Unmaking Sense

As we grow older we either play less or we take play more seriously. We need to rediscover play and experiment as imaginative rebelliousness, the kinds of things that create newness and help us break out of suffocating systems defined by the past.

All human systems of thought are ultimately circular, and adopt strategies that immunise them from attack. How then do we break out of them, how do we escape the self-authenticating power of systems that entrap us? By experimentation, through play, and by taking risks.

Something akin to Hegel’s view was adopted enthusiastically to supply the industrial revolution with a literate, numerate workforce. Knowing mattered more than being; it mattered so much to inculcate knowledge and skills that it did not matter much if the body and spirit were broken in the process.

Hegel on crushing individuality and the contrast with personalised learning delivered by coaches whose skills are matched to the needs and interests of each pupil.

IQ tests, Gifted & Talented programmes, Prize Givings and the other paraphernalia of a self-congratulatory education system’s determination only to measure what it is set up to produce and to cast aside those who cannot demonstrate their gifts when assessed on such narrow scales. To take responsibility for our own education someone has to help us to get started, to reach the stage of self-understanding needed before we can undertake such a demanding exercise.

Education first defines what is to count as success and then blames those who cannot meet those criteria for their failure to do so. This is scapegoating: blaming innocents for the failures of the system as a whole.

Contemplative attitudes that point the finger because they deny that we are all involved. Neurath’s ship that must be repaired while under way because there is no island, no solid ground to beach it while we make repairs.

Localising blame on individuals, groups, tribes, races, nations is a form of scapegoating designed to absolve ourselves from responsibility for how the world is.

Indeterminateness of ends by a plurality of means deployed by intelligent experimentation and play leads to education in which socially embedded individuals can achieve trivalent happiness.

We denigrate play and experiment to our educational cost and loss. Learning is easier and more efficient when we enjoy it. Play is enjoyable. Teaching style needs to change as much as syllabus content for effective enjoyable learning.