From the Library
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Book Review by Melinda Merriam, Vision Librarian From the downtown Paonia office of the Vision program, it is too easy to lose sight of the children whose growth and learning our program supports. We get busy with learner schedules, funding summaries, newsletter articles, and many, many meetings. Reading Brent Cameron’s Self Design: Nurturing Genius Through Natural Learning not only helps me to see the children again, rather than the commitments and expectations regarding their education, but it also provides a surprising amount of support and explanation for how children perceive the world --and how we all can. If we want to encourage and help our young friends to become the people they want to be, we can benefit from this text. Cameron’s manifesto begins with a five-year-old child reluctant to leave a playground swing for the classroom, but he notes that “at its fullest, SelfDesign is a political statement.” It must be, as the paradigm shifts he speaks of apparently come to encompass the entire lives of the young women and men who make his Wondertree and Virtual High programs the center of their worlds. The nature of the book spirals from the individual child and grows to include the family, mentors, a learning community, and finally a global perspective. However lofty and impossible as that seems, Cameron notes that all movements begin with one individual. |
The anecdotes written either by Cameron or by the former learners themselves are appealing, poignant, and reassuring, but the meat of the text comes in the geometric displays Cameron creates to illustrate his theories regarding the workings of the spirit, mind, body, and heart: First a circle with four quadrants, then a two-dimensional, twelve-pointed mandala including the divided circle, next a three-dimensional icosahedron with its 20 triangular sides, and finally a unique shape that its creator calls a vector equilibrium. This final shape, designed with a single sphere in the center and as many equal-sized spheres as possible touching the center sphere (12, it turns out), forms both the idea of one’s spheres of influence and the form of the book.
I must admit, the first time I read Self Design, the geometric shapes blurred into a confusing array of triangles, spheres, pyramids, and even more complex shapes until I was left wondering what I was supposed to get out of this text. The individual’s stories carried me along on that reading. I knew Brent was trying to tell me more about how we learn, how we act with ourselves and others, and how we fit into the world, so I gave the book another go, and somewhere between the second and third reading the geometry began to make some sense.
However, the simplest illustrations provide me with the most lasting food for thought. For example, when I examine the simple spiral of the seed, its germination, the underground, unseen work of putting roots down, the growth stage, with its awe-inspiring power, the fruiting stage, and finally, the production of a new seed, I think of my own children, still young enough that they are creating the unseen roots that will support their entire lives. It gives one pause. Another simple illustration is the SelfDesign LifeSpiral, a concrete, visible means of looking at the pattern of life. The spiral is based on the Golden Rectangle, which Cameron explains fully in the text. When an individual steps on her current age, it is possible to see back to the sheltered years of early childhood and ahead to the next phases of life. Moving on and off the spiral is a physical way to be here now, or to take a trip back to youth, or to see things from someone else’s perspective. The final, simple diagram is an illustration of how new tasks seem to us, and Cameron uses the example of a young child learning to tie shoes. Interestingly, this shape also lends itself to a spiral, because when one completes a formerly new task in the unconscious-competent realm of excellence, a new task is ready to be tackled, and the individual is not at the place of origin but is a new, more competent being.
Overall, Cameron’s book is a thought-provoking, valid look at how we choose to educate our children, how we choose to live, and how we think about these things. Though it is not an easy read, it is also not a strident manifesto advocating one outcome. After all, the idea is self design, and we all come with our own quirks that make us wonderful.
