The school systems have adopted a method of teaching which no longer trains minds but rather aims primarily at memory enhancement. This is not education and does a disservice to our young who need considerable skills to survive, prosper, and be fit members of society in the Information Age.
Learning is discovering new ideas by exploration of ignorance. Wyndham Lewis, in his book "Men Without Art," said that the artist must purify the dialect of the tribe. Lewis recognized that the difference between human and ape is the ability of the human individual to generate valid 'metaphors'. And the vital role of the artist in society is to give a name to something new, a name did not exist before.
What is a metaphor? A metaphor is an idea which has no prior existence in the language. It is a communication milestone, if you like.
Since the Academy of Plato, all scientific ideas came into existence as human knowledge through this process of metaphor. Truthfulness is located in those mental processes, ie. discoveries which resolve paradoxes. These are the same processes by which verifiable principles are generated -- processes through which humankind's very ability to exist, by commanding the universe, is demonstrably increased.
All literate expression in language derive meaning from the use of spoken language to express metaphor. The alternate name for the Metaphors within Classical Poetry and Tragedy are "ontological paradoxes." Absurdities are demonstrated via Plato's Socratic Method, which presents them in the form of axiomatic, or ontological, paradoxes.
Knowledge is the nested accumulation of solutions which the human mind has generated in response to such paradoxes. From the past to the present. All in.
The human mind is not a word-machine, nor a digital computer! We do not communicate ideas by means of code! We communicate ideas by stating the paradox which next demands the relevant idea as a cognitive solution. Knowledge, as distinct from merely tentative, possibly false, solutions, consists of verifiable notions of that most high quality.
Stating those paradoxes (metaphors) provokes the relevant cognitive solution to the paradox. Once an idea has been communicated in that way, that form of communication may be "recalled' to the consciousness of the knower, by "referencing the experience" of solving the paradox -- a reference made most efficiently by reference to the paradox (metaphor) itself. See?
Consider the case of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Within the famous Third Act soliloquy, the essence of the tragedy is a paradox, a metaphor. That is, "To be, or, not to be." One road, the familiar one, leads to the traveller's assured doom. The other road, leading away from that doom, points to an uncertain destination. Fear of the uncertainty of the unknown destination prompts Hamlet to prefer the certainty of doom. This is the metaphor posed by the drama.
McLuhan picked up this notion from Plato. How do these impenetrably sovereign cognitive processes, of one mind, communicate the "uncommunicable idea' to the impenetrably sovereign cognitive processes of another mind? The answer is paradox. The answer is metaphor. All true Classical art - Classical poetry, Classical tragedy, Classical music, Classical plastic art (Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael Sanzio) - is based upon the Principle of Metaphor.
All true Science is based upon that exact same principle! That is, the principle of ontological paradoxes, whose solutions may be generated solely within the impenetrably sovereign cognitive processes of the individual mind. True, discoveries in science must be validated, and that is a matter of experimental method; but, without first knowing the idea which is being tested, how do we know what it is that the experiment is testing?
By validating such agreement, shared in common by two or more individuals' cognitive processes, we arrive at a result which adds to collective human knowledge.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt invented in the 19th Century the Humboldt educational system wherein each student must replicate, in training, the knowledge of the entirety of humankind up to that point.
The student must be confronted with the same paradoxes which confronted the persons who made the initial discoveries. Then, the student must be encouraged to overcome these paradoxes by generating the solutions. This can be done only by re-enacting, in the student's mind, the discovery of the original discoverer. This is not objective learning.
In this way the student learns much more than mere textbook principles. By re experiencing much of the history of human knowledge, the student acquires what Plato called the 'hypothesis of the higher hypothesis'.
This kind of training, McLuhan suggested, is also necessary to prepare the student for an environment of technologically progressive production; i.e., a period of rapid technological change. In other words, the world of TODAY.
Multiple choice tests, memory tests, most of what passes for Education today, have absolutely nothing to do with human knowledge, because they do not address these issues. A linear approach to learning is not learning!
Our generation is the first to have neglected these lessons learned over generations and passed along within the stream of human awareness. Truth has become just 'one person's opinion made popular'.
Look at the hidden dynamics behind key cultural events like the O.J. trial. Was truth a factor? What lesson was learned? What benefit as there to the evolving stream of legal precedent?
Today movies and TV have the almost uncontrollable power of inflating the most insignificant personalities into 'million horse-power cultural icons'. It all depends on ratings, timing, exposure. Welcome to the Global Theatre!
We begin as earnest voyeurs. We may end by surrendering our identity to the systems which we worship so dearly.
The character in The Cable Guy has no identity other than what he borrows from past television sitcoms. Represented experience is rapidly replacing direct experience as the defining sensibility in American life. The hit movie SCREAM is entirely scripted based on the characters; notions of prior horror films.
Reality itself is threatened because computers have accelerated the pace of daily events to the point where humankind can no longer make sense of the world. When the real is no longer what it was, Nostalgia takes over. The movie Forrest Gump is about the role nostalgia plays in the life of the simple robotized human who has been dumbed down by the "system."
Reality loses its hardware quality when one lives at the speed of light. Uncritically involved with our own History, we have all become robots. We are dumbed, dimmed, and gumped in one smooth operation. In the words of the computer nerds, 'the interface is seamless.' And so are we!
We cry out for an Educational Revolution. We must scrap the present educational system and replace it with Learning Ecology--a return to the Classical educational curricula of the ancients.
The antidote to our enslavement by the Electric Service Environment is using The Platonic Model to arm every citizen with the mental tools to become his or her own 'anti-environment'. The moment one achieves this anti-environmental state, all things are then submitted to you to be processed. The world becomes YOUR content, and not vice versa. YOU now program your own sensory order, rather than someone else's--as occurs today.
Reposted with permission of Project McLuhan. July 1997
Contact: thea@chicago1.nl.edu
Entered: 24 July 1997