Unpredictability of Self-Directed Education

Nathan made a really good comment on the self-directed e [...]

I want to continue with some of the issues I raised around the role of self-directed learning in conspiracy, occult and &#8220 [...]

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.

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.

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.

http://www.hermetic.com/bey/conspire.html

So I think you hypothesis is largely right - people attracted to conspiracy theories are generally self-motivated learners.

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.

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.