Beginning work on documenting 1285 ’s world. First by creating a user manual for the mailing list.
There are things that does not work properly or as intended. But then there exists things so horribly wrong that one does not know where to begin on their wrongness. Of all of these things one can be the problem of examination in schools. There are so many aspects of it that we might cover, and there is one that I noticed tonight as Zea was laying out her day before me.
My understanding of education—far all of these years—was that there is a fairly misguiding and perhaps “stupid” idea in education that some people, believe themselves to be at the height of things and to “enlighten” others with it (Something that I believe myself to be fully guilty of) in this situation, the person goes to be in a divine position. And that is so horribly dangerous. For everyone.
Now what can be said of this about education? Well it is the “illusion” of “owning” information; knowledge; and the arts and practices. In software or engineering; or in anything else we create the illusion that “to know something; is to walk past our gates”. It doesn’t matter if you understand. the thing or not; it makes sense only if some one else verifies that you understand the thing. Now this is something to take place in our work, and education; and all else; but then the interesting part of it is if you believe “there is everything to know about a particular thing”. My understanding suggests the otherwise but the whole idea of the “exams” says something else.
What Zea told me tonight was pure gold in terms of understanding the problems that must be fixed in education—something that 1285 inherently fixes in its design; but going forwards we must be deliberate in not making it happen elsewhere—and that was she telling me that: “In the test; for a moment I got stressed and thought I don’t know all there is about derivatives while I thought I knew”—and this was shocking in that I realized “The assumption of knowing everything there is!!” about something. Well; how can you? The amount of knowledge in this universe is infinite and no one will ever even know all there is in one topic. Why is our system putting this horribly wrong assumption on people?
What makes me more worried is that for the opposite end of this; what we end up having is the group of people who, because of having done their tests fully assume that they do know all there is to something. And this is total disaster for the world of knowledge and scientific method where we assume to always be in seeking the truth.
What I believe to be the better way is to assume that knowledge and the practices belong to us all and that we all know a portion of something far bigger than us; and that we must never assume that either someone has the bigger or lower position than us.
And this is something incredibly hard to change if you be pushed down the road of thinking like this. Somewhat it deprives you of all there is that you should be: Certain that you do not know everything; and certain that no one else can know everything; and that, it is impossible for anything to be fully known and most importantly; that it has been the job of the education to have taught you “How to live with the fact that you do not know everything; and must find a way to do the task anyhow”.
