Our purpose in the world and how we learn it. A universe of thought. Le Guin

[Ian Carmichael]

Here are many thought starters. Life, nature, purpose, education, learning, story, stewardship, environment, responsibility, truth, myth, meaning. Sheer delightful reading, Literature and the SAT's. In these 3 pages from Ursula LeGuin's The Telling (143-145) there's surely here part of the meaning of Blake's lines "a universe in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour"

…he was a fluent talker, and he got going, mildly enough at first:
“Animals have no language. They have their nature. You see? They know the way, they know where to go and how to go, following their nature. But we’re animals with not nature. Eh? Animals with no nature! That’s strange! We’re so strange! We have to talk about how to go and what to do, think about it, study it, learn it. Eh? We’re born to be reasonable, so we’re born ignorant. You see? If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost on the mountain, doesn’t it? And dies in the night, in the cold. So. So.”
He rocked his body a little.
…
[He] rocked and frowned.
“So without the telling, the rocks and plants and animals go on all right. But the people don’t. People wander around. They don’t know a mountain from its reflection in a puddle. They don’t know a path from a cliff. They hurt themselves. They get angry and hurt each other and the other things. They hurt animals because they’re angry. They make quarrels and cheat each other. They want too much. They neglect things. Crops don’t get planted. Too many crops get planted. Rivers get dirty with shit. Earth gets dirty with poison. People eat poison food. Everything is confused. Everybody’s sick. Nobody looks after the sick people, the sick things. But that’s very bad, very bad, eh? Because looking after things, that’s our job, eh? Looking after things, looking after each other. Who else would do it? Trees? Rivers? Animals? They just do what they are. But we’re here, and we have to learn how to be here, how to do things, how to keep things going the way they need to go. The rest of the world knows its business. Knows the One and the Myriad, the Tree and the Leaves. But all we know is how to learn. How to study, how to listen, how to talk, how to tell. If we don’t tell the world, we don’t know the world. We’re lost in it, we die. But we have to tell it right, tell it truly. Eh? Take care and tell it truly. That’s what went wrong. Down there, down in Dovza, when they started telling lies. Those false maz, those big munan, those boss maz. Telling people that nobody knew the truth but them, nobody could speak but them, everybody had to tell the same lies they told. Traitors, usurers! Leading people astray for money! Getting rich off their lies, bossing people! No wonder the world stopped going around! No wonder the police took over."


Now this is for savouring, and reflecting. You could frame a curriculum, even a life around responses to this speech.

But let's be slow to start, and thoughtful to continue, for there's something special here, strong, yet fragile. Let's mind how we go, and how we are...

[Skip Zilla]

You could frame a curriculum around responses to this speech. Shall we all try?

[Ian Carmichael]

I'd want it to be investigative - because the presentation comes with questions coiled ready to spring out!
What is nature? What is innate to animals? How is it shaped?
How do animals communicate? Learn? What is language?
If animals don't have language, can they learn language in any case?
How different are people from other animals?
Are we custodians? How can we be better at it?
Does custody imply static preservation or development?
What kinds of agriculture are there? What risks are there in agriculture? Are there 'right' crops for different areas?

Find some key people in these areas - who's active, and can they share?
Where's the current research and how available is it?
What can you be doing in your community as a result of your findings and conclusions.

And I know I've missed plenty! What is right and how do we know it? How ignorant are we at birth, how much do we learn, how much is innate? Is there such a thing as human nature - or animal nature? Only one nature for each entity or many possibilities?

Any more?

[Laura Gibbs]

Research on language and animals - the best book I know of is by an evolutionary neurobiologist (if I had known what that was way back when I would have become one - FASCINATING) - Terrence Deacon, Symbolic Species. Much information on these topics... although I will confess it was hard to read. Some of the neurobiological research done on animals is truly harrowing. I guess I could not have become an evol. neurobio. myself if doing such experiments is required....

[Laura Gibbs]

Ah, Ian: "But all we know is how to learn. How to study, how to listen, how to talk, how to tell."

Perhaps you are going to get me thinking about - and telling it! - how I suspect that television could be the one of the very biggest problems of all... Human voices, face to face, naturally become a conversation. The mutual process of reading and writing also lends itself to great possibilities of conversation, too, and has done so for many centuries. With the talking and the telling (and writing) comes the listening (and reading) and the studying.

But with the television, though, eeek, ..... I just cringe. That for me is a focal point of how somehow we have become zombie-like, losing touch with the natural flow of self-actualization that LeGuin describing here, a flow that can be all too easily blocked up to our terrible loss.

That, anyway, is what I first thought about when reading this. Thanks for sharing it. I admire LeGuin very much. When I taught high school, Wizard of Earthsea was a book I would share with students - they liked it so much and, thankfully, it is not hard to read at all, but is so full of things to think about. I still far prefer it to Harry Potter. :-)