Power of imagination

The power of imagination

We take it totally for granted. This capacity to bring into mind things that aren't present, and on that base is to hypothesize about things that have never been but could be.

Every feature of human culture in my view is the consequence of this unique capacity. Now other creatures may have something like it, other creatures sing, but they don't write operas, other creatures are agile, but they don't form Olimpic committees, they communicate, but they don't have festivals or theater, they have structures, but they don't build buildings and furnish them.

We are unique in this capacity. The capacity that produced the most extraordinary diversity of human culture, enterprise, innovation, and 6000 languages currently spoken on earth, but I believe that we systematically destroy this capacity in our children and ourselves.

Now I pick my words carefully. I don't say deliberately. I don't think it is deliberate, but it happens to be systematic - do it routinely, unthinkingly - and that is the worst of it. Because we take for granted specific ideas about education, about children, about what it is to be educated, about social need and social utility, about economic purpose, we take these ideas for granted and they turn out not to be true.

Many ideas which seem obvious turn out not to be true. If you think of it as the arts and don't say it is exclusively arts, I think it is also true of science and math, but then I say about the art particularly because they are the victim of this mentality currently.

The Arts

The arts especially address the idea of esthetic experience. An esthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak when you are present in the current moment when you are resonating with the excitement of this thing you are experiencing when you are fully alive. An anesthetic is when you shut your senses off, and deaden yourself to what is happening.

We are getting our children through education by anesthetizing them.

And I think we should be doing exactly the opposite, we shouldn't be putting them asleep, and we should be waking them up to what they have inside of themselves. But the model we have is this.

I believe we have a system of education that is modeled on the interest of industrialism and in the image of it. If you are the interested model of learning you don't start from this production line mentality.

I believe we got to go exactly in the opposite direction that is what I mean about change in the paradigm. We have to question what we take for granted!

If we create the right incentives, if we value each learner for themselves and properly, growth will happen. But I think we need to shift from this industrial paradigm to an organic paradigm, and I think it is perfectly doable.

We need to conceive institutions individually, not system-wide, as one is which don't just value utility, but respect and promote living vitality, the energy of the organization, and its potential to be transformative, but doesn't think in terms of linearity, but thinks of creativity and multiple options and multiple possibilities for everybody in it.

That is not about conformity, but diversity and it's critically about customization. I think all our schools could be like that.

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin once notably said,

there are three sorts of people in the world; those who are immovable, those who are movable, and those who move, and I encourage you to move and get a move on.

When we come to accessing people we should be fair with ourselves - it said, after all, human beings are born of reason apes, not fallen angels.

And so what shall we wonder at?

Our massacres, our missiles, or our symphonies?

Final Thoughts

The miracle of humankind is not how far we have sunk, but how magnificently we have risen. We will be known among the stars not by our corpses, but by our poems.

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