"Our attitudes toward consumption and material goods and our apparent lack of interest in curbing waste at a time when our resources are running out is clearly insane"
Edward T Hall, Beyond Culture, 1976.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Posted with Blogsy
What is education for?
Learning is an innate human drive - absolutely necessary for the survival of an individual, and our culture, and the human species.
But Westerners assume that our reality is THE reality from a superior system of thought. This then gives us the right to free others with inferior thought from their ignorance and make them more like us.
Thus we try to solve problems created by this stance with the very thinking that is the cause.
Conventional science has become dogma.
Isn't it a worry that much of our education stifles the learning we need to improve the habitat and society we depend upon? We've bureaucratised beyond the true purpose. Mass education shoehorns people into the system instead of serving their interests as citizens. Where is the service ethic? Are we clear about the major problems that universities are capable of solving?
Professors are inefficient when their work is overly structured - teaching mostly educates professors!
Timetabling bears no known relation to what is necessary for a flourishing society.
Participation is necessary for productivity, contentment, social conscience, and responsibility of citizens. Or we just spend lots of scarce resources on conformance to tests of knowledge transmission.
Bigness and growth is a pernicious - largely unrecognised - pervasive disease, and works against all we know about what it takes to produce better citizens. Factory education isn't the right way to organise learning.
To build resilience in the way we respond to the sustainability of society imperative, we need a transformation in culture, not more of the same.
Eco-consciousness and true democracy, not conservatism and reductive science.
Lester Milbrath urged us to "learn our way out" of the crisis. Marshall McLuhan wanted to "escape into understanding". Are we ready and capable and willing?
Are we reflecting on the way we look at things, how we behave politically, how we make decisions, how we prioritise, how we organise our lives, and how we think? That is the important impetus for learning.
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