Why can't we organize learning in schools more like life itself? As a panelist at SXSW.edu said last week, "school is not merely preparation for life, it is life."

Life: ambiguous, nuanced, a warm complexity requiring our utmost attention, an infinite set of pieces that comes without an instruction manual...shouldn't we help our young learners (and ourselves) build their own understanding and draw their own maps, rather than evaluate their progress along pathways we have determined for them?

Chris Ware inspires me in this regard. I imagine a class -- the term seems inadequate -- based on his Building Stories, one of the great cartoonists (and frequent New Yorker cover artist), has created a world that resembles the one we live in far more than the one too often presented in K-12 settings.

Building Stories is a boxed set containing 14 items -- comic strips, booklets, posters -- depicting life in a Chicago apartment building. The perspectives vary, the story is interleaved and looping, there is no pre-assigned order, each reader assembles her or his own narrative -- a DIY collage, solving for a random unknown.

As Ware says: "When you meet people, you don't get their capsule biography. You piece together a person through anecdotes, gestures, any number of things." (For more insights, see this interview.)

Isn't that real learning, of the most relevance to life as we live it?

Daniel Rabuzzi is the Executive Director of Mouse.