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Opinion

I had a brother who would lap up any praise he got and run with it. He carefully stored it and even years later believed it was still valid; that he had the same characteristics and personality and that he could rely on stale and obsolete praise as his stalwart advising companion. He had an ego that would not brook any conversation that disagreed with the witheringly small praise he got. As he got older he used the same heuristics he had gotten praise for when he was younger, and so got less and less praise.

My father used to say to me, 'Don't you ever change, son!' He was impressed with something I said or a young and innocent attitude. I never knew what it was, because, back then I never dwelt on what I said or did; I just opened my mouth and words came out, or I just did whatever a teenager or young adult did. If he had told me I am handsome or clever, I could only cling to the the latter as being true today; even if it ever was, I cannot know if my ego will not allow any challenges to that. Realistically, a thousand people could call me an idiot for a week and my ego might  allow me to come up with an excuse for their mal-effective intellect. Unfortunately, I am ever so largely going to not be charitable and I will simply associate their raging insults with them following a pattern of thinking that attacks any information they have ever been fed; information they have been spoon-fed by entities they trusted.

If I was in charge of education in the UK, I would separate students into two camps. The followers and the innovators. I am not going to use current cyber-crime reports to flesh out why I think the education system needs an overhaul. I shall simply say that the Black Swans have arrived. Education, as I see it, should be a tutor giving a bunch of students some sticks, a box of matches, and a clear space, and told to make a fire. 'Here, students, is the fabric of the subject, the catalyst to make the fabric do something and, the place to do it.' 

I wonder how many people consider a cooking fire to be a raging fire using up a lot of fuel to generate intense heat. Such heat that is only required for a few minutes. It came as a revelation to me that Indians in North America built tiny fires and constantly fed them with twigs until their cooking was complete. They, not needing to spit-roast a bison three times a day did not build huge bonfires on wide plains that had very few trees. I think it is a modern white-person concept to expend a lot of energy chopping wood and burning it down to a large bed of glowing ember so even cooking times could be achieved. 'Go and chop down a lot of trees, servant.' In the peasant home a large fire is for heat and light, if they could cook on it at the same time then great.

Following a timetable simply because it is there is incomprehensible to me. Deciding on a course of action and then not taking every opportunity to advance within the scope of a strategy that relates to the purpose of the action is, to me, just plain foolish. 

What I am actually doing is holding up convergent thinking against divergent thinking. Convergent thinking, to my understanding, allows for a goal to be envisioned and then linear thinking and action leads to the fulfillment of the goal. Divergent thinking, as I understand it, has an interest in the subject and the end goal is not the same as for the convergent thinker, because it is not yet made concrete. I would favour divergent thinking over convergent thinking simply because convergent thinking relies on each little linear step being completed before the next one can be started. The problem is, we are trained to think that convergent thinking is the right way to determine how we act and live.

People who save money are convergent thinkers and that is when that type of thinking is essential. Learning something is definitely not an opportunity to use only convergent thinking. Of course there are steps; we need to learn to read if we are to learn from reading, so there are preliminary steps that are essential. But learning to read is not an ability to solely to get a qualification in a single subject. No, being able to read opens up divergent opportunities of which getting a qualification is only one. 

As part of my studies I am compelled to give feedback to other students on their work. I know, weird isn't it? The students giving feedback have to find something good to say about something another student has written in a forum post, for example. If there is only a single aspect of the comment in the student's forum post that can be considered suitable for positive remarks. The more positive remarks on that single point there are, the more the ego of the student who posted the original comment will inflate around that aspect of their ability. This is why I completely ignore any positive feedback, whether it comes from a single source or a group. Of course, in the real world, if bystanders clap because I climbed a tree and rescued a kitten then I might do it again, but I am not going to go around seeking kittens in every tree, or stare up into high branches apprehensively seeking some more applause. I mean who would? I think we all know that those who would are the people who believe that correlation does imply causation; that when two variables appear to be related, it means that one really does cause the other.

A while ago I was walking past a primary school. It must have been the first week of the new intake for the infants, because there was a little girl keening by herself at playtime. (Correlation and causation), There was a little boy who screamed at me as I passed the fence that separated the pavement from the school playground; I mean properly screamed with a high pitch. A bit concerned, I stopped and regarded him. He screamed again. I kept my face neutral because by now I realised that he was expecting the same response from me that he had gotten from adults that were only humouring him; 'Oh, my! You made me jump!' or 'Goodness, that's a loud scream!' What he had previously been shown was that if he is silly he will get attention; positive attention. But who is stupid? Not him; he was fooled by idiots that thought that they should reward bad behaviour.

If we religiously and stoically follow a plan we might just get to a new position in a linear strategy that will show us how monumentally inadequate our thinking really is, and in consistently following a plan that has given good results in the past, we will be shown how our ego, that allows us to think we are special, lied to us and it turns out we are a fool wearing a mantle of comforting falsehood, much like the screaming boy. The little girl crying by herself had suddenly learnt that she is not going to be heard or even listened to; her safe environment with mum always responding to her had gone. The screaming boy, of course, was feeling the same and needed a hug. It happens. It happens on the first day at school, and it continues to happen throughout our lives, and it will always happen. Today it is like this, does not mean that tomorrow it will be the same.

Infants should be trained to understand that things change. How many adults have not yet fathomed that they do not control their own lives if they rely on convergent thinking and linear strategies? Correlation and causation.