Let's Discuss Education

1. If somebody had told me at a much younger age all the BS that was going to be put in front of me, and tell me the ACTUAL point of it all with the Right focuses, perhaps life would have been a little easier and enjoyable.

2. The fact that this temple seems to promote some of the education of some of the most important things the video below talks about is what makes me so grateful for it... let's PLEASE never lose focus on it.

Take a look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HndV87XpkWg

That was an interesting video. However, about halfway through when they started talking about teaching or guiding students into identifying their ideal career is when you realize in the real world that has huge potential for abuse. As much as in the "ideal school" this makes sense in the real world where all teachers are human and have prejudices even if they are only on a subconscious level against different groups such as immigrants and students with identified learning disabilities like dyslexia. That those students might be guided away from more highly celebrated or profitable careers such as careers as scientists. Even if they have the intellectual ability. Due to the mistaken belief that you are less capable if you speak English as a second language or you have a specific learning disability. Not to say that this doesn't already happen, but at least it's not out right at least it wasn't in the high school i went to in the US.

Knowledge is good, education is good because it provides us knowledge, but knowledge is useless unless it can actually be put to good use, so for education to be better it must go beyond the limits of just providing knowledge and try to teach people how to live better lives - to make us "wise" if you will. This latter part is what learning at the Temple is aimed at achieving, whether it succeeds or not, or whether it could be better is another issue.

As far as formal education goes, and maybe different people feel different effects, I don't ever remember having classes or work of the sort the Temple promotes - applying knowledge to one's life. Perhaps the only thing which really came close was sex education and basic ICT.

As a university student, there are lots of interesting classes and courses to take, but none of mine have about wisdom. Sure university life presents its own challenges which one has to overcome, lots more independence and so forth, but I would hardly call this "directed" and certainly not as part of a course. It's closer to "you've come to university to study, here are the classes and teachers, now you go and figure out how to live while we provide these".

If I had children, and the opportunity, I would, for better or worse, want to home-school them.

i think the future of education will involve techniques to stimulate specific parts of the brain

im taking a spanish class and one of the things we have to do is identify the different spanish speaking countries on a map

like where is honduras and where is el salvador ect

and the part of me that is spoiled and resents everything and doesnt want to work says 'this isnt spanish its geography'

the part of me thats like curious or something said "and its a different part of the brain that processes spanish words into english words than the part of the brain that says "this country goes here and this country goes there" on a diagram

and then i thought - the reason people are weak in certain areas is very much to do with stimulation of the brain region needed to excel in those areas
so in early education it might be more productive to develop exercises specifically for the purpose of stimulating various brain regions rather than dividing things into set subjects
because each subject will require different parts of the brain, but my guess is that the overall experience of education will consistently demand the same specific brain regions

so thats what i think we will one day see

I agree that we have the wrong curriculum, but in almost everything else I am radically opposed to what he's saying in the video.

The problem with the video is that he treats knowledge as nothing but a means to an end. He fails to understand that knowledge is an end in and of itself and does not require any other ends to come after it.

Spending hours on end studying jobs? The fact is that we come to know what kind of field we want to work in by going through school anyway. If anything, we should have a wide range of classes offered such as basic plumbing, carpentry, popular music, etc. and that will cover the choice of what kind of jobs someone wants.

He suggests we learn about ourselves, but the animation and his words mean to suggest putting forth the ideas of current neuroscience and nothing else. What a shame it would be to go through schooling "learning about yourself", never reading Freud or Jung, never reading or discussing Descartes, Spinoza, Plato, or any of the other greats.

We should encourage and establish works of both philosophy and psychology, including neuroscience, and combine our mathematics classes with classes on symbolic, informal, and formal logic. Not only is logic important for many jobs and social situations, it is also enjoyable to study.

And what's that about working together being taught in schools? That's already taught to children through team sports, television, and the lunch period. Social situations are covered perfectly well. But we should also encourage, and provide the logical tools for, argumentation between students. We should not allow them to think that confrontation is always a bad thing, in fact it can often times be one of the most constructive things in our lives. And taking part in that will teach them the most important lesson in life: that you don't always win. Forget about participation medals and all that. You want to teach them about capitalism, you have to teach them that they're going to lose sometimes and make sure that they are well prepared for it.

Meditation in schools, I'll give him, and continuing education in adult life, I'll give him. But the primary purpose of education is knowledge, and knowledge doesn't need any justification in the form of a further end.