Beyond The Blinding Light
For all The Sun these Trees have took,
The Forest floor in Dappled Shade
has Nurtured Thought from Mind to Book
and with that Seed a Woodland made.
Though Sunbeams Shed their Rays Unbent
it’s in The Shade Beyond the Glare,
Where Lies a Subtle Truth Unspent
that we might Capture Hidden There
So, Stare not Blind Toward the Light
keep Measured Gaze at All Around,
for Sunlight Shows not all of Plight
Nor cares that it is Ever Found.
Cloistered
In a cloistered courtyard
of mosaic, tree and font
where bees and scholars long sparred
though not by way of want
The echoes of their learning
reverberate through time,
as if shadows slow returning
to close the circle of a rhyme
Their learning slipped like seasons
through the orbit of an age,
its lofty purposed reasons
were but theories in a cage…
the keys to which have rusted
and too long now lost their turn,
by those who were entrusted
that those who follow, learn.
Thanks for your ideas.
I would say that the purpose of education has always been to direct the energies and creativity of youth and the uninitiated into forms useful to greater bodies like academia and religious thought. Maybe it is that it is only a relatively recent development that the education of the individual has been superceded by the education of the masses to include society/societies as a whole.
In saying that, I wish to claim that it is absolutely necessary to the methodology of modern education for the modern educator to limit both that which qualifies as knowledge and he/she which possesses it. That doesn’t speak to the quality of the knowledge, but only the scope of it.
This is all a matter of expedience. Convenience. But, in fact, it’s a closed loop of loss and gain.
Where does it end?
Entropy is the answer.
Personally, I think that mass education is living its dying days. It’s soon to become outdated by technology. The only hope for it is the idea that the masses require daycare for their offspring while they go daily to their 9to5s.
Why bother?
The subject of humans failing to learn from history and repeatedly returning to catastrophe is one I have seen addressed on WoL many times. I have seen Uilleam refer to it on more than a few occasions, sometimes directly and often indirectly in his subject matter.
It occurs to me and I’m sure to many others that we do not learn from history, indeed Georg Hegel coined the very phrase that the one thing history teaches us is that we do not learn from it.
There is a subtle difference between not knowing of historic events and that of repeating their failings knowingly. My scribble suggests an absence of knowledge/learning which is readily available rather than the deliberate ignorance of reapplying that which is already known. It seems ridiculous to me that we live in an age where we have open access to more information than we have ever had before yet we fail to utilise it or even make ourselves aware of it.
I suspect this condition has very much to do with the ego of men, each one believing he knows more or better than his predecessors. Of course this must occasionally be true and that is how we progress, but in the times we fail we regress each time a little further. With that in mind it may be that mankind will never move too far beyond the folly of individual ego even in the presence of knowledge and wisdom.
In that respect Uilleam you are 100% correct when you detect the element of sadness in the final verse. It offers little hope.
I wonder if at some point a universal criterea might be developed measuring what we know of outcomes in regard of historic decisions, their success or otherwise. Then with that resultant knowledge make informed decisions whose outcomes are more likely to be favourable to humanity. Of course all this would be dependent on consent and some form of democratic process.
I would imagine that any such process might evolve with the inclusive use of AI alongside human thought. This being the new revolution of our time would make it an extremely dangerous time in human evolution. It is though my personal belief that human evolution is perpetually in extremely dangerous times.
What think you?
NB: We all are the entrusted.