Etch-A-Sketchit

Posted by admin on January 16, 2009; This entry is filed under Thinkers.
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Etchit
teadrinker @ flickr

“It’s not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.” – Edwin Land

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

“The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those that cannot learn, unlearn, relearn.” – Alvin Toffler


It seems like many of the biggest challenges facing us have to do with what we know. Learning, it appears, can be bad for us. Unless of course, we’re able to reflect, look around, and retool our mindspace so that it reflects what’s happening in our meatspace.
There’s a lot we need to unlearn. Unfortunately, schools are doing little to help flip the Etch-A-Sketch. For many of us, including myself I’m sure, it sorely needs a vigorous shaking.We read about humanity’s challenges daily. Etched into our minds is the idea of efficiency being too expensive  (It’s actually cheaper to save energy and materials than to produce more.) The notion of efficiency takes backseat to expanding the economy. (Without the consideration that we live on a finite planet.) We know that nuclear energy is the future–the path to a healthy economy–if not healthy people. Governments understand that war is good for getting society’s needs met. (Robert Fisk reminds us that it’s the total failure of the human spirit.) We send our best to war colleges so that they’ll know how to better fight wars. We build economic systems believing that the biosphere that envelops it has nothing to do with its success. We seem to know how to educate, having been to school ourselves. We know homework is useful. How can something so distasteful not be? Having competed throughout our school years for everything from spelling a word to getting into college, we know, beyond a doubt, that it brings out the best in us.

Clay Shirky, in an interview, observes:

The advantage they [his students] have over me is that they don’t have to unlearn anything. They don’t have to unlearn the idea that a card catalog is a helpful thing to have. That you need a librarian to find things. That you have to figure out where you’re looking before you decide what you’re looking for. None of those things are true anymore. And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist.

We seem averse to change. We don’t like abandoning what’s worked in the past. We don’t like being told that what we’ve worked so hard to learn is now useless–or worse, harmful. This only makes sense.

So, I wonder, how do we help the learned among us become usefully ignorant? How do we make schools places of unlearning?

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  • thanks !! very helpful post!
  • Gents: Thanks for the comments.
    Ken: I agree, older (wiser) people have a lot of valuable learning under their belts. It cannot be discounted. The trick seems to be how to manage it so that it does not come into conflict with new realities. How to do this, I don't know very well. I think schools can help by not being transmitters of "dead ideas".

    Charlie: Agreed. One of the most wonderful things about being around children, especially those young enough to not have the curiosity squashed out of them yet, is to witness their amazement as they experience something for the first time. That newness that brings amazement is sheer joy to watch--and experience.
  • @ Bill
    An interesting post... very well said. Unlearning bad habits and not supplementing previous knowledge as what we know about the world increases is a sad state of affairs. I like shaking the tree of tradition from time to time. The branches that need pruning fall away. I think truth is out there and it can be ultimately known in an objective sense. Jesus may have had it right when he encouraged us to be like children They never stop asking that lovely question "why?".
  • Kia ora Bill.

    An adage says that the biggest barrier to learning something is the belief that you have already learnt it. 'Old' people have lots to offer. The tragedy is struck when they cannot recognise what they have to unlearn and learn anew.

    The human brain starts along a path where it requires unlearning from the moment of birth. Learning is brought about through perception. If the perceptions are awry it may not really make any difference to the life of the individual. But there are instances where awry perceptions make a real difference, resulting in a need for unlearning. Just peruse the field of sex education, for instance, and consider the misonceptions (as it were) held by young teenagers about contraception.

    I think there is a lot of hype about so-called 20th century skills, and there's been a lot discussed on this aspect recently.

    We spend too much time navel gazing, us oldies. We forget that there is a lot that's been learnt that does not have to be unlearnt.

    It's a matter of discernment.

    Catchya later
    from Middle-earth
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