This past May, we had a couple of kids obtain college degrees. Our two other kids came into town to help celebrate so Cathy and I decided to host an open house for family, friends, and neighbors. It was delightful to see so many of our children’s friends, now young adults making their way. A particularly enjoyable surprise was when Josh and Ryan - former neighbor kids who had moved away when they were still quite young - showed up at the door. Their mother came as well (separately), and we had a wonderful time laughing about old times and catching up on the many happenings in the years since. Later in the afternoon as the party was beginning to wind down, these two young men as well as our four kids disappeared for more than an hour. They had ventured out as they had so many times before to visit the Zucchini Club.
The Zucchini Club was a small, shaded enclave located underneath some bushes in the backyard of our neighbors, Leslee and Mike. I’m not exactly sure of its origins, but I believe the club was formed by Leslee and Mike’s two children along with a few other neighbor kids. Leslee served as the informal den mother, and as her kids began aging out, she welcomed other younger kids from the neighborhood in. This second cohort included my kids. However, once Josh, Ryan, and their sister Allie moved away and the neighborhood kids continued to age, the club slowly dissolved.
At the time of its demise, my oldest was probably 8 and my youngest 3. Twenty years have passed, yet my kids felt drawn to the site and to a long visit with Leslee and Mike. What made the Zucchini Club so special? Leslee had created a welcoming space that still felt like an adventure. When they were there, our kids were transported from our neighborhood on 59th Street in Omaha Nebraska to a place with vastly different possibilities.
We should all be so lucky to have such a place. Mine growing up was beside a tiny bridge halfway up the gravel lane that connected my grandparent’s farmhouse to the county road in Hartington Nebraska. I visited the farmstead as an adult and found the bridge to be much, much closer to the house than my six-year-old self remembers it, and my parents could easily see us kids from the window and tend to rising needs at a moment’s notice. Still, it felt just beyond the boundary of safety though I also recognized safety to be just a step or two away.
It feels to me that we have slowly been losing such places of blissful wonderment - in life and in our educational system. In previous times, we placed a premium on the pursuit of knowing. Embedded within the basics of English, Math, and History, were curiosities waiting to pique the varying interests of individuals. Wonderment was inherent in the system as recently acquired knowledge produced new questions for the learner to pursue. No matter how far you ventured, there was always something left beyond the horizon.
It was this thirst for knowledge that eventually spawned the data models and algorithms that produced search engines like Google and, more recently, the large language models used in artificial intelligence. This places our traditional models of knowledge immediately at our fingertips, just a few clicks or a voice command away. Thus, gathering information is now so simple and convenient that “knowing” has far less utility. While our educational systems have been struggling to discern what exactly this means for teaching and learning, students have been perfecting transactional efficiencies that enable them to numbingly sleepwalk through aspects of their education. Good bye wonderment.
This isn’t meant to suggest that schools are doing a poor job or that today’s kids are lazier than those of previous generations. This is more a byproduct of circumstances and timing. As I’ve written previously, I believe we have moved out of a “knowledge age” and are now in the nascent years of an “understanding age" and it’s simply going to take some time to sort out the norms and values associated with this shift. One thing, however, seems clear (at least to me) - people are far less certain of things than they used to be, and this makes them really uncomfortable.
In previous times, a person could feel relatively confident in what they learned from parents, teachers, mentors, therapists, and trusted peers, and they would conduct their lives accordingly. Occasionally, they would butt up against something in life that would challenge their system of thinking, and most of the time people would assimilate this new found knowledge into their mental models, feeling a sense of growth. Today, data, “facts”, propaganda, news, and opinion, are one big jumbled mess. Even when facts are generally agreed upon, vastly divergent narratives are spun to meet varying agendas.
The result? Doubt creeps in. We know more information but we understand things less. We feel more vulnerable. Things feel more dangerous. We take fewer risks. We’re less open. We seek validation of “our way” of thinking. In this way, confirmation bias isn’t something that is acting upon us, but rather something we actively pursue. This isn’t healthy, but it’s the only way that people can feel as though they are in control. Simply put, we’re in a bad place.
I’m a glass half-full kind of guy, so I believe we will reach a point where we collectively realize that this way of proceeding is neither desirable nor sustainable, and that the best way forward is to live in a state of tension between disciplined resolve and ambiguity.
This won’t happen overnight nor will it happen without a collective effort to seek a better way forward. It will also require purposeful attention to our youth, incorporating new ways of teaching and learning alongside traditional methodologies that emphasize the building of skills that foster meaning-making out of ambiguity. The skills themselves are not new. Things like curiosity, analysis, dialogue, objectivity, and discernment have long been a part of the learning lexicon. What’s needed is a new way of speaking about them, recognizing where, how, and why they are valuable in our modern world, lesson planning around them, and providing intentional practice - all in a manner that is life-giving and hope-filled. Our Catholic schools provide fertile ground for such efforts. For our part, Arrupe Virtual is on a journey to develop new delivery models that will challenge and transform, and I look forward to sharing more about this in the months and years ahead.
Accepting a level of ambiguity isn’t a surrender to relativism, but rather a recognition that objective truth follows a straight path while we walk a winding road. In this way, each of us does NOT possess our own personal truth, but rather our own personal journey toward the truth - a truth which will never be fully understood. And when we recognize and accept this, we will be providing wonderment a small entry point back into our lives and perhaps, occasionally, some of our childhood sensibilities as well.
Long live the memory of the Zucchini Club.
CONTRIBUTOR: Jeff Hausman, AVLI President
vol 7 issue 1