
The Place Of Learning
To learn, as to love, are the vital acts most essential to the human being,
those who give meaning and support to their identity and their actions.
Learning is as innate as breathing and essential to live. We can breathe badly,
that evil is built by a tensional network that is slowly fixed and automated in
the body, trapped as a breastplate and activated at the same time as the mind.
That breastplate can be so rigid in a certain moment that it attacks the body
itself, against its health. It is the same with the impulse to learn.We are trapped by a pattern that collapses learning. The deterioration of
quality by quantity is the mark of the crisis of our civilization.
Only the
measurable, the data, are perceived as real and are accepted exclusively as the
value of knowledge. Everything else is set apart, questioned or simply placed
on a secondary plane. Unfortunately the love, the suffering, the passion, the
enthusiasm, are not quantifiable.This mode in which we have contracted learning has important consequences, both
in the order of personal and social development. Surely the most severe of all
of them is to annul in human beings their critical thinking, their
decision-making, their ability to generate new expressions and, ultimately, to
explore their creativity. Of course, we have created a sophisticated
compensation system to treat this wound, this vital fracture.
The most cruel of
all is to supplant our capacity to learn and with it to sustain our own
identity by the simple fact of knowing.Knowing is one of the easiest things in life. It may take time and perhaps some
suffering but it is simple. One can study a subject, read books, experiment
under the tutelage of fashion supervisors, go to the absolute truth of science
or simply delegate to the other and do what is due. Knowing requires reaching a
certain amount of content to adapt to a situation and act within it.Knowledge prepares people capable of withstanding the pressure of a system.
Today being formed means actively participating in a common culture. Respond to
what the circumstances ask, be effective.
The effectiveness, the qualification
with which we prepare ourselves for this challenge paradoxically fixes the laws
of the models in crisis. It is a progress that does not essentially change
anything, we learn to know many things knowing very little.How does the weight of this memory enable us to learn? I think it is imperative
to dwell on the meaning of what it really means to learn, to return to the
origin. When a system is in crisis responds to it trying to change one pattern
for another without really understanding the origin of this crisis. Learning
means returning to the source, to the natural breathing. This movement to
principles, to the place where the act of learning happens is closest to human
nature, must be lived by oneself.
Breathing can not be delegated to another.Unfortunately the educational models from school to culture of any organization tend to standardize. For this culture critical thinking, difference, singularity constitutes a threat.Adequate knowledge is only possible if we are able to situate it in a context that links at the same time the personal and social dimension of the human being, which reconciles diversity with the whole.To return to the place of learning, we must ask ourselves if we really have the desire to learn, if we want to acquire a qualification, equip ourselves with tools or just be more competitive.We can not question the meaning of learning with all its enormous vital force and creative if all this is impregnated with a shadow, a hidden intention, a cold and acid pragmatism. To understand, we must first place the question where it should be done. What do I want to learn? What do I really look for? Without the excuse, on the other hand, so suspicious to differentiate what I do of who I am. There are no excuses. We are how we live, what we say, what we think and how we relate