Education

Over the past months I have been helping a very inquisitive 15 year old with his Science GCSE course-work & exam revision. Consequently I have been bombarded with the question Why? It has made me realise that Why? is neither a question one can reasonably ask (it’s precisely up to you to find out for yourself), nor is it a particularly interesting question. Far more pertinent would be How? That is, “How do I go about finding out for myself”, or put another way, "Can you give me a method that will take me inexorably along the path of discovery?". Method seems to be the one thing he is not being given at school. The teachers seem far more concerned with cramming his head full of facts, concepts & ideas so that he can do well in his exams & thereby improve the prestige of the school. As I talk to him I gently try to shake the assumptions at the base of his questioning because many of the concepts he finds difficult (chemical valency, potential difference, Doppler red shift, etc) are only difficult to a small mind – one constrained by too many “self-evident” axioms. On one occasion this process of shaking led him to exclaim, “Gosh, we assume so much don’t we!”, and allowed him a remarkable insight – that growing-up is a process of digging out the assumptions so that one’s consciousness & awareness can expand for ever. In that moment he realised that his education will never stop & that his passion for life & his engagement with life will grow as long as he can stay true to that insight. Good for him.