A reader remarks that young people circa 2008 seem to expect to be entertained at school rather than educated.  Have technological innovations such as the Internet helped or harmed the education system, the reader asks.

Matt responds:

I am blessed with an almost complete ignorance of today’s sophisticated communication systems.  If it doesn’t have a knob that turns it on and off, I can’t do it, and I don’t have time to have somebody come in and teach me.  My wife is the computer person.  Once in awhile we have someone try to tutor me on it, and I get lost once they get two minutes into the presentation—probably because I really don’t give a damn about it.  At least that’s my excuse, and I’ll stick by it.

I do believe in the old adage of the computer, though:  shit in, shit out.  Whatever you put in, it’s going to put out to you.  It’s like a big fog horn:  You blow the air in, it blows the same air out.  It has no mind of its own.  Seems to me that’s the atmosphere we live in.  Want an answer to something?  Ask Google, and it will spit out more facts than we ever wanted to know. But if we believe that we are the seat of billions of years of undiscovered knowledge within ourselves, I don’t think that by pressing buttons on a computer keypad or our own mouth or ear or belly button, the answers are going to come flying out.  Those answers are going to come out of thought and meditation and really giving a damn about the great questions of life.  If we simply ask the machine, it’s always going to spit out the same thing.  It’s not going to take into account the thousands of years of civilization that we’ve lived through.

I just saw that a tribe of Indians has been discovered that has never had any communication with the outside world.  I’m sure our machines that we carry around have no way of probing their thoughts.  In our own programs, we have just started the concept of art museums for blind people, where they can come and see paintings with their hands.  What blind people experience and see is completely different from what we experience and see.  I look on that as very exciting and look foward to the time when there are major centers around the world where blind people can experience paintings and great works of art through the senses that they live with every day—and then discuss their ideas about the artwork with the people who experience it by seeing it with our eyes.  This can allow all of us to better appreciate the whole experience because it’s looked on in a different way.  There can be a conversation between two ways of seeing.

When it comes to education, how do we formalize that very complex, very nuanced process into some sort of pabulum that we can spoon-feed into people?  It’s going to take a real examination of how we teach, how we learn, what is important, and what isn’t.  Are we looking to clone ourselves, or are we looking for a population who can think on their own, know what the norms are, accept or add to or subtract from them, challenge them, love them, hate them...

Asking me to talk about education is akin to asking the goat to take care of the cabbage patch.  I went through all the outward manifestations, sitting in classrooms for years, listening, understanding what I wanted to, dismissing what I didn’t, failing most tests because probably I didn’t give a damn about what they were talking about.  Or maybe I was just too stupid to understand it. There are millions of very dedicated teachers who go to class every day trying to make this world a better place, and in most cases succeeding.  I just don’t know if the people who make the tools for them to use, have really scratched the surface of how we can present to the world an educated individual who also has room for acceptance of other realities.

One thing I do question is the complete conformism of most knowledge.  2 and 2 is always 4.  B always comes after A.  But when it comes to more complex issues, is there more than one answer, and does our education system allow for that discrepancy?  I do in my own life, but I have had decades of self-criticism and arguments within my own psyche to come to that conclusion.  It has made my life much more interesting, but it makes it more challenging also, because you have to take responsibility for yourself, your ideas, your culture, and how you look at the world.  You have to adopt the attitude that there’s no one to blame except yourself.

How do we get there?  I have no idea, but I’m sure there are people on this planet who have some of the answers, and I have taken up the idea of the New Los Alamos to begin the long process of finding those people and bringing them together under the mantra of peace.  One of the great arms of that is:  How do we create an educational system that allows for the things that can bring this world to a more peaceful place?  Whatever the answers are, I believe they will challenge some—if not most—of our cultural feelings.  It’s a great adventure to challenge and ponder as we look for those new directions.

Thanks for your comments,
Matt