I’m reading Doris Lessing’s book “Mara and Dann”. First of all, it is an excellent text for the process of the rejection of self pity. I find it useful to read narratives by authors who describe great suffering and personal difficulty without ever lapsing into sentimentality or self pity. Andy McNab does that very well too, and the only fiction I’ll likely read this year is by those two. Ms. Lessing was no Spec. Op soldier, but she is sure as hell tough as nails. I like her a lot. If I could meet any living person, it would be her.
In any event, I’m digressing. Education in a culture in the future that has been ravaged by famine, war, and “climate change” (she got the Nobel, I think, largely for this theme, even though the change in question was a new Ice Age, which I personally think is more likely than global warming) consists largely in the teaching of observation and deductive and inductive logic (I get them confused, so I won’t pretend to use them correctly individually).
Specifically, the parents of young children start asking them at a very young age “What did you see today?”. The children answer: I saw stones in the river, trees by the river, some were dead, I saw two monkeys and a turtle.”
The adult then starts asking questions, like “why do you think monkeys live in trees?” Why do you think river rocks are smooth? If they aren’t all smooth, why are some rough? Why do turtles have shells, do you think? Why do you think those trees died? Etc.
The goal is to teach observational awareness. I was thinking about this today, then thought about the Sherlock Holmes story where he tells Watson he is an idiot for not knowing how many stairs there were in his house, which he traversed daily for years, and then decided to count the steps on my ladder. 12′ ladder, 12 steps. Being the genius I am, I thought HMMM, maybe the steps are 1′ apart. Not many people would be that clever. That was my own idea. So I measured them, and lo and behold they were exactly 1′ apart.
In any absolute sense this doesn’t matter in the slightest, but I find the idea of approaching the world that way–of recounting for yourself what you saw daily, and trying to draw conclusions from those observations–intriguing. I would suggest this to my kids, but they don’t like to be overtly taught. I had been doing something similar to that with them anyway.
For example, when I saw a patch of flowers along the freeway on the way to Missouri, I speculated as to whether they were natural or planted. What we saw was that color only occurred at the edge, and nowhere else. Yet, the grass was mowed, so we couldn’t eliminate the possibility that they has simply been mowed down. How do we test ideas? We find a patch that is NOT mowed. When we did this, we saw that indeed those flowers still only occurred on the edge, and therefore had likely been planted by the State. Then we got to talking about who paid for it, and how they did it. Was it by hand? Did a special truck spray seeds? How? Etc.
These sorts of things sound dull, but when you actually start trying to figure the world out, it’s quite entertaining. For myself, I watch internal pictures all day, so most days if I played this game, it would be a summary of ideas. That’s useful too, in its own way. Really, this post is an example of that.