Cloudscape

If stress impairs cognition, what is school for?…

An excerpt from Tempest - The Transition (http://www.lulu.com/content/1929564)

"Education had evolved enormously, providing optimal instruction to nurture our immense intellect. Even today, this was immensely important: the genome, after all, is only the foundation of our identity. Our education taught us to use the full extent of our potential using a wide variety of techniques, including brainwave training, cognitive-behavioral therapy, cognotechnology, meditation, neurofeedback, nootropics, psychedelics, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and so forth. Emphasis was placed not on knowledge, however, but on creativity.
Now, it built our lives rather than destroying them. It is worth nothing that our education managed to achieve just the opposite only decades ago. In the twentieth century, educational institutions were the abattoirs of our curiosity. Everything we learnt taught us the same lesson: knowledge is not just tedious; it is tedium itself.
Before my death, our psychological approach to education was as wrong-headed as it could be. As Socrates once wrote, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” But rather than kindling our interest, force smothered it. In this way, it made sure we learnt something, but also that we’d forget it. Education squeezed our minds like a sponge.
Because learning was forced, the students often seized any opportunity to stop studying whenever they could. This made it seem as if compulsion was a necessity, but this was only so because compulsion made itself a necessity. Only without force, our curiosity can motivate us. Force replaced motivation. But intrinsic motivation is far more powerful than extrinsic motivation.
Once we had our diploma, knowledge was superfluous. We’d been taught that learning was an unpleasant but necessary task. We were meant to be taught, not to teach ourselves. Learning us to learn for ourselves was therefore redundant.
But we should be guided rather than being steered. The philosophy of today’s education could be summarized in the aphorism: do what you want - but know what you want, and know what you’re doing. If knowledge doesn't interest someone, why impose it on them? It will only lead to aversion rather than interest toward it. Knowledge is the bricks, but interest is the mortar. And like Leonardo once wrote: “Just as it harms health to feed unwillingly, so it harms the mind to study without desire, and it retains nothing of what it learns.”
Our education untaught us to learn for ourselves. Mass education is like hauling along a heavy block. Now, the students asked questions to the teachers, and not contrariwise. But then, instead of walking along with us, our teachers led us. Without regard for our interests, they choose what we should learn; and it was amazingly adept at selecting the most tedious and irrelevant information. Like a horse in gallop, it towed us behind it until we fell to the ground, bleeding, bruised, broken.
Curiosity is much like a dense throng: the thicker the crowd is, the more dangerous it is to drive it. Because we were all born with an inherent hunger for knowledge, it inevitably resulted in casualties.
Our personality lopped, we had to deform our minds just to be free. We were melted in a die to be molded just like they wanted. Eventually, our mindset became very alike. By then, it was too late. “A vase of unbaked clay can be remolded,” Leonardo Da Vinci once wrote, “but not a baked vase.”
Amala and Kamala were two lycanthropic sisters suckled by a wolf, found in 1921. Amala died a year after she was found at the age of three, but Kamala, her older sister survived to the age of seventeen. At the end of her life, she possessed a vocabulary of roughly 50 words. Although she’d spent only the first eight years of her life as a whelp, her mental retardation could never be reverted. Our education, though it was less retarding to our development, lasted three times as long.
And in its Procrustean rule, our education treated us all as averages, so that whoever deviated from the norm had to adapt. In this way, the most sterling people were most affected. Having more virtue, they also had more virtue to destroy. The demolition of a skyscraper is obviously more spectacular than that of a farmhouse.
By devastating the curiosity of so many people, compulsory education may have caused more stagnation than the church has in the Dark Ages. It’s astounding how a civilization with technology so advanced still had an education so primitive."