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Conspiracy Theory As Self-Directed Learning
Back when I taught for a living, I used to spend a lot of time reading educational theory and history to try and mine the ideas of others and figure out useful practical applications. I forget who was responsible for it, but I read about one type of alternative schooling system where the curriculum (at least on some levels) is centered around the interests of the student rather than the mandates of the state. For instance, a small child might be interested in dinosaurs. So the teacher acts as a guide to help them learn about this subject, but also helps introduce them to peripheral topics to broaden their knowledge. They might make up math exercises where different dinosaur lengths are compared using the type of charts popular in those books. They might use fossils as a means to teach geology and the history of the earth. They might use dinosaur life cycles to study ecosystems, and could even compare birds, reptiles and other animals to broaden their knowledge. The point is that since the student is emotionally invested in the material, these other peripheral topics are devoured without a second thought. Whereas meanwhile if they were each introduced on their own, totally unconnected to any particular context, the student would lose interest and have a difficult time applying this knowledge to anything else.
Some people would suggest that our public school system is actually designed to be compartmentalized for this reason - to train people to think in small unconnected boxes. Whether or not it’s intentional, it’s a major factor of what bored me in school throughout my life. Luckily enough, I always naturally gravitated towards the interest-based style of learning on my own. I’d get my homework or schoolwork done as fast as possible, and spend all the rest of my time learning about any and everything that crossed my path. It’s essentially the exact same thing I do with this website, so it shouldn’t require a lot of explanation as to the execution of it.
It struck me earlier today that this interest-based method of education is exactly what drives conspiracy researchers. The only difference really is that they don’t have a teacher. In the case of the education style described above, the teacher of course acts as a guide and helps the student to select sources and see connections they themselves wouldn’t see. Without such guidance, we end up with conspiracy theorists, who at their heart are nothing more than highly motivated self-directed learners. This is probably the most valuable aspect of conspiracy theory, I’d say (much moreso than the “modern myth” argument).
When people embark on their own quest of learning, it’s only natural that they will fall prey to poor sources of information, or that they will be working with blinders on and miss connections that should be important to follow to flesh out their ideas. I might even go so far as to say that this is really the number one problem affecting conspiracy theory today: conspiracy theory is a self-directed learning program undertaken by people who have not been trained to learn like that.
Interestingly, the focus in conspiracy theory is basically: connections, connections, connections. You’re always trying to find what links to what, and who knows who, and who said what, and where did they say it. You’re always taking stabs at moving your quest outward into the peripheral practical applications of it. But it can be very hard to do without someone else acting as a guide to help. Then people end up latching onto ready-made guides such as Alex Jones, David Icke, or Laura Knight-Jadczyk. But instead of viewing such people in their proper role as guides to self-directed learning, people end up swapping in their public-education models of “teacher” as the-one-who-gives-answers. And the self-directed learning impulse is effectively shut down again.
I guess the thing I want to look at then is how to teach people to be effective self-directed learners. How do you pick out good sources of information? How do you train yourself to look for the most useful and broad types of connections to enrich your program of self-education? I’m also curious to hear from other conspiracy theorists and find out if the “self-directed education” hypothesis holds up. Were you like me as a kid and all throughout your life: always going out there on your own and avidly tracking down the things you were interested in? How did you learn to do it well, and how can we teach other people to do it better?
- Unpredictability of Self-Directed Education
- Is Self-Taught Better?
- Conspiracy Evangelism
- Notes: Dance This Into Existence
- Choosing Information Sources
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- Next: Perdita
July 14th, 2005 at 1:23 am
boy. interesting question.
I can’t say that I’d ever had much faith in anybody teaching me anything. It was a bit of an obstacle when it came time for me to really get involved in the buddhist master/disciple relationship, or to a lesser extent in the martial arts. In school I had pretty much always been exposed to an idea through my own curiosity before anyone bothered to try and teach it to me.
So i guess you could say I’ve always been a self directed learner. In cases where i ‘m faced with the possibility of digesting whole chunks of someone elses thought, I’ve always kind of weighed it in terms of whether it made the world more interesting to me or not. I’ve always worked from the premise that things HAD to be way more interesting than everyone was telling me, otherwise things would be too boring and stupid to bear. So, anything that seems stupid or unimaginative or poorly designed is highly suspect for aesthetic reasons if nothing else.
July 14th, 2005 at 2:58 am
I was always avidly tracking down things that interested me. So I completely agree with the idea that if a conspiracy, even if it were true, wasn’t particular interesting, I wouldn’t think too much of it or at least build too many creative connections. Plus I’d probably think that other peoples’ obsessions with it were… excessive. But hey, tell me that it has to do with the golden ratio and the Illuminati, and I’m all about it!
As a kid, I don’t know how many non-fiction books I pulled out of the library every week, but I always left with stacks in the 20s and 30s. For example, I’m not sure what planted the “I want to be an archaeologist”-seed into my head, but in Kindergarten I was obsessed with it. So, not too much of my learning started in the classroom. Most classroom work was extremely boring, and I always had to take things down the creative/analytical route before they were at least remotely interesting.
But as for now, It’s way too easy to just hear things on the news these days, and get information from the internet. I wish I had an answer to “finding good information” though, particularly on issues that aren’t widely accepted, or are very new. I’m just really glad I’m not a little kid right here and now. I wouldn’t know what to believe. I really do think information/availability overload is a major problem these days. Sometimes there’s so much clamor over an issue that I become completely apathetic to it. I really don’t have any good solutions for “too much information,” on the other hand.
July 14th, 2005 at 6:52 am
i will read stuff that i don`t understand. like a lot of the gnostic inquiries that you make. i pour it in with the confidence in some synthesis in the future. i guess that`s what happens working with clients too. sometimes the answer immediate and sometimes the process is longer, but i have confidence that i will find answers in the end. i know that my education never stops either. i am constantly curious and that spurs me onward to insight into health, spirituality and the vociferous fringe sciences where the real truth about the universe lies, not in the nasa myth.
July 14th, 2005 at 8:20 am
I have always been a self-learner. Ever since I was a kid, most of my learning took place out of the classroom. Furthermore, in HS, I pretty much just tuned out in class and would study the stuff on my own. I learned all of my math that way regardless of whether or not I had a good teacher. In college I started relying on professors - big mistake, it even showed up on my GPA. The classes where I did the best were those where I basically taught myself.
So I think you hypothesis is largely right - people attracted to conspiracy theories are generally self-motivated learners.
July 14th, 2005 at 9:21 am
*wonders if this is relevent*
http://www.hermetic.com/bey/conspire.html
July 14th, 2005 at 11:21 am
Self directed learning and the inadequacy of modern schooling are prevalent themes in the works of John Taylor Gatto [Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling] and Daniel Quinn, best known for Ishmael, a Turner Award winner, though given the interests of your site, you’d also like his The Story of B, Beyond Civilization, and [particularly] The Holy. Sudbury Valley School is probably one of the best known self directed schools.
S’funny. I’ve always found the idea of a self directed school fascinating AND I’ve always dug a good conspiracy theory, but never actually linked up the two.
Nice.
July 14th, 2005 at 11:27 am
Yeah I’m gonna dive into Gatto’s work on this, cause he’s a great resource.
July 14th, 2005 at 11:36 am
On top of Gatto, there is also string theorist, poet, and playwright, John Mighton. He was actually offered a guest-appearance in Good Will Hunting. About a decade ago, he approached the Ontario School Board with a system of teaching mathematics that is radically different. He would apply the teachings for one year to children in-between grades 3–6 and they could come out knowing their high school math and some had gone on to learn entry-level university physics theory.
Till this day, school boards still won’t incorporate it because they say it would be too timely to teach other teachers. So Mighton, frustrated, started the JUMP Program (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies), where he’s taught hundreds of volunteers, and they, in turn, work with more and more youth.
This is also an interesting article, Conspiracy Theory as Naïve Deconstructive Theory.
July 14th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
I think a very large hindrance to self-directed learning is that most everyone, in their heart of hearts, are obsessed with what other people will think of them. The fear of being rejected, we are colonized by it, it haunts our dreams, drives our nightmares, looms over our sense of self-worth like an anvil suspended by a thread. People can insist all they want that they don’t care what anyone thinks of them, but (often unconsciously) seeking the approval and acceptance of others is a very hard thing to escape from, especially if you don’t truly realize how deep the “other-directed” addiction runs. It functions like an internal filter, making it difficult to fairly evaluate the particular status quo you’ve hitched your wagon to, while processing information that seems to contradict what you thought was a given. Even if you do manage to step outside the box of acceptable behaviour and thought, chances are you’ll end up falling in with the ready-made guides, because the subcommunities of believers they bring with them will provide the group approval and positive feedback that might otherwise be missing. It’s much harder to be a Jacques Vallee, for example, where even the other UFOlogists get mad at you because you won’t go along with the popular theories.
This kind of thing is obviously what drives the conservatism of the “non-conspiratorial at all costs” mainstream media, you can hear it in their tone of voice, you can even see it in their body language, they desperately want to stay within the realms of what is safe, acceptable, predictable. And that is the thing about self-directed education - is this epitome of the unpredictable, you have no idea where it will take you, no idea how many mistakes you might make, no idea how many sacred cows will have to be abandoned, if you really let loose and go after it. So you have to get past it, learn not to indulge it - the fear of being laughed at, the fear of being eventually proven wrong (a big risk if you push the envelope), you have to learn to internalize the Taoist axiom that if you don’t run into a lot of resistance as you move through life, then you must be doing something wrong.
July 14th, 2005 at 2:54 pm
[…] urces
I want to continue with some of the issues I raised around the role of self-directed learning in conspiracy, occult and “ […]
July 14th, 2005 at 4:44 pm
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