Phil discussion 5/19/17
I was handed the ball for this Friday’s discussion. I propose ideas along the line of this question:
What do you wish you didn’t know?
Additional related questions
Along this line, what knowledge is of most worth? Better still, what knowledge has been of most worth to you over the last 20 years?
What did you know that you wish you had not forgotten?
Do you feel a need or a call to gain new knowledge?
“Forget your sins” says The Cloud of Unknowing, trans. Marvin Kananen. Have you forgotten sins or important mistakes?
Can you unknow? Can you use a beginner’s mind set? Can you see with beginner’s eyes?
In a time of Google and other search software, do we need the same knowledge as we did in the 1950’s and 60’s? Can’t we just look up what we want when we want it?
Two sources of inspiration for these questions
A friend explained that he helped launch an online high school. I felt that I could picture getting the cooperation of experienced teachers and collecting their opinions as to what the school should teach and require of the students. Such a procedure typically produces an agreed-upon range of traditional subjects but usually the selection is based more on the politics of the selectors than on data.
The titles “The Cloud of Unknowing” and later “How to Untrain Your Parrot” came to mind in thinking about school and other learning over the course of our lives.
There are many procedural, conceptual and ethical difficulties in collecting useful evidence about the value of any given school learning. How “well” was it taught? What does “knowing” the learning consist of? Can some learning affect our lives, our reasoning, our choices without our being aware of being affected by the learning?