Nonsense - Jamie Holmes - Part 4

Nonsense - Jamie Holmes

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 146

  May 26, 2017 

Book 43 - Nonsense - The Power of Not Knowing
Jamie Holmes (2015)
 Part 4 - pages 155-233
Reading Time - 1 hour

Uncertainty can be useful... it can generate innovation. But... our education system doesn't teach us that. The author says that the Western education system is obsolete. Rote learning prepares workers for a world that no longer exists. Lectures in university are as good as reading a text book. We don't teach students how to approach a problem that doesn't have a single right answer. We don't let students know that it is safe to feel confused and to fail. Because... in the real world... things fail all the time! But if... when things fail... we blame others - we are less likely to learn for next time. If, on the other hand, we take responsibility... we are more likely to improve. But... if, when things go well... we are too self-congratulatory... that can lead to errors later as well. When things go wrong... we tend to debrief and figure out what went wrong and how to do better. But, less commonly, do we debrief when things go right... That is of critical importance... we need to know what went right... we are always learning. We always need to be open to being challenged... and to finding a new and different answer.

When we look at something... and if it is close to some category of what we have in our minds... we put it there. But that means we stop scrutinizing it. We look at, say, a candle, and think... it's for burning and making light. But... it has many other uses. If you were really desperate... you could use a candle taper as a shoelace. How? Just break off the wax and free the wick. The trick is to break things down into their most basic component parts. And to identify the key features of an object. Objects can have 32 types of features (weight, height, taste, length, colour, texture, composition... etc)... but when asked to describe an object, people generally miss two thirds of the features of an object!

The author ends with a story from Jerusalem and a school called Hand-in-Hand. The school has mixed classes of Arab and Jewish children, taught by both an Arab and a Jewish teacher. The students are bilingual and there is a direct correlation between bilingualism and creativity. Bilinguals have a better ability to focus, a capacity to inhibit previously acquired information, and an ability to hold information in the mind. Being bilingual makes us think harder. We are comfortable with linguistic ambiguity and are able to get unstuck more easily. Prejudice... no surprise... can be a traced to a general cognitive outlook characterized by a hunger for certainty. We need to be comfortable with contradictory ideas... because the world is an uncertain and changing place.