Another Question
I am absolutely certain that one of the reason I enjoy formal education is the regular chance to learn new things, or at least new to me. Five days a week I would go to school and meet with teachers and other students. Early on, lessons might have seemed like simple sessions of memorization. I sat through classes where we reviewed vocabulary words for spelling, repeated simple mathematic steps until I knew addition and subtraction by rote and the teachers recited important historical events and facts. Little by little these experiences added up to a basic set of knowledge and formed a comfortable basis to understand the world around me.
With each passing year, most classes came to assume that the students possessed a certain subset of knowledge and the shift from learning facts to understanding how to learn became the purpose of education. Ultimately a post-graduate education requires even more, it demands that you discover things that might be learned and gives you the charge to discover the questions that might lead to the answers. The chasm between knowing facts and having the passion to seek solutions to yet asked quandaries, divides the well grounded from the imaginative and innovative.
The type of learning that leads to independent discovery requires teachers and learners to labor diligently, always willing to accept the truths wherever they may be found. This work can be tricky because some newly uncovered ideas seem tempting and revolutionary but they can conflict with already understood ideals and practices. In this realm, discoveries that show certain promise will often yield fantastic results as they receive widespread praise for their new and more holistic application. But because new truths are truly rare beasts, most of these high flying claims will ultimately crash in the marketplace of ideas.
When one endeavors on a search for new truth, it can pay true dividends to remain faithful to those things that are already known to be proved. Once in a while some commonly held beliefs reveal themselves as impostors, they lack intrinsic truth and merely represent custom and general acceptance. When these errors in thinking are found, their initial disclosure is typically met by resistance and disdain. It should not surprise us that these developments tend to come from institutions dedicated to learning. Those who study are charged with contemplating and testing the very assumptions upon which our society is based.
When the ideas from ivory towers conflict with the norms of daily living they cause turmoil as two parallel but separate worlds collide. Then the evangelists come. Some evangelize the new theories while others merely proclaim long established norms. The challenge that these camps seldom acknowledge is neither can legitimately claim ultimate authority. From our earliest ages we learn that profound understanding comes less from knowing a series of facts, but by testing our experience and evaluating our circumstance. As we search for that which is right may we avoid the tendency to convince, but instead seek to persuade.
With each passing year, most classes came to assume that the students possessed a certain subset of knowledge and the shift from learning facts to understanding how to learn became the purpose of education. Ultimately a post-graduate education requires even more, it demands that you discover things that might be learned and gives you the charge to discover the questions that might lead to the answers. The chasm between knowing facts and having the passion to seek solutions to yet asked quandaries, divides the well grounded from the imaginative and innovative.
The type of learning that leads to independent discovery requires teachers and learners to labor diligently, always willing to accept the truths wherever they may be found. This work can be tricky because some newly uncovered ideas seem tempting and revolutionary but they can conflict with already understood ideals and practices. In this realm, discoveries that show certain promise will often yield fantastic results as they receive widespread praise for their new and more holistic application. But because new truths are truly rare beasts, most of these high flying claims will ultimately crash in the marketplace of ideas.
When one endeavors on a search for new truth, it can pay true dividends to remain faithful to those things that are already known to be proved. Once in a while some commonly held beliefs reveal themselves as impostors, they lack intrinsic truth and merely represent custom and general acceptance. When these errors in thinking are found, their initial disclosure is typically met by resistance and disdain. It should not surprise us that these developments tend to come from institutions dedicated to learning. Those who study are charged with contemplating and testing the very assumptions upon which our society is based.
When the ideas from ivory towers conflict with the norms of daily living they cause turmoil as two parallel but separate worlds collide. Then the evangelists come. Some evangelize the new theories while others merely proclaim long established norms. The challenge that these camps seldom acknowledge is neither can legitimately claim ultimate authority. From our earliest ages we learn that profound understanding comes less from knowing a series of facts, but by testing our experience and evaluating our circumstance. As we search for that which is right may we avoid the tendency to convince, but instead seek to persuade.
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