"Schooling our Intelligence"
The idea of school and intelligence that we now have, with its emphasis on information and rationality, represents only a small portion of knowing and learning that is part of a vital human life. (...)
Keats's words may offer a direction for making sense of the pains and losses that are part of everyone's life, but pleasure, too, educates in this deep manner, and I suspect that we often avoid pleasure in the same way we try to skirt pain. From a certain point of view, pain and pleasure are not so far removed from each other. Both embrace life's intensity, and the common complaints we have about getting along in life may refer back to our attempts to live placidly, comfortably, and in full control. We seem to be largely unconscious of how often our efforts to be prudent merely serve to shield us from the vital edges of pain and pleasure. (...)
The most intimate degree of knowing takes form quietly as we observe the world, contemplate ordinary events, and become apprentices to people of character and heart. (...)
Knowledge is not always the adding on of information and skill; sometimes it involves the loss of both. Knowledge is not always a matter of becoming smart and intelligent; it could be the discovery of one's foolishness and ignorance. Knowledge may have little to do with literacy; there's an intelligence in touch, smell, movement, play, and feeling.
- Thomas Moore
Keats's words may offer a direction for making sense of the pains and losses that are part of everyone's life, but pleasure, too, educates in this deep manner, and I suspect that we often avoid pleasure in the same way we try to skirt pain. From a certain point of view, pain and pleasure are not so far removed from each other. Both embrace life's intensity, and the common complaints we have about getting along in life may refer back to our attempts to live placidly, comfortably, and in full control. We seem to be largely unconscious of how often our efforts to be prudent merely serve to shield us from the vital edges of pain and pleasure. (...)
The most intimate degree of knowing takes form quietly as we observe the world, contemplate ordinary events, and become apprentices to people of character and heart. (...)
Knowledge is not always the adding on of information and skill; sometimes it involves the loss of both. Knowledge is not always a matter of becoming smart and intelligent; it could be the discovery of one's foolishness and ignorance. Knowledge may have little to do with literacy; there's an intelligence in touch, smell, movement, play, and feeling.
- Thomas Moore