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Lifelong Learning Quotes Living is learning. (John Holt) Uneducated does not mean unlearned, it just means that I haven't had to conform to societal norms and that I won't have to shed years of indoctrination. (Miro Siegel) Here is the most powerful way to cause a paradigm shift in the way you and your kids view education: Start to see learning not as the province of experts but as the province of the family. Learning belongs to you, not to schools and government administrators. It’s a function of human wonder and curiosity and love for the world, and work skills are a small subset of that wonder. Children are born with an insatiable desire to learn. If your family is in love with learning, the rest will follow naturally. (Conversely, if your family is not in love with learning, your children will have to struggle to retain their sense of joy and wonder in learning.) This doesn’t mean you have to be “well educated” in the competitive sense of the term. It just means that your family’s relationship to the world of learning is a personal, private, and passionate one. (Grace Llewellyn & Amy Silver, Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education with or without School) The day you stop learning is the day you begin decaying. (Isaac Asimov) You have schools, but we know how to look after the forest. It is very important for the governments of the world to listen to us, the indigenous people who have lived on the planet for thousands of years. (Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami shaman cited at Survival International, dated 2017, accessed 6 July 2017) By the age of thirteen or fourteen, children in aboriginal societies – tribal societies – have completed what we, from our point of view, would call their “education”. They’re ready to “graduate” and become adults. In these societies, what this means is that their survival value is 100%. All their elders could disappear overnight, and there wouldn’t be chaos, anarchy, and famine among these new adults. They would be able to carry on without a hitch. None of the skills and technologies practiced by their parents would be lost. If they wanted to, they could live quite independently of the tribal structure in which they were reared. But the last thing we want our children to be able to do is to live independently of our society. We don’t want our graduates to have a survival value of 100%, because this would make them free to opt out of our carefully constructed economic system and do whatever they please... Turning out graduates with no [truly useful] skill, with no survival value, and with no choice but to work or starve are not flaws of the system, they are features of the system. These are the things the system must do to keep things going on as they are... (Daniel Quinn, ‘Schooling: The Hidden Agenda’ in The Unschooling Unmanual, pp.48-49) Very early in life the child began to realize that wisdom was all about and everywhere and that there were many things to know. There was no such thing as emptiness in the world. Even in the sky there were no vacant places. Everywhere there was life, visible and invisible, and every object possessed something that would be good for us to have also – even to the very stones. This gave a great interest to life. Even without human companionship one was never alone. (Chief Luther Standing Bear of Sioux cited in Native American Wisdom by Alan Jacobs, pp.151-152) Children learn out of interest and curiosity, not to please the adults in power…. They should be in control of their own learning, deciding for themselves what they want to learn and how they want to learn it. (John Holt) Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.’ (Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook) [In PWP's view, all of the indoctrinated need to either break free of or purify these narrow and often corrupt cultures. It is no use any more just being another rat in the rat-race. We all must rise and create a more noble culture or cultures infused with Love and Light. On a personal level, this will require much ‘unlearning’, freeing ourselves from the controlling or manipulative or fearful brainwashing we have absorbed. On a collective level, we need to change many systemic structures, like the money system...] There is a socialization which turns curious children into adult automatons in a social environment of repressive uniformity, and there is a socialization which turns selfish, impulsive children into self-aware and deliberate participants in a larger community. (Benjamin R. Barber cited at Wikiquote, accessed 2 March 2021) Whenever the therapist stands with society, he will interpret his work as adjusting the individual and coaxing his 'unconscious drives' into social respectability. But such 'official psychotherapy' lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing. On the other hand, the therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism. This does not mean that he has to engage directly in political revolution; it means that he has to help the individual in liberating himself from various forms of social conditioning, which includes liberation from hating this conditioning - hatred being a form of bondage to its object. (Alan Watts, Psychotherapy, East and West) Generations of human beings have lived very well even though they were unable to read or write. But we now live in a culture which demands that we know how to read and write, and it is unthinkable that we could do without these skills. But we should not stop there since reading and writing are two activities that we must also learn to exercise on other planes. According to Initiatic Science, to read is to be able to decipher the subtle and hidden aspect of objects and beings, to interpret the symbols and signs that Cosmic Intelligence has placed everywhere in the great book of the universe. And to write is to be capable of leaving our mark on this great book, of influencing stones, plants, animals and human beings through the magical force of our spirit. Even being able to read and write in all languages that exist in the world is not enough; we must prepare ourselves to read and write in all realms of the universe. (O.M. Aïvanhov) Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. (George Carlin) Don't just teach your children to read… Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything. (George Carlin) I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think. (Socrates) Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each. (Plato) We have been created for greater things, not just to be a number in the world, not just to go for diplomas and degrees, this work and that work. We have been created in order to love and to be loved. (Mother Teresa) |
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