"It is important to do what you don't know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos."
-Carlos Castaneda, Peruvian author
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies with in us."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of my favorite education bloggers just celebrated his 30th birthday. He says he won't be depressed about it, so I guess I won't be depressed either, and won't try to do any comparisons. Ewan made a quick list of milestones with accompanying ICT references, kind of like what I did a couple weeks ago on the event of my arrival in Turkey, which reminds me again of how long, and how short, life can be.
Ewan, the quote is a little birthday present from me, and a reminder to us both that it's not so much what we know as who we become.
"By not allowing them to print books, will the thoughts and ideas go away? If they want to teach radicalism, someone can teach without a book."
-- Gershon Baskin, Israeli Director of the Israel-Palestine Centre for Research and Information, on the decision by Israel to halt the importation of textbook paper into Gaza. Click here for more.
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"Will they feed us?"
-- Asked by a street child of Nairobi, when invited by a social worker to attend a special private school with no fees or hidden costs (like requiring shoes). The answer was yes.
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"I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world -- the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair... It took me decades to find out."
-- Bill Gates, on receiving an honorary doctorate at Harvard University.
Thanks to Tim Cohn (via John Connell) for the link to the text of the speech. Click here to read the whole (short) speech.
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"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
-- Alvin Toffler, post-industrial futurologist.
"A heart is to be spent."
-- from a poem by Stephen Dunn on turning 60, posted by Bruce Schauble.
"If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken up the violin at 60. I'd have been playing for almost 40 years by now."
-- Quote from a woman in her 90s, reported by Kathy Sierra.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair
At least twice a week I find myself in conversations that turn on the point that education is not the same as learning, and that information is not the same as knowledge. A few weeks ago one of these conversations led to my translation last year of a stanza by Yunus Emre, a Turkish mystical poet who lived approximately 1240-1320. Oddly, I had memorized the Turkish original but not my English translation. Just as well, since the translation continues to evolve.
İlim ilim bilmektir
İlim kendin bilmektir
Sen kendini bilmezsin
Ya nice okumaktır
For the English translation it helps to know that the word 'ilim' can mean 'knowledge', 'learning', 'scholarship' or 'enlightenment'. It's possible that the first line uses two different senses of the same word, which would set up a nice chiasmus in the translation of the first two lines. Still, what Yunus meant 700 years ago is open to interpretation.
To know is to gain understanding
To understand is to know yourself
If you do not know yourself
Then all your study is only so much reading
"It is impossible to give the soldier a good education without making him a deserter."
- Henry David Thoreau
We have learned that for most the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
- Ivan Illich
