Unmaking Sense

Episode 4.44: The way infants learn to read as a paradigm for all positive learning-experiences.

The way infants learn to read by sitting on their parents’ laps and following books repeatedly in a safe environment until they can do read for themselves is a paradigm for the way all the learning should occur. By contrast for many of us the experience of learning is threatening, alienating and potentially damaging, and destroys any incentive we might have to become lifelong learners.

Episode 4.43: The problems we have in experiencing the new, the challenging on first acquaintance.

Why do we so often reject new experiences or the experience of something new especially in circumstances where the same thing that we reject comes subsequently to be accepted and regarded as a fundamental breakthrough in human understanding?

Episode 4.42: Appreciating the meaning of present experiences is not something we can do instantly.

We need to learn how to extract as much of the meaning from every present experience as possible and failing to practice the skills required to do that means that we will not be able to do so in the future no matter how hard we may wish or try to do so.

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.