Unmaking Sense

Episode 4.41: A serious objection to the depiction of education given in recent episodes discussed.

Is it still true that we see children as “monsters”? The short answer is that it very much depends on which society we live in and which part of that society each child is born into. Even the most enlightened systems still see themselves as “preparing children for the future”, and need instead to enable young people to appreciate the present by encourage living the present and living our questions.

Episode 4.40: The Illusion of Necessary Drudgery.

Education convinces itself that children are monsters and learning needs to be hard and unpleasant, then invents systems that guarantee those assumptions become true. But learning that is not enjoyable only arises only from teaching that makes no effort to make it enjoyable, and is thus another example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By adjusting teaching and learning to match the stage of development and style of each pupil, education can significantly reduce the incidence of boring and tedious learning.

Episode 4.39: The self-reinforcing deceptions that education uses to justify defective strategies.

Education’s belief that its job is to use the present to prepare young people for the future gives rise to an armoury of self-reinforcing but self-defeating strategies that guarantee its failure. Inestimable human unhappiness flows from this mistaken premise. The conjuring-trick has been done right at the very beginning, and it involved the move we thought most innocent.

Episode 4.38: The Great Educational Deception.

The notion that the purpose of education is to use the present to prepare for the future is the most disastrous mistake imaginable. It means, because we never learned to appreciate the present, that we will be similarly dissatisfied by the future. We need to reverse this polarity and treat education as having as its primary responsibility to enable children to extract as much of the meaning of every present experience as they can as the only preparation for the future but in the end really amounts do anything.

Episode 4.37: More ways to escape from the straitjacket of our self-image.

“Living our questions” (Rilke) is one part of “following our instincts”, trusting that the things our nonconscious brains suggest we should be interested in, even - perhaps especially - when we don’t know why, are things that will eventually play some part in our lives. They are enjoyable now, and fruitful later.

Episode 4.36: How to avoid being enslaved by self-images from our past.

We all tend subconsciously to engineer our own futures in accordance with the image of ourselves that we have from the past. A lot of that image is created by our experiences with other people and a lot of it is often thought to be unchangeable. By implementing the Dewey Principle the Rilke Principle and the Jesus Principle that we should not engineer our future subconsciously in everything that we do by taking too much thought for tomorrow, by allowing emergence a chance to take its course, we may find that we can become someone we never imagined that we could ever become, and fulfil ourselves in ways that we never imagined we would ever achieve.

Episode 4.35: If we get the basics right, all else will follow as consciousness does evolution.

If consciousness emerges from the natural processes of evolution and within the non-conscious processes that feed it, then why don’t we just make sure that we get the fundamental principles governing our education and nurture right and leave the emergence to take its own course? If we were to do that, and particularly if we were to learn to Live the Present, Live our Questions, and resist the temptation to second-guess the kinds of lives we could best lead, the world might be a better place and our lives better lives.

Episode 4.34: The emergence of consciousness is an automatic consequence of evolutionary biology.

People often seem to think that consciousness is so remarkable that it requires some additional explanation over and above the evolution of the physiology and neurophysiology upon which supervenes. It doesn’t. Consciousness emerges automatically and the non-conscious processes that feed it from having a particular kind of body-with-a-brain. And that’s all there is to it.

Episode 4.33: Do collective nouns encourage discrimination and prejudice?

Whenever we use a collective noun like “the French“ we are lumping together tens of millions of people into a single group as if they have shared characteristics. This is prima facie discriminatory and we should stop doing it if we really care about racism because only when we individualise our references can they be justifiable.

Episode 4.32: Conservatism of all kinds insists on backwards compatibility, even to ancient texts.

Any prevailing culture holds the whip hand over anything that is new by dictating what is to be regarded as “normal”. It is therefore in a position to suppress anything new that appears to be abnormal in the name of backwards compatibility. Extreme examples insist that we continue to live in deference to texts, creeds, writings, “scriptures” that are thousands of years old and systems of belief and practice that have evolved from them. Anything new threatens these ideological monopolies and those with vested interests in them. Attitudes to the status of women, LGBT and transgender issues are coloured by this reverence for the past and the assumption that humankind has lost its Paradise rather than being on a journey that works towards, defines and creates it by becoming ever more tolerant and inclusive and so more diverse.