Posts filed under 'Education'
So I was at Robarts today, walking through the stacks trying to track down some articles for the PhD student I work for. Usually when I’m walking around libraries I’m in awe of the sheer quantity of knowledge bound in books around me; but today another angle hit me. There is more specific information in that library than could ever be useful to anyone. …and are we really the better for having collected it?
I used to be of the opinion that ‘blogging’ was a frivilous congestion of a medium for information transfer, that could be much more productively used. Just millions of people spewing out whatever comes into their head in a day, often with little credability, or authority, wasting their own, and their readers’ time.
I’m beginning to wonder though: what does it mean to say that someone is an authority on a subject, or that their writing is credible? Generally speaking it means you should turn to an ‘expert’, a professor or a researcher. But I sit and listen to a professor of writing every week and all he really seems to be is pompous.
Today he said, “There’s something that fascinates me about the human mind.” So I looked up, thinking he might actually say something I was interested in hearing, and he continued, “its ability to get lost trying to capture the whole picture. The academic mind,” he went on, “is concerned, instead, with the minute tiny little detail that the human eye can’t see. When your papers are focused that small, that’s when professors will know you are someone who’s on track.”
On track toward what?! Toward publishing another 500 page book that over-analyses a minute aspect of the world, and that won’t ever change a bloody thing?
Somewhere along the way universities seem to have rendered themselves useless. Once a place for great thinkers to come together and analyse the world together, universities today are divided into tiny little sub-divisions with high walls inside which researchers are so busy staring into microscopic lenses they forget about the world outside. In fact, today, not only is the old idea of the Ivory Tower applicable, different faculties don’t even communicate ideas! I took an economics class last year on sustainable development that based it’s entire thesis on an obselete view of human psychology.
…there’s a reason that the human mind is so easily consumed with pursuing ‘the big picture’. Little pictures are irrelevant when examined alone.
I’m fortunate enough to be studying Cognitive Science, a discipline which has laboured over the last 3 or 4 decades to bring psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and neuroscientists back to the table to share ideas about what might make the human mind work. It’s fascinating work, if only because of how difficult it is proving to be to pull down the walls between the core disciplines to look for some real answers. I hope it is the beginning of a revolution that will sweep universities as a whole.
…in the meantime though, I’m starting to think this blogging is going to be a very powerful (and empowering) thing for people. In the end most human beings just need to communicate. It doesn’t so much matter if the information you read is credible necessarily, as long as it inspires you toward a way of life. Read what you will. Think what you will. Just don’t lose sight of the big picture.
November 1st, 2005
Something has just occured to me:
“Why the hell is the government even remotely involved in the education system?”
Education systems hold (and mold) citizens for between 14 and 18 years (allowing for 4 years of post-secondary). Clearly this is not something that should be affected by shortsighted politicians working only toward votes in the next election (a maximum of 4 years away in this country). Every time a new government comes in they mess around with a system that noone is happy with, shaking it at it’s roots, leaving teachers, principles, and academics interested in educational change powerless to have any longterm say over the process.
Never has it been more blatent to me that we are living in a system designed to help us feed it, rather than to turn us into real people.
Obviously education is a public service, and the government’s involvement is explained in this fact alone… …but it certainly explains why the system continues to take children, quenching awe and wonder, stifling spiritual questioning and producing little minions capable of responding to strict schedules (’saved by the bell’) and project deadlines…
If people passionate about true education ran the system, can you imagine what beautiful people it would produce? What natural talent would be cultivated in every student…what a powerful change that would have on the way we run our entire world. ..
….couldn’t have that could we…
October 2nd, 2005
Some thoughts from Paulo Freire on sectarianism vs. radicalization, and on the challenges the world proposes to those among us who hope to be radical…
“Sectarianism, fed by fanaticsm, is always castrating. Radicalization, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. Sectarianism mythicizes and thereby alienates; radicalization criticizes and thereby liberates.”
“The sectarian…blinded by irrationality does not (or cannot) perceive the dynamic of reality…[they consider] the future pre-established–a kind of inevitable fate, fortune or destiny. Starting from their false views of history they develop forms of action that negate freedom.
They suffer from an absence of doubt.”
“To admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labour, for the overcoming of alientation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny…”
“World and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction… If humankind produce social reality (which in the “inversion of the praxis” turns back upon them and conditions them), then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity. .. ”
“The more the people unveil the challenging reality which is to be the object of their transforming action, the more critically they enter that reality. In this way they are ‘conciously activating the subsequent development of their experiences.’ There would be no human action if there were no objective reality, no world to be the ‘not I’ of the person and to challenge them; just as there would be no human action if humankind were not a ‘project,’ if he or she were not able to transcend himself or herself, if one were not able to perceive reality and understand it in order to transform it.”
**The present-day western world was founded on ideals of freedom, but many today are confusing “freedom with the maintenance of the status quo”. Paulo Friere wrote about education as a tool for liberation, specifically to those in his own country of Brazil, and other South American countries. He challenged the oppressed to rise up, and acknowledge their own humanity, as well as the humanity of their oppressors. Although his works are deeply rooted in a particular historical context, they are relevant all around the world, where leaders construct societies in which citizens are encouraged to succumb to the “logic of the system”.
September 25th, 2005
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