I think your right, but it’s not that we have to put fun into learning. It is as you alluded. Schooling has taken the fun out of learning. I’ve always believed that fun is the natural companion to learning.

There are a number of indicators in your post that shake my interest:

– shift from mechanistic to systematic,

– collaborating nodes of meta-learning.

These attributes precisely describe a complexity system – its dynamic nature with no position of equilibrium, systematic and adaptive rather than mechanical, etc.

The key main qualities of a complexity system are ability to transform, self-transforming, that is adaptive – and the synergy from the activity between and within its individual components, that is emergent.

The study of complexity is relatively new. Communities of practice are what came to mind when I read what you said of the skills of larger groups of people and learning with others.

I’ve déjà vu about all this. I’ve the strong impression that people working together in this way has been visited before in the history of human development, perhaps hundreds or thousands of years ago, when ‘community’ was essential for human survival.

An analogy to the way we have worked and learned in the past is the development of the nuclear family – insular, dependent on self-sufficiency.

Somehow I feel that ‘coming of age’ will embrace so much of this not-new way of growing, of learning, of working together. It may even mean the disappearance, from western civilisation, of the nuclear family as we know it today.

Catchya later
from Middle-earth