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Thought of the Week Archives
March 1998
March 2
"...the two worlds of the traditional and the industrial are diametrically
opposed. The indigenous world, in trying to emulate Nature, espouses
a walk with life, a slow, quiet day-to-day kind of existence. The modern
world, on the other hand, steams through life like a locomotive, controlled
by a certain sense of careless waste and destruction. Such life eats
at the psyche and moves its victims faster and faster along, as they
are progressively emptied out of their spiritual and psychic fuel. It
is here, consequently,
where one's spirit is in crisis, that speed is the yardstick
by which the crisis itself is expressed."
~ Malidoma Patrice Some ~
Ritual: Power, Healing and Community (p. 34)
(Swan/Raven & Company, Portland, Oregon, 1993)
Comment �
by Reg Harris
According to Some, we can measure the degree to which our spirit is
in crisis by the speed of our lives. If this is the case, we are suffering
a serious spiritual crisis in the modern world.
Moreover, we are indoctrinating our children into the crisis at earlier
and earlier ages, and it should be little wonder to us that we see our
young people turning to alcohol and drugs for escape or relief. It should
be little wonder to us that we have one of the highest rates of teen suicide
in the world.
As educators, we have the choice of either perpetuating the situation
or helping our students learn to cope with the insane pace of our culture
and still live a human life.
Of course, we cannot go back to the traditional lifestyle, but we can
help youngsters learn to step away from the insanity, help them learn
to find the "calm center of the turning uinverse" within themselves.
Trying to keep up with the increasing volume of information, trying
to stay abreast of the rapid changes in technology, trying to keep pace
with the ever-accelorating expansion of knowledge and its applications
can only lead us away from ourselves.
We should spend more time teaching wisdom and less time teaching information.
Only by teaching young people to think, to take time to sift information,
to decide how to let information affect their lives will we help them
cope with the future. Most of the skills and facts we give them today
will be obsolete within a few years. What we need to teach are techniques
to manage information, to control the speed of life, to stay in touch
with their humanity despite the dehumanization of the world around them.
Otherwise, we are contributing to the growing crisis rather than helping
to solve it.
March 9
Teaching is the art
of awakening the natural curiosity in young minds
for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
~ Anatole French ~
March 16
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness
to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children,
before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily;
and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn
at all.
~ Thomas Szasz (b. 1920) ~
U.S. psychiatrist
Comment
If learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem,
perhaps this is why so many of our students, who have so little self-confidence
and self-esteem to begin with, rebel at learning anything.
How difficult it must be to function in a world where your kind of
knowledge and experience is genarally devalued and often ridiculed. But
to have that same world then ask you to embrace its views, definitions,
and beliefs is too much. "Disenfranchised" is hardly the word to describe
the resulting frustration, bitterness and anger.
March 23
Because an individual becomes a person only within a physical, social,
and cultural context, when and where we happen to be born defines a single
coordinate of existence that no one else shares.
Thus each of us is responsible for one particular point in space
and time in which our body and mind forms a link within the total network
or existence. For where as it is true that who we are is determined by
genetic instructions and social interactions, it is also true that having
invented the concept of freedom, we can make choices that will determine
the future shape of the network of which we are a part.
~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ~
Finding Flow: The Psychology of engagement with everyday life
(Basic Books, 1997)
March 30
Symbols are to express ideas. When ideas have been understood, symbols
should be forgotten. Words are to interpret thoughts.
When thoughts have been absorbed, words stop. . . .
Only those who can take the fish and forget the net
are worthy to seek the truth.
~ Tao-Sheng ~
Fourth century A.D. Buddhist text
~ and ~
The fishing net is used to catch fish. Let us take the fish
and forget the net. The snare is used to catch hares.
Let us take the hare and forget the snare. The word is used
to convey ideas. When ideas are apprehended,
let us forget the words. How delightful to be able
to talk with such a man, who has forgotten the words!
~ Chuang Tzu ~
Taoist philosopher
Third and Fourth Centures B.C.
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