I am an open space facilitator, and until I read your post, I never considered these collaborative learning events in relation to children. You are right… it’s not an appropriate technique for the main education of children. I see it as a very adult approach – so if we want to incorporate it into formal childhood education, it would be better as a “rite of passage” – something introduced in measured amounts as children are ready to understand it.

Collaborative learning requires self-control, measured risk taking, other social skills. Children have not learned these sufficiently to participate constructively… though I don’t think they need as long to learn these things as some would have us think.

Collaborative learning also requires that we each bring skills, knowledge and questions to the table. This is suitable for a mix of more experienced and less experienced participants, but in the context of school, though there is much knowledge being imparted, real experience is limited, and so use of something like Open Space would only be appropriate in measured doses, perhaps increasing over time until children reach a place where they can understand and fully contribute to the event. This presupposes that children are having REAL experiences during their education – volunteering, participating, interacting, which too many schools don’t foster now, what with cutbacks and other resource constraints.

Many of the concepts above (“Participation versus the lecture method; the close connections between learning, play and the creative moment.”) are now accepted as fairly mainstream pedagological techniques. Children, however, cannot be expected to be “self-organised and self-governing”. They are not little adults. Some degree of leadership, or guidance, must be present to ensure that people are able (or forced!) to learn correct punctuation, for example. (Not to mention the importance of structure and authority in socialisation. We have all read our Golding, haven’t we…?)

In my opinion, the great value of Jane Jacobs’ observation is that she has indentified another area where a purely “economic” perception of the world falls down. It may make greater economic sense for an individual to pursue an MBA or a Microsoft certification than a general arts degree. Political and cultural norms have made it increasingly acceptable to think of education in those “economic” terms. The demand for specialisation has led to supply in a self-perpetuating loop. In the process, we risk losing the generalists, renaissance (wo)men and jacks-of-all trades – the ones who, in fact, are able to make valuable connections between disciplines.

So, if we could de-bunk the idea that economic value is measurable only in dollar terms, and find other, more complete, ways of assessing it, the trend to specialisation could moderate itself as the benefits of more broad-minded thinking are identified and realised.

Re-visiting Lord of the Flies is not the answer!