Teaching & Learning

An older piece:

Teaching and learning are two wildly separate experiences with almost completely dissimilar outcomes. A teacher teaches, presents information for uptake and regurgitation. The teacher feels his information is correct, while few disciplines can claim perfect truth in practice. Teaching is an antiquated idea centered around an older set of information being passed down to the younger generation. A teacher, in the traditional sense, is done learning his or her subject. The teacher is a subject matter expert and unquestionable in the classroom. This does not encourage curiosity or free learning. It results in the will to seek new knowledge being stunted or crushed. This is not what we need.

What we need is learning. We need mutual students of knowledge, seekers of truth, to gather in a round table forum. The willingness to seek out ones own knowledge is fostered by this environment. Nobody is spoon fed pre-chewed ideas. Much like the ancient colleges of Greece are depicted, this is an imagined environment of questions, not of answers. The one who seeks to know history and philosophy need only find his own books and resources. Likewise, the student of math may also find his resources and learn at his own pace. Willfulness to learn and re-learn is paramount to the strong mind. If a mind cannot re-learn previously misunderstood concepts, that mind will deteriorate until it becomes obsolete.

Ones mind must be free to experiment and try new things. The human must be free to do what he must in the pursuit of knowledge, without interference from the law, or oppressive regulation. Any area may be the laboratory of a curious mind, and many things done in laboratories are now illegal to attempt without. The oppression of scientific inquiry, to exclude all but the overeducated elite, is the most sincere form of tyranny our planet has yet known.

(No idea when this was originally written. Prior to May 2014)