Unmaking Sense

Episode 4.46: Two ways we are dissuaded from living the present or try to stop others from doing so.

Parents often become concerned when their children become obsessed with some particular activity and misguidedly attempt to prevent them from continuing to do it. Well-meaning friends and others sometimes try to prevent us from doing what we think best to do right now because they don’t understand why we are doing it or the point of doing it, because it doesn’t make sense within their world. We should resist both these temptations to prevent one another from living the present to the limits of our ability.

Episode 4.45: Backing off the present makes its imperfections worse. We should engage with it more.

There is no suggestion in what I’m saying that the present needs to be perfect before we can live in it. On the contrary, the present is always imperfect but backing away from it only makes it more so. We would be surprised how much more we could learn and derive from the present - how much more we would enjoy it - if we engaged with it more wholeheartedly and fully.

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.