01.02. KINDNESS/discovery. The Generation Poetry Project
Kindness is one of the most common words Generation Poetry uses to describe what they need. But they don’t mean charity or platitude. They mean a keen attention to the subjective experience of each person. They are post-post-modernist (or meta-modern). The fact that reality appears differently to each person isn’t up for debate, it’s intuitively understood. Things aren’t black and white, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be useful. Speaking, exchanging perspectives, emotions and feelings, allow change to start from the individual, not from external forces. Poetry, allusive language, seeking feedback, allowing others to build upon the work of the other allows for discovery, learning and growth.
This contrasts to learning and building Resilience through challenge. Pushing the boundaries and feeling discomfort is a way to grow. Resilience is a muscle built from use and friction, that is useful and valuable and forges characters. Relative objectivity, where certain things are un-negotiable and need to be done.
Entelechia is a concept from Aristotle, the idea that people are like a seed with an innate potential to learn and grow into themselves. All is contained within the individual. There is no objectivity, but a shared universality – no one has the same life, yet we are all human. Creativity is more important than rationality, to find your unique way to be in the world. Like a seed, people require nurturing and care to reduce trauma that hinders growth. Teachers can only create the conditions for growth, not the content.
At the extreme, learning is matter for survival, Sink or Swim, do or die. What does not kill you makes you stronger. This is the hero’s story. You make it, or you don’t, and forgiveness is weakness.
Tailored Choice approaches learning with give and take, constant questioning and decisions about when to challenge and when to encourage. Certain things are unnegotiable, but within those boundaries, people should find their own way. Grouping of people into learning styles (auditory, kinaesthetic, visual, etc). Recognition that learning disabilities exist and should be taken into account.
Determinism lets kids be kids until they reach certain milestones. Then they stop being kids and enter adult life. Rites of passage. Belonging to a group. A golden childhood followed by harsh reality, epitomised by the Spartans.
Only You recognises that no two people are alike, and no individual has more rights than another. Participation counts as success, being first doesn’t. You can be anything you want to be and make your own world.
Little Soldiers need to be responsible. Good boys and girls who are prepared for life and what they world needs them to be. Acquiring essential skills that serve and construct order, control and harmony. Homework, activities, exams and mechanistic progression.
The Silent Generation and Baby Boomers learned through survival. The Silent Generation had relatively unstructured educations, largely deterministic by context of birth and punctuated and interrupted by war and depression. The Boomers entered a more structured education machine as little soldiers, designed to move them through the system and into the roles required to rebuild a world devastated by war.
Generation X was raised in a series of contrasting concerns of considering each child’s innate potential (think Sesame Street and Mr Rogers) alongside a hefty dose of real-world challenge, running a bit feral in the world of rising divorce rates and rising crime rates. The Millennials were encouraged to embrace their only you-ness to a much larger extent. The snowflake label can be unfair, but often sticks.
Generation Poetry spans Generation Z and Generation Alpha. Both explore the tension between Kindness and a understanding of the power of the subjective (NOT the individual) and the harsh reality of a world in which their survival does not appear to be guaranteed. This comfort with balancing highly contrasting realities may explain much of the affinity we see in the project with Generation X. Gen X doesn’t live in the same reality, but they nudge alongside it and can glimpse the edges from the corner of the eye.