Sometimes you face life’s problems head-on and you feel like the superhero you always wanted to be. But sometimes the problems just overwhelm you as the individual, especially when it is systemic problems. You as an individual cannot solve, for example, all the systemic racism embedded in our modern society. And more often than not, when you alone try to do this, the system bites back harder than you could have dreamed of biting. More often than not, when the individual tries to solve a systemic problem, the system throws the individual out (at best). But this is a problem, because by having the will to change the system, the individual will not easily settle or assimilate into the system itself. That person will either always bump heads with those who have assimilated into the system, or it will drain the will to live from them.
In either case, an extreme form of cognitive dissonance will surely follow. Your beliefs will not gel with the system’s values. You will always feel this split, rift, gap, void, etc., between what you believe to be the right thing to do and how the system goes against this belief.
And again, what can the individual do about this?
This is where I find myself at the moment. I am inside this rift, in the in-betweenness once again. I am marking exam papers (or I am finished) and it is shocking (to some degree) how students just disregard their own education. But this is something that I knew beforehand would happen, just not to this extent. And this is not necessarily the rift itself which I find myself in. No, the rift I find myself in is simply that I feel one can do so much better and affect more people in a beneficial way outside of this framework.
I am constantly going back to the idea of Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher, who had a “philosophical garden” of sorts. Imagine a lush garden far away from the troubles of daily life. In this garden, time is spent reading and tending to the garden. Lectures take most of the day, but unlike lectures at university or meetings at workplaces, these lectures are characterized by creation and co-creation. The “lecturer” is not some authority figure, merely someone who opens the floor for further discussions to which anyone can contribute. Creation and co-creation might lead to very interesting ideas which one can cultivate like the plants in the garden. Like minded people thus gather to listen and converse.
The modern education system is still based on the old and outdated idea that a single lecturer is the carrier of knowledge, and the students are there to learn from this figure. Students are then asked to write exam papers in total isolation. No cell phone access, no talking to friends, no books my be consulted. The single lecturer will thence mark the exams and tests, the products of this very rigid and strange system.
But my question: where will a student or anyone for that matter be in a situation in which you are wholly cut off from all information?
So why are we still testing people on this? No one will ever go through life without a calculator by his/her side, so why force a student to write an exam without one? There are some cases in which this might be preferred, but in our day-to-day life, we have access to all this information. Most if not all of education is in turmoil about the likes of ChatGPT and other AI text generating software. This turmoil, in my opinion, is similar to the introduction of the calculator, the camera, and all of these revolutionary technologies. Moreover, it is new, and people fear new things that they do not understand.
But this just again showcases the desire to control the environment in which learning supposedly happens by not opening it up to this new and changing world. I would have preferred if students could write open book tests, and consult their colleagues to produce work that showcases understanding and which is to the satisfaction of the student. At this stage, the student writes an exam under extreme stress and pressure to fulfill this strange desire to control everything.
In the philosophical garden, this will not be the case. Learning happens differently for different people. Understanding does not always translate to writing a sentence on a paper under stressful circumstances. Understanding can be in the form of co-creation or in the form of a conversation. By helping the other person, genuine understanding might follow. By sitting underneath a tree with one’s being planted firmly to the ground, new ideas might hit you like the wind from every direction.
And this is where I am at. I am of the opinion that modern education systems are not really geared to foster an environment for learning. By asking the fish to climb the tree, one will not foster an environment for learning to happen. But I cannot do anything to this situation at the moment. I am relying on this system to pay me a salary so that I can have these thoughts. It is a perfect recipe for cognitive dissonance.
In any case, I hope that you got something from this strange philosophical rant. Maybe you have thought about this as well, please let me know in the comments! For now, happy reading and stay safe.
The musings are my own, albeit inspired by my very tired mind and overworked situation. The photographs are also my own, taken with my iPhone.