“Whatever you have to say, leave The roots on, let them Dangle And the dirt Just to make clear Where they come from.”
― Charles Olson
Some years ago, the Green Free School was nominated as one of the hundred best educational initiatives of the year by a Finnish NGO. That year I went to Helsinki to attend their annual conference, to represent our school, and to meet all the other nominees. It was a privilege to get to explore all the amazing and profound and simple and ingenious ideas that educators come up with. I was so inspired!
One of the things that I dread most about events like this is having to meet all sorts of strangers, strike up conversations and chit-chat with them. It’s hard for me to walk up to someone and stick out my hand, but it’s also awkward to stand around waiting. I always worry that people would prefer to talk to their friends or to meet someone else. Much as I loved the conference and exploring all the different initiatives, I was knock-kneed at the thought of hanging out and talking to people.
Of course, at a conference like this, if you’re a nominee, things are a bit easier. And they turned out to be easier still because of the title we had come up with for our initiative, Snail-Based Learning. Somehow, the name had jumped out at lots of people, but since they hadn’t read the blurb, they thought that we were teaching about snails. Or using snails. Or something. There was a lot of laughing and joking about slime trails and hermaphrodites.
So, explaining that we weren’t actually working with real live snails was a nice icebreaker, as it turned out. They were excited – perhaps more so than if we hadn’t had the misunderstanding – to learn what our snail model was all about.
One of the things that had people puzzled about the name was the ick-factor. On the one hand, snails are kind of cute – at least the ones with shells – and some are downright beautiful. On the other, most people don’t like actual snails. No one likes slime trails, gardeners don’t like the way they snack on crops or decorative plants, and everyone hates accidentally stepping on a snail in the rain or on a dark path. There’s always at least one snail-hater in any given group.
So inadvertently, the wonky name we had chosen drew people in and fostered laughter, disgust and interest. And conversation. Lots of conversation. I don’t know whether any of the people I chatted with ever engaged with the substance of our project: the fundamental way in which we were trying to change teaching and learning in school settings. But we did connect, and I like to think that the snails worked. As much as anything can work in a big conference setting.
Afterwards, I felt as if I had betrayed the snails a bit. As if I had been too quick to disclaim them and laugh at them, to dispel the notion that we were inspired by or emulating snails. As if snails have nothing much to teach, as if they are not worth emulating. And as a consequence, I began to consider the ways in which I was inspired – despite their mucky reputation – by snails.
Snail Love
I’ve never been much of a gardener – and I don’t have to feed my family on what I grow – so I am not fussed about snails. I don’t mind sharing my kale and my raspberry leaves with them; I know they are cleaning up messes – eating fungi and algae, dead leaves and animal matter. On top of that, they serve as tasty snacks for birds and hedgehogs.
Snails are neither keystone- nor flagship species, but the thankless job they do – hoovering through nature – serves an important purpose. We notice them when they snack on what we want to eat or keep, but the rest of the time they are collaborating with microbes, earthworms and fungi to break down nature’s garbage. Their work moves along nutrients from dead plants and animals into the soil, so they are available for living plants to absorb. Without snails and their colleagues, seeds would not have rich soil to grow in.
In short, snails are process animals; little slimy workhorses that keep the cogs of nature chugging along. And in a world where there is so much focus on results, I like to keep my eye on process. And on dirt and slime.
Our Western culture is hyper aware of results, but also on cleanliness, clean lines, straight lines, effectiveness, leanness; we want to pare away not only the plants and animals that we don’t like – weeds, pests, snails – but also the parts of human processes that we consider superfluous.
That’s one of the reasons we believe so strongly in schools. Clean, orderly schools, where processes are controlled and transparent, everything is out in the open, measurable, squared off and lined up. The messiness of children, of life, of learning, gets tied up and deodorized, and streamlined to include only what we regard as the positive, productive parts.
Love of Order
We like that the day is chopped in manageable bits – class, recess, class, lunchbreak, class – and that children are organized by age (and sometimes by gender, class, and ability too). We like that knowledge is separated into disciplines (mother tongue here, math here, history there), chopped in small manageable bits, and that learning is kept completely separate from playing. We feel comfortable when the sand is in a box and the climbing is on the jungle gym, preferably with rubber tiles in place underneath, and when the rest of the school yard is nicely paved.
We tell ourselves that this is the best way to learn, the most effective and the most efficient; doing the right things and doing them right.
Just like we tell ourselves that getting rid of the snails leads to a better crop. We get rid of certain plants – and call them weeds – because even though they may serve a useful purpose in the earth’s processes, they compete with the plants we prefer for water and sunlight. We don’t hesitate to poison the animals and plants we don’t want, going so far as to insist that our poisons ultimately are for the best.
But all this poisoning and artificial fertilizing – coupled with plowing, and monoculture, and all our other modern agricultural techniques – is just destroying the soil and the surface of our planet, as well as contributing to global warming.
Likewise, it turns out that all this streamlining and cleaning up of learning processes, reducing them to a very limited set of teaching-based, adult-led activities, may just be destroying the natural processes of learning. Learning worked just fine – extremely well, in fact – before schools came along. Just as nature produced plenty to eat before modern agribusiness took over.
It turns out, the process is important.
And that’s what I know about snail-based learning.
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