Define self-renewal. Explain Gardner’s conceptualization of self-renewal.
Gardner’s Conceptualization of Self-Renewal
In his book, “Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society,” Gardner (1963/1981) defined standards concerning the self-renewing person. His clarification showed a representation of the perfect traits of people intensely keen on the procedure of lifelong learning.
The self-renewing individual has built a genuine “framework or system inside which continuous development, renewal, and rebirth can happen” (p. 5). To explain this structure, Gardner represents a balanced ecological framework where, within a similar framework, a few things are being conceived. In contrast, others prosper and are still dying of this (p. 5). Equal representation is utilized as a part of The Ecology of School Renewal (Goodlad, 1987).
The thought is the same as the three elements of teacher education given by Schlechty and Whitford (1983, p. 77)
- I’m going to talk about “Self-Renewal.” One of your most fundamental tasks is renewing the organizations you serve. But to help you think about others is not my mission. I want to help you think about yourselves.
- I take that mission very seriously, and I’ve written out what I have to say because I want every sentence to hit its target. I know a lot about the kind of work you do and how demanding it is. But I’m not going to talk about the unique problems of your type of career; I’m going to talk about some fundamental issues of the life cycle that will surely hit you if you’re not ready for them.
- I once wrote a book called “Self-Renewal,” which deals with the decay and renewal of societies, organizations, and individuals. I explored the question of why civilizations die and how they sometimes renew themselves and the puzzle of why some men and women go to seed while others remain vital all of their lives. It’s the latter question that I shall deal with at this time. I know that you, as an individual, are not going to seed. But the person seated on your right may be in somewhat danger.
- Not long ago, I read a splendid article on barnacles. I don’t want to give the wrong impression of the focus of my reading interests. Sometimes days go by without my reading about barnacles, much less remembering what I read. But this article had a remarkable opening paragraph. “The barnacle,” the author explained, “is confronted with an existential decision about where it will live. Once it decides.. . it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock..” End of quote. For a good many of us, it comes to that.
- We’ve all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions, who seem to run out of steam in mid-career.
- One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with more challenging problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Maybe they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim. You’ve known such people — feeling defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line, they forgot what they were running for somewhere along the line.
- I’m not talking about people who fail to get to the top in achievement. We can’t all get to the top; that isn’t the point of life anyway. I’m talking about people who — no matter how busy seem to stop learning or growing. Many of them are just going through the motions. I don’t deride that. Life is hard. To keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage. But I worry about men and women functioning far below the level of their potential.
- We have to face that most men and women in the world of work are more stable than they know and more bored than they would care to admit. Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations. Someone said to me the other day, “How can I be so bored when I’m so busy?” And I said, “Let me count the ways.” Logan Pearsall Smith said that boredom could rise to the level of a mystical experience, and if that’s true, I know some very busy middle-level executives who are among the great mystics of all time.
- We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, and imprisonment by our comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people you know, good people even younger than yourselves, are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits? A famous French writer said, “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.” I could without any trouble name half of a dozen national figures resident in Washington, D.C., whom you would recognize and could tell you roughly the year their clock stopped. I won’t do it because I still have to deal with them periodically.
- I’ve watched a lot of mid-career people. Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I’ve concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. Many are dearly troubled by self-assessments of mid-career.
If we are conscious of the danger of going to seed, we can resort to countervailing measures at almost any age. You don’t need to run down like an unwound clock. And if your watch is developed, you can wind it up again. You can stay alive in every word until you fail physically. I know some pretty successful people who feel that life has trapped them and that that isn’t possible for them. But they don’t know that. Life takes unexpected turns.
There’s a myth that learning is for young people. But the proverb says, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” The middle years are great, great learning years. I took a new job after my 77th birthday, and I’m still learning.
What is it trying to teach me?
When you hit a spell of trouble, ask, “What is it trying to teach me?” The lessons aren’t always happy ones, but they keep coming. It isn’t a bad idea to pause occasionally for an inward look. By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.
We learn from our jobs, our friends, and our families. We know by accepting life’s commitments and playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the parts we would have chosen). We learn by growing older, suffering, loving, bearing with the things we can’t change, and taking risks.
Of course, failures are a part of the story too. Everyone fails. Joe Louis said, “Everyone has to figure out to get beat sometimes.” The question is, don’t you fail but did you pick yourself up and move ahead? And there is another little question: ‘Did you collaborate in defeat?” A lot of people do. Learn not to.
Life is an endless unfolding and, if we wish it to be, a continuous process of self-discovery, a continuous and unpredictable dialogue between our potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities, I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one’s capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.
Perhaps you imagine that you have fully explored those potentialities at age 35 or 45, or even 33. Don’t kid yourself!
You must understand that the capacities you develop to the full come out as the result of an interplay between you and life’s challenges –and the challenges keep changing. Life pulls things out of you.
There’s something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have more energy resources than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, and more to give than you have ever given.
You know about some of the gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you believe you have unknown skills and possibilities? It’s true. We are just beginning to recognize how even those who have had every advantage and opportunity unconsciously put a ceiling on their growth, underestimate their potentialities, or hide from the development risk.
Now I’ve discussed renewal at some length, but it isn’t possible to talk about revival without touching on motivation. The world is moved by highly motivated people, enthusiasts, and men and women who want something or believe very much. Someone defined horse sense as the good judgment horses have that prevents them from betting on people. But we have to bet on people, and I place my bets more often on high motivation than on any other quality except judgment. No perfection of techniques will substitute for the lift of spirit and high performance that comes from strong motivation.
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