I wish I could adopt this man as my father/grandfather/mentor. Sir Ken Robinson: Empathy and imagination are essentially what makes us human, and the powers that flow from it — creativity and intuition. So it seems to me that we have two big challenges in education — one of them is to have a more unified conception of a human being and what it is to be a person. One that recognises that feeling and knowing are parts of the same complex of the whole being. That our feelings are forms of perception and they are affected by what we think; by our frameworks of ideas. They are affected by how well we can express ourselves in the language we have available to us. So part of the task of education is to connect ourselves with ourselves. And I think the reason so many people get depressed and lost, I think, is because theyve lost the connection with themselves. They have no sense of purpose. Carl Jung said this — he said, in his 30 years of professional practice, there wasnt a single person who came to see him, whose malaise, he said, couldnt in the end be attributed to a loss of faith in religion. Now, I dont think he meant, and I certainly dont mean... when quoting him, organised religion. The word I would use, that I think he wouldve accepted, is spirituality — in the sense of your spirit. He [Jung] said, in the end, nobody got well without regaining a sense of spirituality. So part of the task of education is to connect ourselves with ourselves. But the other task is to connect each other with empathy, through the power of intuition and mutuality. And all those things get lost in an industrialised, atomised [and] homogenised system of education. And the price couldnt be higher and we are paying it everyday, in disaffection, disengagement and emotional turmoil.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 19:21:20 +0000
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