Schooling
It’s easy to criticize anything. I will criticize Education here. Specifically schools. I guess if I have to teach someone anything of substance, I would teach them ‘how to use your brain’.
Not some dead knowledge.
You may say we shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel. I have a problem with that. So many fellows have invented so many wheels before me and I have so many of them to turn around.
I understand you need ‘content’ to exercise your brain. And we have flavors to chew on. But our schools only do that. They don’t tell you how to use your brain. They make you get deep into the ‘content’ part and miss the ‘connection’ part.
For example, if they teach Newton’s gravitation, they don’t make you think freely about the force that pulls you down to the ground. The one that makes you walk, run, drive around, see the world and people the way you are seeing now and in turn the way you think. The enormity of this is lost in harping on some cryptic formula.
I am not allowed to wonder at this phenomenon that engulfs me, my world, my thoughts, whatever I consider as me, is in fact, it.
That automatically makes me know ‘who I am’. I am not any of this as I see or being identified by others. I am just a momentary flicker in this enormity, constructed out of what others saw me as and constantly reminded me of.
When I realize this, I feel relieved. If we realize this, our Education won’t be to cross over some books written by folks who saw the world in a certain way. That’s just a tiny vision of this enormity. Worse is when we turn all of this into just a way to fill our stomach when we are hungry.
Now the idea of using the brain or teaching how to use your brain shouldn’t be the way we force the heads of young kids down to stare at pages on a desk that gives a keyhole aspect of what we are in. The more we do that we end up building a fake world, a world that builds on lies piled on each other. And our Education perfectly helps in this.
Not in waking up sleeping people.
When you learn to see the world without prior notions, you wouldn’t be afraid of it. All the stuff we constantly plant in our heads, all those bits and bytes haunt you, scare you and make you drag your life without being able to appreciate the beauty around.
Plant a tree not because you learnt that it will save the planet but because it is just beautiful to have one near you.
Learning to appreciate beauty, the orderliness of this universe we have evolved to perceive is a fundamental shift in the way we look at this world. When you divert your brain to things that are mind numbing mumbo jumbo, the dead past, you create a very difficult and fearful world to live in.
