Why Teach? Why Learn?
The purpose of education should be to light the fires of innovation and to teach listeners that, contrary to human inclination to believe there are, there are no limits on the world.
Humans tend to naturally categorize the world into boxes, meanings, and reasons. True education would teach students to live a life of asking, "Why not?" Not just "why?" because "why?" implies there is an answer. But students should learn to ask, "Why not?" and that when the student learns why not, they should often try it anyways.
That is why Gargantua's body is huge. R is striving to take his readers out of the normal bonds of size and limits. Every time a person asks "Why not?" and manages to do it anyways, the limits on human kind become broader. We as a people grow and set new limits. Humans achieve new levels, there are then more sphere to explore and we are able to widen our understanding. Remember: people use to say there could never be less than a 4 minute mile or that people would never fly to the moon.
THESE are the reasons why anyone bothers to learn, seek higher education or seek to teach others. Why bother to educate others when few may ever rise above? That is not the question, the question is: Why not? Sure, often students will refuse to shatter the boxes they have accepted around their lives. But some may venture through the glass, some will ask why not about paths untaken and build new stairways to the stairs where no one thought there could be stairs at all.
Some will never look at a human cell, or will look and only see it as small. But some will see the infinitesimal movement in the speck in the microscope and say, "That isn't thought to be significant. Why not?" and thus discover new parts of our cells that can be changed and improved.
We educate to learn new ways to look at our world, to teach others to look deeper, for their eyes may catch what has been overlooked for centuries.
We educate to shatter the glass boxes of "commonly accepted facts" that hold mankind back from how limitless this world is, which people will see if they learn to look without their naturally preferred safety glasses.
We learn, we educate, to make our world bigger. We educate for sometimes it is the only true act of creation. The new awaits, is in front of us, but we have trained ourselves not to see it.
We educate that all the "why not" questors may broaden our world for all time and thus reform and redefine the meaning of "the human existence."
Education is the truest act of being alive. We educate for it is the only way to create a new world and that is the siren song of man's heart, to know: "Is there something more?"
We'll never know unless someone challenges the "why not's." If everyone shattered their boxes of accepted knowledge and pushed against the why nots there would be carnivals as we happily waited IN LINE at the library, waited to know of new hammers (books), new hammers to shatter our boxes more quickly.
If we could only see then we would never let a hammer go unread. Books would be revered and panted after. We'd fight less with those who didn't live in the same kind of boxes we did (ie, believe the same way.) But rather we'd walk together to build the impossible stairway to the stars. For then we would all long to test "why not?", we'd all be Edison, who "hadn't failed but only found 10,000 ways that didn't work." Yet we would press on that a bulb might spark to life to illuminate our paths, climbing even higher on the steps of "why not?"
We learn, we teach, because it is our only chance to get closer to the stars.
And teachers must teach of boxes for we cannot shatter what we cannot see. Teachers must first teach the boxes, to point out where they are.
But good teachers do not merely teach you to polish the glass and show you where the glass walls are. Good teachers must point out the supports which we should attach new steps to. If we build on the supports of others, we get closer to the sky.
Without education, we would all make the same wheel over and over. Through education we learn what already is so we can finally truly reinvent the wheel (or perhaps a spaceship with no wheels at all.)
Humans tend to naturally categorize the world into boxes, meanings, and reasons. True education would teach students to live a life of asking, "Why not?" Not just "why?" because "why?" implies there is an answer. But students should learn to ask, "Why not?" and that when the student learns why not, they should often try it anyways.
That is why Gargantua's body is huge. R is striving to take his readers out of the normal bonds of size and limits. Every time a person asks "Why not?" and manages to do it anyways, the limits on human kind become broader. We as a people grow and set new limits. Humans achieve new levels, there are then more sphere to explore and we are able to widen our understanding. Remember: people use to say there could never be less than a 4 minute mile or that people would never fly to the moon.
THESE are the reasons why anyone bothers to learn, seek higher education or seek to teach others. Why bother to educate others when few may ever rise above? That is not the question, the question is: Why not? Sure, often students will refuse to shatter the boxes they have accepted around their lives. But some may venture through the glass, some will ask why not about paths untaken and build new stairways to the stairs where no one thought there could be stairs at all.
Some will never look at a human cell, or will look and only see it as small. But some will see the infinitesimal movement in the speck in the microscope and say, "That isn't thought to be significant. Why not?" and thus discover new parts of our cells that can be changed and improved.
We educate to learn new ways to look at our world, to teach others to look deeper, for their eyes may catch what has been overlooked for centuries.
We educate to shatter the glass boxes of "commonly accepted facts" that hold mankind back from how limitless this world is, which people will see if they learn to look without their naturally preferred safety glasses.
We learn, we educate, to make our world bigger. We educate for sometimes it is the only true act of creation. The new awaits, is in front of us, but we have trained ourselves not to see it.
We educate that all the "why not" questors may broaden our world for all time and thus reform and redefine the meaning of "the human existence."
Education is the truest act of being alive. We educate for it is the only way to create a new world and that is the siren song of man's heart, to know: "Is there something more?"
We'll never know unless someone challenges the "why not's." If everyone shattered their boxes of accepted knowledge and pushed against the why nots there would be carnivals as we happily waited IN LINE at the library, waited to know of new hammers (books), new hammers to shatter our boxes more quickly.
If we could only see then we would never let a hammer go unread. Books would be revered and panted after. We'd fight less with those who didn't live in the same kind of boxes we did (ie, believe the same way.) But rather we'd walk together to build the impossible stairway to the stars. For then we would all long to test "why not?", we'd all be Edison, who "hadn't failed but only found 10,000 ways that didn't work." Yet we would press on that a bulb might spark to life to illuminate our paths, climbing even higher on the steps of "why not?"
We learn, we teach, because it is our only chance to get closer to the stars.
And teachers must teach of boxes for we cannot shatter what we cannot see. Teachers must first teach the boxes, to point out where they are.
But good teachers do not merely teach you to polish the glass and show you where the glass walls are. Good teachers must point out the supports which we should attach new steps to. If we build on the supports of others, we get closer to the sky.
Without education, we would all make the same wheel over and over. Through education we learn what already is so we can finally truly reinvent the wheel (or perhaps a spaceship with no wheels at all.)