In an earlier post by Mills today and reblogged by Benjamin Hilts there was a discussion about “America’s absurd, outmoded, socioeconomically cruel university system,” that reminded me of a talk given by Michel de Salzmann, a psychiatrist, among other things, where he describes one of the main problems of our current system of education and the importance of “not knowing.”
He says, “In our society, mainly concerned with production and efficiency, the drama is that our capacity for questioning, still so vivid in early childhood, is very quickly eradicated or pushed aside for the benefit of our capacity for answering. When a child has a real question, most of the time he is immediately given a stupid answer. In the best cases the educator goes to the dictionary to be sure his answer is accurate. But anyhow unconsciously, if not proudly, he closes the question. From school to the end of our life it is always necessary to answer. We are compelled to learn how to answer. If we don’t know how to answer, we are just no good. So little by little we become some kind of model machine able-to-answer-to-all-situations with all the necessary blindness as regards its own contradictions. That kind of answering, whose degree of sophistication may sometimes hide from us its conditioned character, is required by our life. But under its dominating necessity, is it possible to keep alive in ourselves our most authentic and precious capacity, which is questioning?”
It seems as I get older, the less I really know. Sure I can read lots of books on a variety of subjects and be able to regurgitate them, but what do I really understand? It seems to me that our education should be one that penetrates beyond just the head, so to speak, and instills in us a capacity to continually question and search for understanding.
My two cents.
November 07, 2009, 9:07pm Comments
