The Environment And The Separation Of State, Religion And Business Part Two

DAVID RALPH MACKERETH

dmackereth@canimac.com

YOUTH

“Education has to teach us not only what we can know but also what the limitations of our knowledge are – what we don’t know.” Vartan Gregorian (1989).

“Compare the views, make allowances for distortions, and then judge for yourself. That is the only way. Hence the many newspapers on my table.” Samuel Robinson Littlewood (1875 – 1963).

“[…] the human nature takes it shape in the years between one and five.” Virginia Woolf (1929).

Most animal parents are compelled by Nature to provide their young with the very best enabling instruction. The lion’s share of this knowledge has accumulated through evolution. G.K Chesterton, in his 1910 book ‘What’s Wrong with the World’, sets the stage a century ago: “Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are first put to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself.” To a child beginning out on their lifelong journey, the world appears rather simple. As we learn from Northrop Frye, in his 1990 ‘Words with Power’, “Innocence he [William Blake (1757 – 1827)] associates with children, not because of any moral superiority in the child, but because the child assumes a world that makes sense, and

was in fact probably created for his benefit.” Always cognizant, the child did not ask to be born!

“In the lives of individuals and of societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other.” Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916).

“It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.” Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (1965). “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).

Youth should be provided with the most useful possible knowledge as they progress to maturity. And to provide this information without detrimental effects, as Seymour Papert’s 1984 ‘New Theories for New Learnings’ cautions, “the scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.” Determining the source for this learning, Marshall McLuhan mentions in his 1974 public lecture ‘Living at the Speed of Light’, “Ivan Illich has a book called Deschooling Society, in which he argues, since we now live in a world where the information and answers are all outside the school room, let us close the schools.” Illich stresses in this 1970 ‘Deschool-

ing Society’, “School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.”

Selecting the most appropriate subjects for our youth to learn requires looking beyond the needs of the adults. Tapscott and Williams in their 2010 ‘Macrowikinomics’ advise, “Young people are bearing the brunt of our failures. Full of zeal and relatively free of responsibilities, youth traditionally, the most inclined to question the status and authority.” Bertrand Russell, in 1925, engenders parent’s attention in his ‘ABC of Relativity’, “Einstein’s ideas, similarly, will seem easier to generations which grow up with them; but for us a certain effort of imaginative reconstruction is unavoidable.” We have the following on Einstein’s approach from John Hands in his 2015 ‘Cosmosapiens’, “[…] the Big Bang theory didn’t derive from observation: it arose from solutions to the equations of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, one of which was selected because it best fitted observations […]”. “So Einstein was not alone when he faced the need for new notions of space and time. It was as if he carried Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Kant, and Mach in his back pocket and was able to converse with them and benefit from their insights. Similarly, a good knowledge of Plato, Kant, and others gave [Uncertainty Principle] Heisenberg a language to go beyond Newtonian particles.” Lee Smolin, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (2019).

Isaac Bashevis Singer, in a 1978 speech mentioned; “Children […] have no use for psychology.” And James Joyce’s demanding 1939 ‘Finnegans Wake’ cautions, “[…] they were yung and easily freudened.”

“No one came to be wise who did not know how to revise anopinion. […] But most people not only recognise nothing asgood in our life unless it is profitable. […] Alas, the truth is that

we suffer, and carry the burden of existence, and there is no remedy other than illusion.” A.C. Grayling, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible (2011).

“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.” John von Neumann considered the last of the great mathematicians (1903 – 1957).

Obviously human children do need some form of special education to move forward in their non-animal world – and language could be the most important. Ludwig Wittgenstein works into his 1921 ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” The extent of language required by our youth is even more important in the Digital Age, as specification limits the ability to understand the scope of the modern world. Marshall McLuhan brings to light in his 1974 ‘Living at the Speed of Light’, “The scientist has great trouble looking forward past his problems because his knowledge [including language] gets in the way.” Human knowledge is one thing; however, if we are to comprehend the Universe, we will also need to master its language: mathematics. With the ‘Universal Genius’ Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519), directing; “Let no one who is not a mathematician read my work.”