Learning

There is an image from a movie that has always stuck in my mind. It is the scene from “The Matrix” in which Keanu Reeves has an epiphany that allows him to see the world in a different way. The world around him is suddenly transformed into living information that he can read and understand now that he has learned how to look at it. Learning is about figuring out how to see the world in a different way, how to see that the wisdom of the world can be read from every droplet of water when it is looked at the right way. Learning to see the age of the earth in the layered rock of a mountainside, or the force of the ocean in the curl of a breaking wave, watching how the waves provide both life and destruction for the denizens of a tide pool, and understanding a little more about life because of it, these are examples of the type of sight that learning must cultivate.
Learning in a classroom is valuable, but to become truly learned requires learning from everything: from the experience of living, sleeping, eating, and everything in between. The classroom teaches what can be taught, but a true education also requires a person to be able to learn that which cannot be taught. I think that our primary education system fails in this task, and those few students that do truly learn more often represent the failure of the school to tame their minds rather than the success of the school in producing such an individual. I believe that in order to produce well-thinking and seeing people, critical thinking and basic philosophy must be taught at the elementary and middle school levels. I think such a program would create a class of students who are accustomed to thinking rather than accustomed to simply reproducing whatever answer they are told is correct. In a democracy, where the direction of the most powerful country in the world depends on the knowledge and decisions of its voters, it is not simply important, but essential to ensure that our citizens enter the world with a lifetime of training in both how to think critically, and the framework for developing an informed system of values derived from the world that they have experienced around them, so that their wisdom can decide in which direction their intelligence should be employed.