Learning and education

My interest in education really took off in 1998 in India, where I was studying renewable energy and sustainable development. The sequence of contacts that led me to the Redstone Farm School was typical of the small-world nature of activism in India: a math professor at my alma mater in Tucson, Arizona put me in touch with his colleague at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, who gave me the address of Mr. Vasant Vadawale, a wonderfully energetic science teacher at the Gandhi Vidyapeet (Gandhian rural agricultural school) in Vedchhi, Gujarat, an hour from the city of Surat. Vasant in turn took me to the Sampoorna Kranti Vidyalaya, or Institute of Total Revolution, an organization located on the campus of the school and founded by Narayan Desai (the son of Mahadev Desai, a close colleague of Mahatma Gandhi) to teach the philosophy of non-violence and nonviolent social change. Narayan's daughter Uma and son-in-law Suren Gadekar have extended this philosophy to activism on many contemporary social issues in India, including displacement of the poor by corrupt development projects (e.g. Enron's shady Dhabol power project, which generated much controversy long before the company's public meltdown) and the impact of nuclear power on public health in India, as well as experiments in low-energy-input construction and farming methods. (Incidentally, Mr. Gadekar publishes one of India's few reputable anti-nuclear journals, Anumukti, a sober publication devoted to the issues surrounding nuclear proliferation and nuclear power development in India and south Asia - yet another unexpected connection that would later fuel my interest in nuclear nonproliferation.)

The Gadekars shared with me their wealth of experience in the field of sustainable development and social activism, and my visit to their home two months after my arrival helped shape the rest of my time in India.

Among the contacts they gave me was the address of an organic farm in Panchgani, not far from Pune, in Maharastra. I visited the Redstone farm for the first time in May 1998, on my way back from a pilot wind energy installation at Chalkiwadi. There I met Peter and Mona Patrao, social activists and educators who had just begun to plan for the opening of a new school at the farm. Our ideas meshed, and they invited me to come teach at the school. I returned in August 1998 and over the course of three weeks took part in the school's densely active curriculum, to which I contributed eight focused discussions on science and the philosophy of science. Seven students, ranging in ages from eight to fourteen, found that they could not just understand but themselves ask the biggest questions that scientists, philosophers and theologians have asked about truth and discovery. It was an unforgettable experience of reciprocal constructive learning; I was immersed in the most fresh and intellectually stimulating environment of my life.

Although there is much more to say about the Redstone school's approach to education, I must give credit here to Peter Patrao for turning my mind explicitly to the application of computer technology to problems in education (and larger social issues).

(Until I can digitize my own photos, the following link has some good pictures of the Redstone Farm, dating the year after I taught there: http://www.sustainabilityed.org/redstoneplay.htm))

In 2001 I applied to graduate school. Looking back at my work in nonproliferation and sustainable development, as well as my time as an undergraduate at Los Alamos, I found three common threads: first, an appreciation for the power of information resources codeveloped with new methods of organization fitted to those resources; second, a sense of both the importance and the practical difficulty of collaboration, both locally and internationally; third, a deep conviction that people differ not in any fundamental way, but only in what they learn to be true. For me, computer science offers not only a way to understand and organize the information that each individual assembles into an image of the world, but the means to meld disparate images into a coherent whole, and thereby shape the reality that guides each individual's actions. Inspired by the memory of my experience as a teacher - and a learner - at the Redstone farm, this vision has led to my current research on learning and cooperation.