De -Academize Knowledge, De-institutionalize Learning and De-intellectualize Experience!
Let me share with you why the project to de-school, de-colonize, or even develop knowledge to counter Western hegemony is possibly a failed initiative from the start itself, considering the progressive atrophy of our natural cognitive processes. The real solution doesn’t lie in the modern paradigm of education at all.
One has to deeply explore the way human beings CREATE knowledge itself from direct experience, and understand how modern education turns us into analyzers and storage bins for second-hand information masquerading as knowledge.
Western knowledge system or the operating system of the modern Western mind/worldview has evolved due to dependence on the written text, which also means reliance on codified, readymade ‘knowledge’, or ‘hand-me-down’ symbolic information/misinformation of others. This rewires the cognitive process totally and the west has taken centuries to perpetuate and accentuate this cognitive damage. Even though they are aware of mind-body split, left-brain-right brain issues, fragmentation, etc, they think that it is natural and can be corrected by taking certain measures. This can never happen because the linear mind will not be able to even understand the real issue. It is beyond the linear paradigm and outside the realm of language.
We, who are attempting to challenge the Western knowledge hegemony, are also largely trapped in this paradigm of ‘text’, ‘linearity’, and ‘certainty’.
I.n this paradigm, written text is the cognitive source and conscious reasoning is the cognitive tool. You can deduce how and when the celebrated ‘Age of reason’ happened in western history. (This is the age of treason).
Dependence on Literacy creates the formative condition for Linear, rational thinking, and dependency on certainty creates fear of the unknown and intangible, thus resulting in western culture’s obsession with making things tangible, measurable, and controllable. The loss of subtlety stems from this, making everything ‘black and white’, as they say, which is fundamentally distortive of reality.
Modern schooling (world view) is based on four fundamental flaws and they are –
1. De-contextualized education, cutting the learner from the real context
2. The learner has no active role in the creation of knowledge as experience is removed completely with little or no role for the senses — the tool given by life to make sense of the real world.
3. Language is the cognitive source — The real world is replaced with the written word as the cognitive source, overlooking that the symbolic map is not the real territory.
4. Reasoning as the cognitive tool to conclude, instead of the life-given ability of spontaneous self-organization of personal experience.
Cognition can take place only in the real world and in real-time, and the senses are the tools that connect us to reality. Senses can only deal with the ‘now’. In the real world, we are sandwiched between the known and the unknown. Unknown being a constant element in the act of cognition, reason cannot play a determinant role. Because reason can only deal with what is known! Reasoning and language are for communication.
What is comprehended through self-organization of direct personal experience, has the semblance of order, though this order is commonly misunderstood as if it has been achieved through reasoning. So, by decontextualized and textualized education, you remove the being who learns directly from the context.
As we are accustomed to dealing with ready-made, second-hand knowledge/information, cognitive rewiring takes place and reason is established as the tool for cognition. No wonder there is no creativity in modern schooling. Talk about creativity is pointless as the creator, who is essentially treated as a receptacle, has been removed from the cognitive act. But mental tricks are misunderstood as creativity. This is where the De Bonos thrive — ‘lateral thinking’ and all that stuff.
Dr. Leonard Shlain — What the Alphabet Engenders / The Alphabet vs the Goddess
It is no surprise that Howard Innis and Marshal McLuhan- the medium is the message- took up communication rather than cognition as the subject to study. As you can see, both were concerned about how means of communication impact culture or the individual. They are located within the realm of the language/linguistic world.
The digital, textual, and experiential paradigms need to be understood not from the way they communicate, but from the way they cognize. It is but natural that communication gets priority in the textual paradigm and everything gets defined as per its paradigm. It is interesting to note that the terms literate and illiterate or literacy and orality (Walter Ong) are all based on language and communication, and not on cognition- that is, not on how one makes sense of the world.
I propose to rename ‘literates’ as ‘text cognites’ and ‘illiterates’ as ‘sense cognites’ indicating how one connects/ relates to the world or cognizes. In reality, only through ‘senses’ can one connect, while text disconnects one from the context.
The fundamental shift in our being-ness is caused by cognition and then it extends to communication.
Modernity is the result of language –literacy- which primarily is a communication medium, becoming the source of cognition. Naturally, it impacts our sensorium. Language removes senses, body, and direct experience from the scene. TV, film, etc bring them back; not the natural or authentic, primary senses, but rather, second-hand sensory perception, distorted and dictated by the fragmented and mentally constructed media. This gives an illusion of the senses functioning but in reality, it is still controlled by the mind; indeed, someone else’s mind.
Is it possible to see beyond the paradigm in which we belong? Can the linear, rational, fragmented mind understand the whole?
So how do even begin to address this without some fundamental transformation in ourselves?
The fundamental difference between indigenous, non-literate oral cultures and the Western literate culture is that the indigenous cultures use intuition and insight as frameworks for creating, transmitting, and sustaining knowledge, while the West uses reason. It is through the present educational system that this shift is being brought about, and further entrenched, thus cutting us off from our roots in a very fundamental way.
So, recovering our cultural roots lies in recovering our natural cognitive system which relies more on intuition in a direct, experiential context.
Only from this state of being can we begin to address our problems and to search for solutions.
Otherwise, we will continue the plunder of the earth, which the reason-dominated human beings have been doing for the past 600 years. The present destruction of the ecosystems is a direct result of the domination of ‘reason’ induced tunnel perceptions over intuition, conscious over sub-conscious, individual over collective, self over self-transcendence, materialism over spiritual, anthropocentrism over nature centrism, and so-called scientific (western) knowledge over indigenous wisdom knowledge.
Recovering indigenous culture does not lie in getting back the artifacts from Western museums or doing all kinds of research and documentation or sending our children to present-day schools. There is no true knowledge in the schools. It also destroys intuition, our very tool for acquiring ‘life-sustaining wisdom knowledge’. In fact, recovering indigenous culture might even mean doing away with the present school system, the present institutions/museums, documentation, etc.
Our main obstacle will be how to get rid of the ghost of reason and intellectuality from our being.
I am offering an explorative retreat from the 27th to the 31st of March in Kerala to ‘understand’ natural cognition- cognition in which the context is the content, senses are the tools, and finally, which enables knowledge creation autonomously. The one we used while imbibing our respective mother tongue — choicelessly, establishing the real world as the primary cognitive source, retaining the connection with the world and the word.
Cognitive right is the most fundamental right that enables us to ‘be’, which has no space in the educational paradigm of modernity. To understand this one has to revisit cognition as a biological process given by life which gets damaged when the role of the senses is numbed. But the catch is that this can be only ‘understood’ non-linguistically.
Registration link http://tinyurl.com/2bxuvk4m
https://jinankb5.wixsite.com/naturalcognition
I have also been involved in developing a process for de-fragmentation to cognize the whole and to be whole and integrated. https://beingacademy.in/, https://www.rethinkingfoundation.org/
The attempt is to go from the realm of words and ‘concepts’ (mental world) to the realm of senses and experience.
