A Room with a View
The Art of Thinking 5.
Announcement: Next weekend, november 16-17 I will have a photo show about Australia in Járatlan Utakon Fesztivál (Untraveled Roads Festival), preliminary date is Sunday 5:40 PM which may still change. Also participating in some round table discussions. I highly recommend the event where you can find talks on every possible and impossible way of independent travel and geographical place together with many round tables and a good atmosphere. There will be some presentations in English as well.
One of the purposes of this newsletter is to try to understand complex issues by connecting seemingly separate topics.
Source: https://activities.raisingourkids.com/connect-dot-to-dot/051-dot-to-dot-games.html
Certain visual methods can aid us in this quest. Such as a big, overall picture covering the whole of a topic and connected issues. People as well as societies often get lost in details. They work out ingenious solutions for completely mistaken questions. The nuclear bomb is a good example. Before getting into the details of anything it’s a good idea to get some distance, zoom out, and look at the wider context. What else is involved in this endeavor? What’s the higher purpose of what we’re trying to do? How else could that purpose be achieved?
Source: Mariusz Prusaczyk, Pixabay
The following example will be rather long but it’ll be worth following through. Education is a pretty problematic area. What’s wrong with the way kids are being taught today? Well, people say, the material is out of date. Students are overloaded. Teachers are underpaid. These criticisms are valid at some level, but the structural problems of modern primary education go much deeper. They start with gluing balls of curious energy to desks at the age of six, thereby closing off a large part of their nervous system. Another problem is that the world is being taught in the form of separate subjects. Math has nothing to do with music or French. That’s not how the world works. The only place where language is a subject is in class. Everywhere else it’s a tool to be used with real people in real situations.
Source: Abdulraman Hussain Danjuma, Pixabay
A third problem is that in this system poor lad or gal has contacts only with kids of his or her age for twelve years. Everyone knows that children imitate older kids. They pick up a lot of things much more easily from their somewhat older friends than from an adult authority figure. Which is connected to a fourth problem: school is based on coercive discipline. The natural learning process of organisms is called play — you can hardly stop children playing. All we should be doing is focusing, directing the kinetic exploration energy already present in kids.
So what should school be like? There are other factors as well, but for now let’s take the above mentioned four: It should involve movement and play, connect different areas of life and include children of different ages. The following is just a wild idea, obviously in need of more work. How about some kind of a game in which we hop around in squares drawn on the asphalt, singing the multiplication table in French. The older kids already know big parts of it, they are, in effect, teaching the others. They get some extra tasks, but, as all teachers know, the very act of teaching something to others is a great way to fine tune your skills in the subject.
Source: Immo Wegmann, Unsplash
This game would have other advantages such as being a social activity. Instead of sitting at individual desks like little hermits who get punished for helping others. In Hungary we always whispered the answers to our mates at school, even though, if caught, there were severe consequences. In Canada, in the storage facility for adolescents euphemistically called high school, your mark was determined by the class average. The better your mates performed, the worse your standing was. When writing tests kids covered their paper so others couldn’t copy the answers. Can you believe it?
In the case of multiplication tables the situation is similar to our topic, the big picture. This kind of information is easier remembered visually. I don’t know about you but I have it down auditorily, because that’s how it was taught to us. “Seven times eight is fifty-six.” I have to run that tape in my head to get to the result, and it actually usually starts earlier: “Five times eight is forty, six times eight is forty-eight, seven times eight is fifty-six.” It’s much faster to glance at the chart in your head, scan the proper column and see the result. The game we’re devising will work much better if at one point kids can get out of the picture and take a look at the entire chart. They need to climb a tree from where they can look down, seeing and memorizing the whole chart as a unit.
Source: https://worldofprintables.com/multiplication-chart/
“Oh my god”, people say. “They will fall off the tree!” Well, do we want to raise physically disabled people or athletes? We’ve just included physical education in our curriculum. Safety obviously must be observed but tree climbing is a great exercise, developing muscle strength, attention, coordination, balance, strategy, courage. The kid finally makes it to the top, feels good and sees the whole picture. The uniqueness of the experience will make it much easier to remember the chart than some data learned by rote in a grey classroom. Comme c’est marveilleux!
“Come on, they surely won’t be able to hold such a detailed picture in their head!”, sounds the next piece of criticism. This sheds light to another major problem of the present education system. It presents data but does not teach the mental skills required to absorb that data. Kids’ nervous systems are very flexible, it’s entirely possible to teach them new mental maneuvres, such as remembering complex pictures. There should be a lot more how instead of what in education. That way, instead of having them struggle with memorizing data you could actually make children smarter. Which is possible even in adulthood.
Source: Gerd Altmann, Pixabay
The reaction to such proposals is usually more complaining: “Oh, but there’s no time”, or “How on Earth am I supposed to do that”, and so on, and these questions are valid but at a later phase. Details will be important at a certain point but for now we are with the Big Picture where we want to oversee the whole topic to be able to decide our goals. What is the actual purpose of school? Some authors claim that public education was designed to train the masses to be able to work in manufactures. Peasants were unable to conform to new standards of time so they started with their children. The main goals were discipline and timeliness, which was achieved with school bells and strict adherence to artificial rules.
My book Gyógyító szavak (Healing Words) details how to mismatch seemingly obvious propositions at higher logical levels. The question is not “Where should the new multiple-lane highway run?” The question is how we can transport people and goods efficiently, economically and comfortably. Individual vehicle based highway traffic is so bad, it’s difficult to imagine something worse. But of course the higher purpose of cars was never efficient transport but profit for the car industry and Big Oil.
Health is similar. For Big Pharma “What medicine will cure this illness?” is a proper question. But what we really want to know is how we can cultivate and augment health. The best point of intervention is not when people are already sick. Guided by present paradigms, however, the ministry of health will put enormous amounts of money into hospitals instead of organizing a system for a healthy lifestyle.
Another relevant issue is that Western medicine tries to heal organs or “illnesses” instead of people. Cardiologists surely amassed a great body of knowledge in their narrow field but if all one sees are ventricles and atriums one will miss the causes of their disfunctions. What about the rest of the building? What is going on with the emotions, behavior, eating habits, nervous system, etc. of the person? A complex system such as a human mind-body-soul can’t be fixed by parts like a creaking wheelbarrow. Which is mostly what they are trying to do in Western medicine today. In order to see the whole system we have to step back and look at the big picture. In the beginning we need to see where we want to arrive, and during the process we need to keep track of where we are. Most of the pressing problems of our society cannot be solved the way our present institutions are endeavoring to. We need a different kind of thinking. A much wider perspective is one of the first steps.
Source: Cécile Brasseur, Unsplash
Question of the day: In what area of your life would it be useful to zoom out and look at the Big Picture?