Animal Collective’s record “Marriweather Post Pavillion”  is arguably one of the top albums of 2009 (listen here). According to Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson:

With their constantly evolving sonic identity, in-your-face vocal mannerisms, and open-ended ideas about what their music might “mean,” Animal Collective seem designed to inspire obsessive fans and vociferous detractors in equal measure.Merriweather Post Pavilion, their latest full-length, has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak. No one who’s been looking forward to it should be disappointed. Everything that’s defined the band to this point– all those strands winding through their hugely diverse catalog– is refined and amplified here.

So, what is it about them as individuals that makes their work so effective? What allows them to create music that has a sense of ‘strands winding through their hugely diverse catalogue’? Let’s briefly consider one aspect of their biography:

In parallel with his environmental policy and marine biology studies, Weitz hosted a noise show at WKCR, Columbia’s college radio station. On weekends, he and Portner borrowed Avantgarde music records and listened to them all night at Weitz’ dorm room which rapidly broadened their musical horizon

In other words, it seems that it was not primarily their formal music education that enabled their musical creativity. While they needed musical knowledge/ training to be able to integrate what they learned, it seems that the learning that really enabled their unique sound took place in a more fluid/ random environment. To put it another way, their formal education was necessary but not sufficient to the development of their unique music stylings.

If this is indeed the case, it seems to suggest that there is in fact something emergent about the way our learning takes place in our stories. But do our university systems allow for this type of natural emergence? Do the carefully crafted educational paths we prepare for our selves/ children/ students (going from prepatory school, to top university, to top graduate programs, etc) really  facilitate this type of development?

In the following article, Louis Menand suggests that there is something antiquated about our educational systems with their primary focus on knowledge transfer. It is an approach which I would argue crowds out the potential fluid nature of learning, while simultaneously failing to teach the creativity necessary to solve the more interesting social problems, and/or to make the most interesting music:

The American university is a product of the nineteenth century, and it has changed very little structurally since the time of the First World War. It has changed in many other ways–demographically, intellectually, financially, technologically and in terms of its missions, its stakeholders, and its scale–and these changes have affected the substance of teaching and research.

But the system is still a late nineteenth-century system, put into place for late nineteenth-century reasons. The extraordinary series of transformations of higher education after 1945 have strained it. To the extent that that system still determines the possibilities for producing and disseminating knowledge, trying to reform the contemporary university is like trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter, or like riding a horse to the mall.

If there is something emergent about the ways our minds learn, something non-linear about the development of authenticity in our own stylings (music or otherwise), might it be true that we don’t become true selves and unique in style through following a predefined path. Rather, might it not be possible that we could best develop authenticity in styling (music or otherwise) by following paths, in fits and starts, towards some gradually (but consistently) emerging personal mission.

So can this be built into educational systems, and specifically into classes that are to teach something about the creative/ entrepreneurial process? What if the best way to teach entrepreneruship is not the way we have tended to organize such courses (example here) but rather by providing a space to minimally guide the non-linear emergent learning situations, while also providing the theory and tools to harness such visions into successful businesses (or albums, or art pieces). It is the challenge of finding the right balance between chaos and structure.