Why Don’t We Learn?

If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later. – Abraham Maslow

While obtaining my master’s degree in education, I became quite familiar with and frequently referenced the work of Abraham Maslow. His work was essential in understanding human motivation and the needs we all must satisfy in our lives, so that we may obtain higher levels of self-awareness and personal fulfillment. As educators, we were expected to work toward crafting educational environments in which individual needs can be satisfied and promote higher learning. As an interior designer, I frequently think of this hierarchy of needs in assessing the quality of built environments as well. The model resonates across many disciplines because it can be meaningfully applied in a variety of contexts when discussing human potential for learning and growth.

According to Maslow, our most basic needs are physiological. Our perception of physical safety is one of them. When we do not feel safe, our motivation to learn is defeated by our preoccupation with the absence of safety. We cannot successfully master higher level tasks without safety. Maslow very importantly stresses that we also fail to learn when we retreat from the innate challenges of our existence in order to feel safe. We need to be safe enough to challenge ourselves and experience new things that offer opportunities for learning in order realize our full human potential.

I can’t help contrast what is happening in education today with this broadly accepted postulate concerning safety and learning. It seems there is a lot of confusion about what constitutes being safe enough to learn and what constitutes a retreat from learning in the name of safety.

For example, we witnessed another tragic slaughter taking place in a school. Our school-aged children have just received another injection of anxiety concerning their physical safety at school. We know that their learning is compromised and a whole generation of young people is at risk of failing to make progress because the presumption of safety is disappearing, if not absent, for youth in schools. Still, one side of the gun safety debate is unwilling to concede this fact concerning our kids if preventing another slaughter involves removing a default entitlement to own weapons specifically designed to mass-slaughter humans.

The proponents of gun culture insist such entitlements to weapons of war must be universally protected in the name of personal ‘safety.’ This is not personal ‘safety,’ it is the means by which they reserve the right to collectively retreat from learning about our historically and fundamentally flawed approach to our human differences – bolstered by hysterics concerning the infiltration of ‘woke culture.’ It’s no coincidence that the most bigoted members of Congress are the ones wearing AR-15 pins on their lapels.

At the same time, many of the same folks dismissing the need for safety at schools by obvious measures to prevent would-be mass shootings are focused on banning ideas, books and appearances by individuals who encourage kids to consider how we deal with human differences, both historically and currently. They do this in the name of ‘safety;’ safety from things that could make kids feel uncomfortable, or might make them feel responsible for their own bad behavior, or might motivate them to stop the bad behavior of others toward people who are different from them. This is not ‘safety,’ it is a coordinated retreat from learning about human differences – bolstered by hysterics concerning child safety that are completely and simultaneously withdrawn when talking about guns.

This dynamic has gotten so insane that a school recently banned kids from singing a song whose primary message is “We are rainbows, me and you, Every color, every hue, Let’s shine on through, Together, we can start living in a Rainbowland.” The apparent fear was communicating any kind of tacit acceptance toward LGBTQ+ people. The impact isn’t just felt by LGBTQ+ people though, because it’s only the latest example. For centuries kids have been learning that accepting differences is something they shouldn’t do. They learned that via the overwhelming presence of a homogenized, sanitized and white-washed dominant culture powered by people who systematically denied opportunities and agency to anyone who didn’t uphold their dominance.

Contemporaneous with more cultural acceptance of diversity, some adults who are products of our flawed system are now fostering environments where they and their kids can continue to isolate and bully any kid who is somehow separate from the dominant identities of the group – whatever they happen to be. Legislators are calling these efforts in schools ‘parental rights,’ intended to keep their kids ‘safe’ from the threat of things like personal responsibility, cultural awareness and cross-dressers. Systems are upholding stratification and segregation in the name of ‘protection.’ The outright hostility toward learning about, or experiencing discomfort as a result of our (still) flawed approach to human diversity only makes us less safe.

Those same folks perpetuating hostile environments and coordinating the resistance to learning about each other think they’re being sympathetic when they offer thoughts and prayers to families of mass-shooting victims. They wonder out loud (as if they don’t know) how it is someone can become so angry and self-loathing as to buy a bunch of guns and slaughter school children on the way to what they assume is their own suicide. That’s a question that can be asked and answered quite simply, and that should make everyone quite uncomfortable.

So come on. Stop it. You know better. Stop the guns. Stop the hate. Just stop it.