Here is a simply lovely piece about a book: The Gardener and the Carpenter about social learning. I knew what it was going to be about from the title alone. There are so many parallels with the ideas some of us share about dancing tango and an approach to life generally: that it's about exploration and discovery not targeted on "levels" of development, that it's play, not work, that there is no right and wrong, simply what happens, that it's about growing, not building and that the skills that develop happen organically, in an emergent way and are thus stronger for it. Also, that we learn much by listening and observation, play and apprenticeship, which in dance terms means we can learn much just by attending a milonga and that beginners learn easily just by dancing (not being told what to do) with people who already can. No surprise that she calls the relationship between parent and child - or anyone - an interplay, "like dancing".
Quoted for truth:
ReplyDelete"To seek to parent a child, Gopnik argues, is to behave like a carpenter, chiselling away at something to achieve a particular end-goal – in this case, a certain kind of person. A carpenter believes that he or she has the power to transform a block of wood into a chair. When we garden, on the other hand, we do not believe we are the ones who single-handedly create the cabbages or the roses. Rather, we toil to create the conditions in which plants have the best chance of flourishing. "
It was thanks to Julie, who's smart and strong and shares interesting things that I saw that piece on Facebook. And thanks to Michael, with whom I love dancing that I saw this short video today. I think it relates to some of the ideas in the article.
ReplyDelete