edulution in the head

They are talking about education on the radio. I haven’t really heard enough to workout the specifics but the gist is about how we could change education if we could start again. I think they are saying that social relations ought to be made part of the experience. I just suddenly thought what an insane world we live in that we are able to convince ourselves that an education system based on competition is in any way an evolved way of organising our lives. This tells me that I am not a realist. I mean a realist would say, “that is the way of the world so we must prepare our children for it”. That was in a deep resonant alpha control voice in case you didn’t pick that up. The other thing we’d say is something about human nature and that we can’t change that. This all makes me realise the eternal paradox of being human. The enlightenment tried to help us evolve through the use of reason and higher thinking but that ended in lots of heads being chopped off and scientism trapping us in a realm of neurotic rationalism.  I really cannot see a way out for the occident. We are too far past the point where we once understood our relationship to the cosmos as poets. Everything the rational mind claims as its own arose from the nebulas state of pre-personal wonderment. Singing, making, playing, imagining. The problem is that now the rational mind sees the chain through the wrong end of the telescope – It has a job to think and test stuff and then if there’s time at the end of the lesson we can try staring out of the window or looking under rocks.

So education props up the power structures of yore. To succeed you can use education to be socially mobile. You can clamber and climb over others. You too can reach the top deck with the original privileged few. Instead education could be about doing away with the need for social mobility. This all comes down to our ability to spontaneously evolve and let go of the crutch of human nature (yes John Gray) that we think let's us off the hook of taking responsibility for ourselves as eternal bodies in a fleeting sacred moment.