Discontinuing Diseducation

Both the words 'continuing' and 'education' have become boring cliches. 'Continuing' has come to imply 'more of the same' instead of a dynamic flow. 'Education' has come to mean a gradual closing of the mind through an accretion of self-importance and dead knowledge rather the gradual illumination empowered by a seeker's humility. Put the two words together and they serve up a double whammy. Continuing Education has come to imply the communal gathering of professionals around yet another stagnant pool of knowledge, there more to meet. greet and preen rather than drink from the waters and you wouldn't blame them because truth be told they aren't thirsty. In a better world (round the corner as they tell me that 2012 will signal the end of things as they are - good bye human greed, stupidity and apathy) we will perhaps subscribe to Discontinuing Diseducation to undo the harm that a century of mass-market education has done to a couple of generation of practicing professionals. Get them to regularly attend sessions that take them faraway from their areas of domain expertise to lands of learning where they can be children again, curiosity multiplying discovery multiplying curiosity which is the natural attitude of children to learning until rote education overcomes it. And as the mind slowly opens again the trapped and stagnant pools of domain knowledge will begin to flow again cleansing themselves of detritus and gathering force and powering a world of good. Auden in a poem titled "Under Which Lyre" wrote these lines about the GI bill that enabled World War II veterans to attend college that capture the spirit of Discontinuing Diseducation: Encamped upon the college plain/Raw veterans already train/ As freshman forces...../ And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter/ Are shot to pieces by the shorter/ Poems of Donne