet my goals I just need to be told how to achieve them – with far greater specificity and chronology.”
Dave Eggers, The Every.
We cannot separate freedom from Thinking. It’s an essential disposition for liberty, for the expression of who we are in all its idiosyncratic glory.
Thinking is hard though, and it’s not something that many kids get to engage in at school. For one, we cannot escape the fact that Thinking is a ‘time-spent’ endeavour. We must sit with things to know them well enough to think well about them. We need to feel what’s going on - essential for knowing. We need to mull things, turning them over to glimpse them from all sides. And that means we need to control the amount of time we spend Thinking. If this control is outsourced we undermine the growth of ourselves.
Thinking only happens with repeated engagement. It’s a slow process, in general. And it’s not something that someone else can do for us, regardless of the amount of ‘notes’ (answers) a teacher might give us.
This, unfortunately, is the default mode for most kids at school in our goal-oriented, progress-obsessed education systems. Thinking is outsourced. It’s getting us, and them, into trouble. They’re being robbed of the chance to find out who they are.
To Think we must tease out. Which means it is something that is insourced. We must move something within us slowly, with consideration, before we can interact with it in the world at large and see how it, and how we, fit. It is a process of birthing - not just knowledge and correctness, but our very selves.
Thinking should be a playful process, which makes it an expressive one rooted in not only imitation but also in imagination and surprise. Play is the ultimate insourced action.
And yet, the lauding of efficiency and productivity and profit and progress and excellence has led to a diminishment and disregarding of play’s power (unless it serves some purpose like creativity in the name of capitalist gain). As a result, we have outsourced much of what we find our freedom in. Now our playlists tell us what to listen to, sweeping from one wallpaper piece to the next, our phones remind us when to do this and that, our feeds tell us what to be outraged about and comment on, our calendars map out how we’ll spend our time.
Many of the structures of our education system increasingly mirror these expressions of external control.
And as tech creeps deeper and deeper into schools, and more and more haste and pressure gets pressed down on them, we’re striking a death blow to the ability of our kids and teachers to become themselves. Day after day, software tells them what they need to do next, how they should be doing it, and encourages them to share for approval. Machines read kids stories, not expressive people. The work of kids is monitored at will, much like citizens in East Germany had their lives surveilled by the Stasi. These are not the conditions in which agency can flourish.
But maybe that’s the point. We live in an age of massive corporate corruption, where nothing but their profits are of value and they’ll do anything to protect them. So a generation of dislocated, robotic, reactive, anxious for approval, and submissive people might be part of the plan. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but how else to explain things? When the right to protest is being undermined and used by powerful corporations to shut down dissent, we’re not exactly living in an age where non-conformist thinking is valued. In fact, it’s seen as dangerous.
So perhaps the one thing we can do in a classroom is counter the dangerous social engineering that’s going on right now, where outsourced dependency is manufactured in the interests of profit and the powerful, and seek to encourage Thinkers who are given the opportunity to gain knowledge of who they are, how they relate to the world around them and aren’t afraid to participate in it.
Is emphasising insourcing the one radical act we can perform as educators?
I think so.
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