again its the NPR radiohour with a great podcast on how we learn and what impact the learning environments we grow up in have on our adult lives and habits. let's try to incorporate these thoughts into our lives, into our parenting!
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The director Erwin Wagenhofer released his documentary "Alphabet" in 2013. This movie is of particular interest for someone who thinks that educational bodies turn unique raw diamonds into the same sort of round and boring marbles, ready to roll into the direction a government or the consumer world mandates them to do. I have picked out a few quotes that are worthwhile lingering about; I moreover wholeheartedly recommend to watch this film.
Arno Stern, a Jewish pedagog, who escaped the Nazi regime and settled in France to found an institution that studies children's learning behavior in a random painting exercise says: people say that children shall be serious about life. I say children shall be serious about play. Dance, music, painting shall be their main occupation. A child can do what is wants to do and it wants to do nothing else than it can do. Stern says that children nowadays suffer from information overload. They execute what adults expect them to do. The current educational system is according to Stern modeled for the industrial age: it shall produce a majority of blue collar and a minority of white collar workers. That’s an obsolete systemic approach. Gerald Hueter, a German neurobiologist, picks up a thought that I had myself many years ago, when I heard how compulsory schooling was introduced by empress Maria Theresia in the Austrian Hungarian monarchy. He too claims that educational bodies are a result of a transgenerational experience. When compulsory schooling was installed, governments wanted schools to generate people fit for military and economy, therefore schools turned into corrective institutions. Neurobiologically, man cannot be forced to study, he can only be educated if he himself wants to. The art of education consists therefore in inviting not forcing students to learn. A study that was carried out on “divergent thinking”, the competence considered to be at the core of creativity, tested1500 people of all ages. It found that 98% of 3-5 year old have this competence, but only 32% of 8-10 year old. This ratio drops even lower for 13-15 year adolescents (10%) and reaches a bottom for adults older than 25 (2%). The conclusion is crystal clear: in each one of us there is a genius. But: this competence deteriorates with increasing socialization, in particular schooling. I can say that I managed to do so, in spite of social conditioning. This website will over time feature quite a few sub-pages. The first on literature is more or less completed and contains recommendations about books that are worthwhile reading. in particular the non-fiction works aren't part of any curriculum and therefore earlier described dark matter. More sub-pages are to follow on topics like religion, nutrition, psychology, economics, philosophy, etc.
There is one thing that always baffled me: how to get all these interest under control? how to shape of such a diverse pool of interests one or a few solid competences? There are not many of these polyglot, cosmopolitan and universally educated scholars left on our planet. Our society tells us that we have moved beyond the need of generalists. We need specialists in hydro engineering or labor law. We run through similar curricula, all of us raw diamonds at the start, round marbles at the end. Such stunning characters like Baruch Spinoza, who was both a rationalist philosopher and an optical scientist-craftsman, Hildegard von Bingen, who was ventured into medical, moral, religious and musical study fields or Leonardo Da Vinci, who covered a wide spectrum of professions have always been rare exceptions. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". Even if we don't accomplish what those polymaths did, we should learn from their mindset and turn curiosity and imagination into the paramount message for our offspring. When I read William James' "The Variety of Religious Experiences" I also understood at once, why people before the invention of tv, before the introduction of IT technologies, before the information revolution, were able to spend so much time on their studies: there was nothing else to do for those who did not have to bear the yoke of physical work of farmers or servants. Days, long evenings and even nights were spent reading, thinking and writing. Our lives have changes so tremendously during the last 100 years; much more than during the 1000 years before that. The information revolution is a two bladed sword. It enables me to write this essay and do quick online research for it. But it also makes me waste hours and hours on social platforms. Nowadays the challenge is more than ever, to be in touch with one inner self in order to safely navigate through the 24/7 available information on all and everything. Mankind's knowledge currently doubles every two years or so. But man's knowledge is halved every generation, it seems. |
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