Silver Donald Cameron; Beyond the Teapot Theory of Educating and Gross National Happiness

Silver Donald Cameron is one of Canada's most versatile and experienced professional authors. His work includes plays, films, radio and TV scripts, an extensive body of corporate and governmental writing, hundreds of magazine articles and 16 books, including two novels. His non-fiction subjects include history, travel, literature, politics, nature and the environment, community development, ships and the sea, as well as education and public affairs. He produces and hosts a project called The Green Interview.

I interviewed him a few weeks ago for Radio Free School about new ways of educating, with examples from Bhutan where the focus is on Gross National Happiness!

Listen to the show here.

Also, included in this post is a text excerpt from the interview (below). Enjoy!

Your article Beyond The Teapot Theory-pouring out knowledge into empty vessels- do you think there is a significant movement happening now against this way of educating? In magazines like The Times, more and more you are seeing articles talking about the 'dropout economy,' don't bother going to college-because it will not be useful in the new world.


I think that the rising cost of university and the uploading of the cost on to the student has had a really deleterious affect on that whole dimension of the system. But I think most of us do need some form of education but how you get it is kind of the question.

What i am sensing is a lot of disquiet about what i call 'the tea pot theory' in that article in the sense that that is not the way people learn. I think that educational needs have become so diverse and the range of things people do with their lives has become so striving that it is not easy anymore to have a single education system that prepares people for the labour force.

The labor force is not like that anymore - it is very very fragmented the skill sets are quiet sophisticated and very different from one another so this sort of factory system where you push them all through and they get more or less the same education it doesn't fit very well and i think a lot of people are seeing that.

And I think it doesn't fit not only from the point of view of a vocational system but it doesn't fit in terms of the way that people learn, and i think we have learned something about that too; that there is a relatively small part of the population that learns best by sitting inside of a classroom having the information preached to them, or conveyed to them. That is not a very efficient way of learning, and the more effective way of learning always seems to involve hands on activity, community activity engagement with the world out there observation, reflection and then maybe be ready to hear something from an instructor or mentor...


You underlined in your essay Beyond The Teapot Theory "the need for art and mystery in learning" which is something we don't often hear about.


That comes from an actual apprenticeship document in the 19th century Cape Breton Island that the young fellow is "bound to the blacksmith to learn his art and mystery" and the sense that there is art and mystery and that it is something you have to absorb over a long period of time more or less through your pores. Not something we think about very much anymore. We tend to think of it as being a very cut and dry proposition. But learning in a profound sense is not like that.

What I love about that phrase is that it's not just some sort of mechanical skill or technique but a sense of the actively as a holistic kind of thing and the sense of it being a body of knowledge that can only be understood if you know that at heart there is mystery to it. I think that is true with anything that you have set out to learn.


"The liberation of learning"- that is what we need to do. liberate learning from these strict A to B- no deviation.


That's right. One of the things in another mood I would say is that I am not sure there is such as thing as teaching. I am very sure that there is such a thing as learning and that teaching really occurs at the instance of the learner For example if I want to learn how to lay carpets or weaving and you know about it than I may come to you and say, "Please show me how to do this."
This is what we do in every aspect of our lives; the way we do it, you say, "Well, I will sign up for this course because I want to learn about it."

So the emphasis is with you and the primary activity is you learning and the other person is not so much teaching as providing resources intellectual resources and other resources. And I suspect that that is how most learning takes place and this doesn't resemble the paradigm we have.


Gross National Happiness vs gross national product?


I got involved with that because we have had here a wonderful research organization in NS GPI Atlantic -which was working on a genuine progress index for Nova Scotia and is in fact completed. And the kind of core understanding of GPI is the foundation upon which the Bhutanese Gross National Happiness measurements are based.

The basic issue that GNH has dealt with is the sense that important things don't get counted and unimportant things do get counted in our economics process. So for example traditional GNP measures all economic activity and if all economic is increasing then people tend to think we are becoming more prosperous and that is a good thing.

But it doesn't tend to distinguish between economic activity that is positive and economic activity that is negative......We don't have any way of measuring the value of the standing forest. We measure the forest as potential as lumber. We don't value it's absorption of co2. We don't value its control of erosion its impact on the human spirit. It is just strictly lumber that hasn't been cut yet. Well this is obviously nonsense. This is obviously a foolish way to do things.

And underneath all of this is the assumption that somehow multiplying money makes us better of and in fact there is lots of research that that is not true. Simply multiplying money beyond a certain point-I mean there is a point a fairly low level where you have enough to food to eat, good place to stay, clothes etc. Once you have that, more money doesn't add proportionately more happiness. In fact the more prosperous we become in the Western world the more the indicators of unhappiness have tended to arise-like in family breakdown and divorce, suicide and drug use- these are diseases of prosperity.

And so understanding all that the king of Bhutan said years and years ago the Gross National Product (GNP) is not as important as Gross National Happiness (GNH).

They didn't really pursue that in a scientific and systematic way until fairly recently and then they said, "What are the elements of GNH and how can we measure them?" They started to look at the factors and talking about the things that normally don't get measure and they developed a whole set of metrics based on the GNH there.

Then the next thing they said was, "Okay. If we now understand that if there are things that make us happy and other things that don't make us happy and they are not the way that things are conventionally supposed to go in the Western world, how do we organize the school system so that young people are trained to think of their role in the world from a GNH point of view not the GNP point of view?"

So they had a whole conference last December and they brought together educators holistic educators alternative educators, spiritual leaders from 16 countries and it was an astonishing experience because these educators took a day and a half and basically asked what would the product of a GNH system look like?

What kind of a person would that be? And they said, "Okay- so there is the objective we would need to pursue."

That night the government adopted that. "The government has accepted our recommendations that these should be the objectives. Would you now please tell us how to get there?"

And the conference players considered that question-how you would have to train teachers, principals.. the government has convened a meeting of all the senior educators in the country to start the process of training in GNH education. and plans to train every teacher in the country.


How is that reflected in the people that come out of this process?


What you wind up with is young people that have a great respect for the environment and who think of the environment as an integral part of their decision making in their personal life they have a great regard of the traditional wisdom of the tradition of the country very conscious of the fact that they are people in society. That their role in society is to function with people- not in competition; they understand themselves to be in society and also understand that they can progress as individuals only if people around them are also progressing.

And it will be very different from the kind of graduates we will produce who tend to think in terms of personal success, high degrees of consumption not too much attention to the environmental impact of what you do. If we flip a lot of the attitudes that we have in the west on their heads and you wind up with the Bhutanese attitude.

A Sense of Self-Susannah Sheffer

Susannah Sheffer worked for a number of years with Holt Associates. Holt Associates is the organization that John Holt founded in 1977. John Holt is the education critic and writer who probably is best known for his books How Children Learn and How Children Fail. He also founded a magazine called “Growing Without Schooling” (GWS). Quite a number of years after his death Susannah Sheffer joined the folks who ran the magazine and eventually became the editor. She got to keep close touch with his philosophy and ways of looking at children learning and with people who were practicing growing without schooling all over the country and other countries all over the world. At some point along the way, she wrote a book about homeschooled adolescent girls in particular. That book is called A Sense Of Self.

In A Sense Of Self, you reveal that homeschooled teenage girls are more confident, and assertive than their peers in school. Let’s talk about that.


I was interested in looking at the experience of girls in particular at a time when the experience of girls in school was getting a great deal of attention. In the early and mid nineties there were a lot of studies and reports coming out looking at the experience of schooling for girls and specifically asserting that girls were suffering in school in some very specific and particular ways.

There was a study called “How schools short change girls” which was produced by the American Association of University Women and such studies. That was being looked at. Everything from specific school discrimination issues like studies that showed that teachers called on boys when students raised their hands- that teachers called on boys much more frequently than they called on girls that teachers were often not consciously aware of their behavior. They might say when being interviewed that they had no discrimination based on gender whatsoever but when they’d let’s say, be videotaped and when they’d watch the video of their own classroom behavior teachers would realize to their shock that in fact they were favoring the boys! That’s just one example of the kind of research that was being done.

Also, there was some important research that was looking not specifically at girls in school but simply at adolescent girls psychological growth and development and their inner experience. And there was a lot of discussion about girls “losing their voice.”- the phrase that came out of the Harvard project on the development of girls- the sense that adolescent girls really were losing trust in themselves, doubting their own voices, doubting the validity of their own goals, and perceptions and experience.

Adolescence is a hard time for many young people. Again there was some attention to the particular way it was hard on girls, the messages that the culture send to girls, the ways in which school sometimes reinforces those messages, and that the way that let’s say, and this very general but I think it will resonate with many people, that if a boy is struggling in school or struggling as an adolescent, its often very visible.
Classically and more typically a boy might be”acting out”- that a boy for whom school was not working might be the disruptive one. The one that was making trouble in class, interrupting the teacher. The girl in school on the other hand might look fine on the outside; she’s the one sitting quietly in the corner not making any outward trouble!
So that’s the type of discrepancies in the way this plays out-what with all those studies and reports and getting a lot of popular attention. getting picked up by the popular press, these were university studies- and what I noticed , as I was following these things closely, was the assumptions that girls go to school was a given. One of the studies even said in passing that all girls go to school.

The point was therefore we need to look at the way schools treat girls- extremely valid point. But meanwhile I knew of course through my work and my interactions in knew and dealt with and in some cases worked closely with girls who didn’t go to school; in some cases girls who had never gone to school a day in their lives. Who had grown completely outside of that very typical experience.

And I was working with girls only through the magazine “growing without schooling” as well as discussion groups for teenagers and through mentoring young writers and so forth. So I had a lot of contact with teenagers of both gender, but I was also aware of the girls that i knew well and they didn’t fit the descriptions that i was reading so much about.

I would read about girls who were losing their voices, getting less confident, distrusting themselves, feeling alienated from their own goals, and that just kept not fitting the girls that i knew well. They were having a very different experience. So I thought that it would be interesting and worth while as a contribution to this whole discussion to study girls who were learning outside of school and ask them many of the same interview questions actually that girls in these other studies had been asked and see how that all came out.

And that’s what a sense of self was ultimately about. It was the result of 55 interviews with homeschooled girls age 11 to 16 across the united states and they were in depth interviews- this was not a statistical study - this was qualitative interviews research where its all about the answers that the girls gave give in talking and reflecting in conversation. I did indeed find that the girls experience was in many ways quite different from their peers in school.

Can you underline some of those difference again?

Yes-first of all the summary was that they were not experiencing the same kind of decline over time that was demonstrated in some of the other studies and what I’m going to say about the other studies is something that I think does resonant with a lot of adult women. That people talk about age 10 or so, as being the high point of their girl hood- it’s when a girl often feels very confident and on top of the world and then as the girl begins to absorb the cultural messages of what’s expected of females in this culture that things begin to get much harder and she as Carol Gilger and her colleagues, “goes underground.”

She doesn’t feel comfortable saying what she really thinks, focuses on what others want (this is all very much shorthanded) And the girls I was talking to were reporting the opposite. A 15 year old girl might report that she felt more sure of herself, more trusting of her own experience than she had 3 years before, for example. You saw a different kind of progression.

Another really classic distinction was the other studies had found that girls became increasingly uncomfortable with disagreement among friends. For example,you think of the classic sense we have of social life of girls in school-like it’s very,very important to conform, to fit it, to go along with what the norms are, what the leader of your clique demands and so the one of the interview questions is about how do you speak up when you disagree with a friend and that sort of thing- and that was a place where the homeschool girls were almost unanimous one of 2 exceptions in the 55 girls I interviewed.

They expressed comfort with disagreement; they sort of expected to disagree with friends a about one thing or the other and didn’t assume that that precluded friendship. After all these are girls that are doing something so different with so much of their lives and so often having to explain themselves so that if they needed to agree about everything with a friend they would have a very limited pool- so they become much more comfortable with that sort of thing- with being different and yet having relationships with people. They don’t think you have to be the same in order to have a close relationship.

There is something important to understand. Ultimately, although these interview questions on both sides look at something pretty internal, and subjective and kind of subjective in a way, ultimately it’s very much connected to the outer experience

Psychologists ask how can we help them-to identify with their own goals, To feel more connected? And my point, was well conventional schooling is not really based on that. Schooling is not about helping to identify their own goals and helping them with that. Schools tell you this is what you need to learn this is how you are going to go about it. We will test to see if you’ve learned it - that sort of thing.
In a setting where you are learning outside of school, you are being asked to reflect on your own goals. You are learning to ask the question what do I want out of life? Not just education. What do I care about, what seems important to pursue? Those are the questions that a typical teenager of any gender are being invited to ask. So it those students eventually then feel more comfortable and identify with their goals, it’s not actually surprising.

Lee Hoinacki; Looking back on a life long friendship with Ivan Illich

--> Lee Hoinacki is a former Dominican priest, professor of political science, and subsistence farmer. He collaborated with Ivan Illich many projects and still works today to spread the thoughts of his life long friend.

This is an excerpt from an interview a few years back:

Illich's concerns around technology, what it’s doing to society can we talk a little more about that?

He was interested first of all in the effects of technology - the actual effects first of all and later the symbolic effects. He would use an example, say a photograph. The photograph was introduced in the 19^th century and into history. But this technological artifact changed people’s perception so he thought it was a serious question which people should try to look at, figure out, whether anyone sees anything today. Period.

Anyone who is exposed to photographs that is. When you see the person are you able to see the person in front of you - see the nature etc and what you are able to see the people you claim to love etc and that kind of thing, you are not going to see them. That was his point. Because what technology is doing is creating an artificial universe and a lot of it has to do with the question of perception and so he spent a lot of time on perception and how technology affects ones perception, what one sees.

Ultimately, he thought that technology was changing what we call the ‘human condition.’ There he is coming out of an atomistic perspective-say Thomas Aquinas in terms of human nature, based first upon Aristotle and he is saying that those people had a certain notion of what it is to be human-what you call human nature and technology is changing that.

He would say for example, are there any human beings around today? Do humans still exist? He would say that would be a serious question....

I want to backtrack a bit and get to the idea of man created in man’s image- the cosmos in man’s hand.

Illich thought that humans are created in God’s image and he was very traditional in that. So that’s why he was believing that the question of image is important. He did a lot of writing on images i.e. these were late writings. He thought that what is happening today is that people are recreating human beings, but it isn’t in man’s image- it’s in a sort of pseudo man, a technological, artifact man.

He actually called it a kind of perversion that is going on. He believed that because of what is going on in the medical system today with respect to death an so on that what we are doing is producing monsters. So that people under intensive care as they approach death, these are not human any more.

These are creatures or what ever they are- well he used the word monsters and word like that. Now obviously, with respect to schooling there are people who learn in spite of schools- so there are people who die in spite of medical technology- who die their own death. Illich would spend a lot of time on words- so he would say, is it possible today to die? And he would think, "well no. It’s not because of technology."

The thing is, that subject of death and technology is not simple to get at. Very complicated and it would take along time to delineate his meaning with respect to technology and its effect on human beings. He would carry this through on everything. That is, for example any kind of vehicle he would think is a kind of monstrosity, a kind of perversion- once you take a person’s feet of the ground, flying and that kind of thing- he would be very critical of that object. He would be very critical of this kind of thing- of talking over the phone over wires. He was critical of that.

But many people would think-okay, this is going back! Did he want to go back?

No! No he said you’ve got to live right now. You’ve got to live in this world. We’ve go to live in the modern world. So he would get into an automobile, or an air plane for example. Although, realizing that this is not a good thing to do. And he would use things like telephones and so forth but as he said, “I would never want to speak to a person I love over the telephone. He never had any photographs of those friends and intimates. He would say, you have to live in this world but you try to live with technology at the same time being critical of it in terms of trying to see what is good and what is bad in the whole thing.

He placed a lot of emphasis on what he called askesis - he like to use Greek words now and then. We would call that in English an asceticism-which is life long process of trying to discipline your senses so that you are able to feel, to see, to smell, and so on. And it’s a life long process disciplinary practices which one can use- you see that in people today who are into mediation. He did not go for that kind of stuff, because he thought anything that smacked of new age- he avoided. It was sort of an anathema to him. He thought that was the worst kind of junk you can imagine. And he was quite explicit and vocal about that.

But he was very strong on the question of disciplines that are necessary in order to train ones self to be able to hear, to see to taste and so on....the point is to be in the world but not to be of the world. And he said this was a kind of mystery that one had to figure out- him or herself. So renouncing the world, it doesn’t mean that you close yourself up in some sort of ivory tower which he did not do, or go of to the desert some place which he did not to. Because he was in the midst of things all the time.

But he was living in what in the, the Roman Catholic tradition is called 'detachment.' That is, he wasn’t attached to any of these things for example a good wine, flowers, a comfortable bed. Well he didn’t have much of a comfortable bed because he just slept on a futon which I built. But he felt that one could not become attached to any of these things.

I’ve seen him eat all kinds of junk and drink all kinds of stuff and thought well this is crazy to eat and drink this way. But he could also enjoy a good meal and wine without attachment. The question of renouncing the world is a question of attachment - he would give me clothing that his brother would give him.

We were the same size so I could get his brother’s good shirts or whatever because his brother gave them to him thinking, he’s got to wear something! He’d be like in rags- well not rags but these sort of torn, old clothes. His brother would go out and buy him these expensive things and he’d pass them on to me. “I don’t want that stuff. I don’t need that!”

He’d say. So he would take what he needed but that was all. He wouldn’t take any more.

Do you want to go back and talk about the idea of friendship and how that could help us navigate ourselves through this world?

He thought that we live in an awful society. This society is not going to do anything to encourage us to be good. Because it’s just a mess. So the one thing he thought that could possibly save people or,may be that’s not the proper word, was the notion of friendship. Friendship for him was gaditas in Latin-charity that is, it was a grace. It was a supernatural thing. ......

So he would say, "Friends are everything- without my friends I would just be nothing in a sense."

And then of course, one of the deeper key notions is what he called hospitality. That is to be an hospitable host. His door was always open in a sense that any one could come in. I mean I’ve seen all kinds of crazy people come in, living with him over a number of years. And so he felt that it was extremely important to be hospital to the stranger and to friends. There are people I know who interpret Illich just in terms of hospitality- they say that’s the most important thing he had to say in his life - there is some truth in that.

Did he think that the world was just going to hell in a hand basket?

Well yes. I think so. Um hmm.

Do you think so too?

I feel perhaps much more stronger about that then he did. I feel that there’s no hope in a sense.

That’s very discouraging.

He would say, I don’t speak this way to young people because it’s too horrible, I can’t say these things. And so he would talk to me about his views that way. But he wouldn’t really come out and be explicit with respect to others. At the same time, he was a ‘man of faith’ so he believed well, this world could go to hell in a hand basket because it doesn’t make that much difference anyway "because there is another world in which I believe. That’s the world in which I want to die."

He was a peculiar person in the sense that he was a genuine believer so while he was looking at the world and seeing what it was, he also was not discouraged. He was not depressed because he saw that there was more then what meets the eye.

He was very active in Europe protesting the implantation of Persian missiles in Germany and he supported people who were in the green party in Europe and he did a lot of behind the scenes work supporting people when Pinochet overthrew Rajende in Chile and when Goulah was overthrown in Brazil, Illich did a a lot of stuff behind the scenes- very active with respect to Comunotorez in Columbia - those are just incidences that come to mind at the top of my head.. He took a very active part in things that were going on in the world. He would really work for what he thought were good things. So he said, "Who knows what will come of it? ....................

That’s Illich. It’s very hard to say his influence because I met him in 1960 and I’ve live with him for many many years and my wife said what are you going to do when this guy dies because your whole life has been centered around him? .....

I think that Illich’s books are important and as he said himself, "You don’t read these books as you would a newspaper." And so, I worked with him on number of these books, some people would say trying to make them more intelligible but they are his ideas and they require some work to understand what he is all about.

Gender, which I think is the most important book he ever wrote, is not reviewed. There is one review, an important review, but other than that it’s never mentioned in any bibliography and nobody reads it and no one know it. But it’s a theory of economics which if one were to take it seriously, would have to reinterpret what is called a social history of Europe. And it think it’s powerful enough that it requires that kind of rethinking of what is called a social history of Europe.

His book, Tools for conviviality is a theory on technology and no one has ever come whatever near those 5 dimensions that Illich talks about there. Bits and pieces of people are saying all kinds of important things and doing all kinds of good things here and there, but I would just argue that I think Illich too was saying something that could perhaps be taken into account.

Listen to the audio here: http://radio4all.net/index.php/program/10512

Read Radio Free School

In our seven years of producing a radio show, we have interviewed many people about unschooling and authentic learning. Some of these people include Grace Llewellyn, John Taylor Gatto, Pat Farenga, Matt Hern, Wendy Priesnitz, David Cayley, Aaron Falbel, Jerry Mintz, Carol Dweck, Joseph Pierce.

Other interviews include 'pioneer' parents in the field of unschooling such as Sandra Dodd, Linda Clement, Marty Lane as well as fun interviews with authors Kit Pearson, Denis Lee, Gordon Korman etc.

At one point I had the idea to transcribe the interviews into a book.

I am revisiting the idea. As a start, I plan to post weekly excerpts from the interviews to give you a feel for what the eventual book will hold.

Stay tuned for some really insightful reading!