Unmaking Sense

Episode 2.10: If education traps us inside a partially false world-view, how can we find a way out?

Our socio-economic system requires an education system that makes producer-consumers (“prosumers”), but what if that is a self-perpetuating vicious circle that benefits only a wealthy, powerful élite; and how can we change it?

Episode 2.09: Education shares the wisdom of the past; how can we avoid inheriting its mistakes?

If we avoid starting again, what can we do to avoid adopting the same mistaken assumptions as have brought about our contemporary challenges?

Episode 2.08: Unconscious Cognition; we need to educate our unconscious processes more effectively.

Giving more attention to educating our unconscious processes because they are more powerful and effective than our conscious processes.

Episode 2.07: Education is not so much about factual content as the skills we acquire to process it.

Factual content is less important than the transferable skills that we acquire that allow us to evaluate accuracy, purpose, trustworthiness, worthwhileness. Quizzes give the mistaken impression that learning facts is what matters rather than acquiring transferable skills.

Episode 2.06: Education as a pivot between the past and the future.

If the sense we have made of the world in the past needs changing to be suitable for the future, how we manage to convert one into the other is the central educational question.

Episode 2.05: Obsession with the past turns to stone and kills creativity, but imagination renews.

Shestov and the past that turns to stone like Medusa’s head, and how the new cannot be understood out of the old but requires new concepts and tools, even new language. George Steiner and uninvited, irrevocable guests.

Episode 2.04: How different cultures have made sense of the world will govern their regeneration.

Educational and political cultures tend to align, so creative free-thinking cultures will renew more easily than those in repressive, controlling states.

Episode 2.03: How can the way we make sense of the world regenerate itself?

The way we have made sense of the world has been the source of our difficulties so how can we solve them out of a starting-point defined in terms of that kind of sense?

Episode 2.02: The Difference between Education and Training.

Education is divergent; training is convergent. Education presents students with open choices; training prepares them for predetermined outcomes. The tensions between the two.

Episode 2.01: Unmaking Sense of Education. Introduction.

Education has to satisfy all kinds of stakeholders in addition to pupils and students, particularly parents, governments, cultures, each with different vested interests; this creates conflicts.