Today, we aren’t talking about the state of the institution that we call education. We are talking about the process and the path. Talking about the institution would devolve into a long and pointless rant, I feel.
First, let’s look at what we consider the active agent of education, the educator. The role of the educator is to present information and skills to those receiving education and training. As well as to draw out insights in the person that let that skill crystallize in their functional awareness, rather than remaining as a pointless abstraction. Sometimes the role of educator is better served by someone who has gone ahead of you on that path of experience. But is that absolutely necessary? And are all those, who are experienced in whatever it is, suitable guides?
Many experienced ones cannot present it at all. Many who do cannot teach. In today’s education, we hire those who can do math, or diagram sentences, but they are missing something. What is it?
They used to hire real life working scientists and authors to teach. They stopped that. Indeed. They are ill suited to teaching, but so are baby sitters.
For us in Hawaii, the practitioner is the best teacher. When the practitioner is on the path that they started on, but most professional teachers are not. For some people, math is part of their way of life. These make perfect teachers.
We go to the practitioners environment. That did not work in the USA education, because they put the practitioner in the school environment. Much depends on context. Something I am challenged in. But you miss large parts of what there is to experience by trying to teach it away from where it is practiced.
Teachers are also sometimes called pedagogy. It is from an old Latin term that originally described slaves kept as baby sitters and educators of the children of the nobility. There is a related term. Demagog. Someone who gains power by appealing to the attitudes fears and desires of the populace.
Greek term, guide of the ‘demos = people’. Pedagog = guide of ‘paideia = children’. Yes, exactly.
The path of education is not a going out and learning things. The path of education is a drawing out of yourself and others the experiences and actions that lead to progress and growth. The specialist is often either anti-social or neurotically social. Why is this?
They’re so absorbed in their specialty? They actually have very little education. They become fixated on occupying the role of their specialty as an escape or defense from the world around them. Are there any other reasons they struggle socially?
Originally in human culture, any talent had its roots in the values of the people. The spiritual guide was as important as the hunter and the warrior, and the leader was an elder who had the time and experience to bother with things like diplomacy and negotiation. But everyone’s role had a recognized place in their immediate community. Today, the specialist is a cog in a faceless machine. A brick in the wall. They have no education. They have programming.
We don’t want people getting “above themselves” or their station in life? In original human culture, there was no above or below. It was only much later with feudalism that above and below had much meaning.
Interesting to consider given how our society practically worships the specialist today. We love our cogs. And we hate them. We make very sure they know they are replaceable, and if they are called outside of their narrowly defined specialty, they risk financial ruin and serious loss of quality of life.
I’m thinking of professors in universities. Probably the majority are cogs, but there are some superstars. Indeed, though those superstars often tend to get sidelined, or they have so much in the way of resources and support it becomes dangerous for anyone to argue with them.
The cogs make the students feel like cogs too. Exactly, it’s contagious. Cogs breed cogs. Only minds bring education, which brings us to the renaissance. It was perhaps too short of a period in human history, really.
Is there such a thing as a master of anything? Yes. There is such a thing as a master. The Chinese express it best though. It is a foreign concept in the west. Their word for master is Tzu. The word Tzu means both master and child. The true master is a child of their path. They live and breath their practice. Basically, a very experienced student.
So every master knows that there is always more to learn? Yes.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~