Author: Isaac Morehouse

The real world isn’t a closed system. It isn’t a finite, zero-sum game. It’s dynamic, creative, innovative, infinite, and cooperative.

If you want to earn a living, you have to create value. But there is no correct answer to the question, “How do I create value?”

It requires experimentation, trial, error, gain, loss, feedback, and adjustment. And it’s a moving target. A constant dance.

If the point of education is preparation for success in the world, it should also be open. But most mass, modern approaches to education are closed.

There are correct answers to everything. They come down from a single authority. Things are rigid, with lagging feedback loops, only changing when authorities dictate.

Closed education is not good preparation for an open world. It ends up resembling a training ground for closed societies – no one gets in or out, ownership and entrepreneurship are nonexistent, the authorities hold all the answers and control individuals like lumps of dough.

Few educators want this, but the inertia of the system seems too much to overcome for reformers. In a way, they are correct. Reform from within is limited.

Thankfully, external forces come into play.

As the world shifts and evolves, more people are seeing and feeling the pains of closed education. They are seeking to open it up.

The lines are blurring. Homeschool, unschool, microschool, co-ops, pods, alt-schools, tutors, teachers, coaches, guides, part-time, full-time, private, public, remote, in-person, synchronous, asynchronous – more terms keep getting added and each term becomes less clear-cut. They are no longer rigid categories you must choose between, but a grab-bag of tools you can pick up and use as needed, swapping freely. This is a good thing.

Ironically, when the world closed in 2020, it revealed the problems with closed education more than ever. Parents saw and felt the contradictions. It opened their minds to the need to open their kids education.

Traditional school enrollment has been plummeting. Funding that follows students instead of schools has exploded. Teachers have begun to become education entrepreneurs. Parents now realize they have no choice but to take charge of their kids education – simply deferring to the system is not sufficient.

The age of open education is upon us.

You may be pessimistic about this year or the next. I don’t fault you. But I can’t look at the opening of education and the rapid growth of this movement and not see a brighter future. We’re in the thick of the struggle now, as we wrestle with what all these changes mean.

How can we embrace technology and the openness it offers while not becoming addicted to screens and isolated from the real world?

How can we harness the benefits of asynchronous and location-independent learning while still forming bonds and connections?

How can we take charge of our kids education while not feeling under-equipped and overwhelmed?

These are the questions we’re dealing with, and they are good questions. The right questions.

All of them are being answered in a million ways a million times a day across the world. We are trying, testing, experimenting, sharing, cooperating, and figuring out how to solve them. This is how an open world works, and how an open education should be created.

The answer is not to run from change and technology or pine for past eras. Nor is it to let change and technology and inertia be in the drivers’ seat while you’re merely along for the ride.

The answer it to take the reins and stay open. Explore and learn and share. Go your own way but don’t go it alone.

The world is ready and waiting for kids to engage with it, rather than be kept hidden away from it.

Let’s open education together.

Leaving a bad taste in someone’s mouth is a lot more costly than you might think.

The world is smaller than you think, and how you exit a situation matters a lot. Whenever ending a transaction, interaction, contract, arrangement, either side of employment, membership, etc. I have never once regretted erring on the side of generosity and goodwill – even if the other party didn’t reciprocate. I have regretted a few times I’ve been stingy or done only what’s minimally required.

These things have a way of coming around.

Trust and knowledge were restricted by geography. Travel advancements, then telegraphs, telephones, and finally the internet expanded the range of trust and knowledge to nearly every corner of the globe.

But the low barrier to information led to an overwhelming volume, and increasingly clever tricks and tech allowed people and governments to game trust-enhancing systems.

Now the internet is becoming a weaker source of knowledge and trust. People are reverting back to smaller communities.

The digital “globe” you experience in your news feed is curated to match your tastes, leading you to believe the world looks a lot more like you than it likely does. When you experience the shock of reality, trust erodes further.

The shrinking of the reach of knowledge and trust is neither inherently good or bad. It is sad, but in the same way that anything that results from human weakness and sin is sad. It is not uniquely sad, except for those who grew up watching the web of knowledge and trust expand in a seemingly endless and inevitable way, and now are seeing it shrink back to what feel like barbarous times.

Maybe the world gets smaller and stays smaller for a long time. Or maybe this is just a bump in the road and new trust enhancing mechanisms and signals will emerge to continue the expansion. But for now, the expansion has halted and a contraction has begun.

Still got this one in

Half-hearted in Sunday din

Last line now we’re fin

There’s this idea among the church fathers that praying for mercy for yourself is in fact praying for the whole world.

The cosmos is contained in each of us, a fractal of reality. If we get our hearts right, we will help right the world.

The older I get, the more damage I see causes and movements do – to the individuals that participate and to the world – the more I believe this.

You banish the darkness by shining brighter, not by starting an anti-darkness campaign.

One thing I love about reading older fiction is encountering characters who are exactly like people I’ve met in real life.

How could something written 60, or 100, or more years ago in a totally different country and culture depict an individual who is exactly like some that I’ve met, in speech, mannerisms, actions, and ideas?

Archetypes are real. There are certain frames of mind, personality traits, and dispositions that attract people to certain vocations and milieus which further condition them into recognizable types.

None of this is groundbreaking, but I’ll never cease to be amazed at how universal these people patterns are. And it takes a great observer and describer of humans to tease these patterns out and insert them into stories.

Materialism’s heyday is past. It is common for people who once wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so to talk about symbolism and a structure of reality that goes beyond what can be seen and measured.

Forms and archetypes and egregores are entertained. Interdimensional realities, consciousness extending into other realms, and unknown beings are discussed. Tradition and religion are en vogue.

I think this is a good thing, because reality is more than what can be measured in a lab. There is a danger, though, of not going far enough.

The embrace of psychological realities found in religion and symbolism and patterns beyond our own minds is easy to abstract. We can get caught up in discussing these things as grand ontological or epistemological categories and feel very broad minded indeed. All the while skirting and evading the real question:

What does it mean for me, personally?

If symbols are more than man-made tools; if behind them is some real power, intelligence, or entity, what does that mean for me?

If the Logos is more than fiction, what is it? Who is He? What does He demand of me?

If religion isn’t hooey; if a spiritual world, or other dimensions, or extended consciousness exists, what should I do?

This part is hard for smart people. Because it bring you down out of the realm where you are demonstrating to people how all of reality works – an impressive and helpful feat – and forced to either do or deny embarrassing, old-fashioned things that this understanding demands. Prayer. Baptism. Communion.

The symbols reveal a deeper reality, yes. But that reality is not merely a map of the world beyond our senses. It is a call to participate in it. Not as an intellectual plaything. But with our flesh and blood and heart and mind and habits and words.

It is a call to not just know about the divine reality. To not just acknowledge His existence and authority. To not just speak in His name. But to know Him. To do His will.

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’”

This is a hard pill to swallow.

It puts the simpleminded old churchgoer who does His will without a wit of understanding on the same plane as the genius professor who sees the full pattern of reality. Both are in equal danger of not really knowing Him, and both must seek Him and do His will (‘love the least of these’, ‘feed my sheep’) to avoid that danger.

I keep seeing more signs of eroding trust in society. Little things. Fast food restaurants no longer having self-serve fountain drinks. Theft and break-ins in neighborhoods that even a few years ago never thought of locking doors. Service providers that never show up, ratings that mean nothing, Uber drivers that cancel on you.

None of these in isolation are a huge deal. Normal bumps in the road. But the number of these little shifts is astonishing, and combined, create an undercurrent of inability to have confidence in anything. You have to have a second thought about things. The benefits of a high-trust society – speed, efficiency, safety, ease of business – are eroding.

This does not bode well. Low trust societies are survivable, but not enjoyable.

I’m writing this post after having cleared my inboxes and (half of) my Slack messages. Which means I’m in a terrible frame of mind for writing and I’m thinking about other things and treating this as a chore. Bad.

Every morning, I do a bunch of stuff. Workout, read, pray, write, eat, review calendar, clear messages, and get to work. In that order.

If I jumble the order, a cascade of jumble befalls me. The days is disordered, rushed, and unsettling.

I’m going to knock this post out and try to reset the order and see if I can prevent the chaos from breaking quarantine.

It doesn’t matter how fast or slow, busy or free the pace of work. To maximize productivity and happiness, what matters to me is who is in control of that pace.

When I own and set the pace, I enjoy work and do it well. (Mostly).

When the pace pulls me along, forces me to adjust to it, I struggle.

I don’t like a frantic pace – unless I set it. I don’t like a laggy pace – unless I set it.

I want pace control possibly more than I want control of where I work or what I work on.

In the morning light

Wondering if it was right

After all the fight

Homeschooling your first kid:

“Okay, here’s our schedule, starting at 5am with Latin and Greek, working through the Trivium, then several elective subjects throughout the day, ending at 6pm when we make dinner together.”

Homeschooling your second kid:

“Okay, Monday and Wednesday, just do whatever your brother is doing. Tuesday and Thursday are co-op and you’ll have to come grocery shopping with me or read a book at home. Friday is sports meetup day.”

Homeschooling your third kid:

“Did you talk to anyone today? Good. Rhetoric is covered. You played Roblox? STEM is covered. You hit your sister? PE. Now look at the road signs while we’re driving your siblings around all day and you might learn to read.”

The spreadsheet might be the greatest digital invention in history.

Of course tables and ledgers are a pre-digital technology, but the ability to enter formulas that auto-populate, edit, delete, reference other sheets, etc. is unique to the advent of personal computing.

In all my years of using computers and the internet, nothing has added more joy and value to my life than spreadsheets.

The best part about them is that they don’t lie. Budgets and data and formulas just tell you the facts. If we spend this much vs save, here’s how much we’ll lose in monthly interest. It’s just a brute fact. Then you can make choices.

I feel so peaceful every time I update or adjust my spreadsheets.

Death sucks.

Even if you believe that life is eternal, death still sucks.

Before raising Lazarus, Jesus wept for him. Before facing His own death and resurrection, he begged God to take the cup from him.

Because death, even though life comes after it, still sucks.

Death is a corruption of creation. Even though it has been ultimately defeated, we still (for the time) feel the sadness and weight of it. We know, deep down, it’s not how things are supposed to be. It reminds us of our fallen state.

You may get along even better after fighting and then making up with someone, but the sting of the fight is still there. You still feel the consequences of the error, even after all is set right.

You are always in the Last Days.

Earthly life is a blip.

It’s always near the end.

The question is not only what things will last here on earth beyond your death, but what things will last beyond this earth itself.