Adele Seronde Blog

The Soul of Education        2/5/12

I believe that true learning has a soul.

It has a spiritual center that inspires us to love, trust, and wonder!

We are curious to observe and really see what is alive, moving, and exciting around us. Who are we and what do we love doing?  What do we know about our bodies?

Can we run and jump, swim and dance? Can we paint and sculpt, sing, or make sounds with different instruments.

Do we create music?

We can touch each other or the grass on the ground, smell the flowers, and feel the water in rain, in rivers, in oceans.

The fragrances of the world are perfumes to our memories, bringing back to those ‘whole’ places and the people we love.  All our senses enrich us, cause us to fall in love with the beauty of each other- to some action we make, or a flying eagle, a hummingbird- a leaping deer, a butterfly hovering over an iris, a huge wave foaming at a beach, a tree’s yellow leaves falling in an autumn wind!

            The soul of learning is in each of us, in what our hearts can hear, can feel. It is in our minds when if suddenly or thoroughly one understands a fact, an idea, a dream, and a whole concept.

This is what school should also be about:

What magic of learning can touch our hearts?

Computers are a Universe unto Themselves   2/5/12

            Computers are a universe unto themselves—not mine, however! They are the 21^st Century’s new medium, just as the Guttenberg Printing Press was the new medium for transforming old-fashioned quill writing to printing by machine.

            Television is one of today’s new media, a visual way of thinking. Now  computers are changing the way children think, act and create. It is the means by which our new freedom on the Internet is reaching out to the whole world! Marshall McLuhan, famed author of The Medium is The Message, would be thrilled!

            Of course, there are both new ideals and temptations; as usual, our technological knowledge is way more advanced than our ethics. But it seems to me that our children impacted in two major ways: one, that both the methods of using the computer and the content of what they can discover is so much more exciting than the watered-down pabulum they are getting (for the most part) at school, that they have an easy and pleasurable out from homework; they have someone else’s ideas immediately at hand; they do not need to think for themselves.

Computers use up TIME!      2/5/12

Another major impact of computers on education (besides changing our way of thinking, seeing and acting) is their abnormal use of time! When is there time now for hiking or riding, swimming or any kind of physical exercise? Is there time for any kind of interrelating with nature, like fishing or mountain climbing, surfing with gigantic waves, watching the undersea gardens of fish while snorkeling? Children can get all these vicarious actions on television or the computer without experiencing them first hand.

Life becomes big game. Children can see violence, murder, stealing, and rape- 24 hours a day! Actually seeing a murder or other cruelty becomes another game, which can be simulated without thought of consequences.

Unfortunately, there are few real antidotes, and who wants to choose anyways? Where are Shakespeare and Conant Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe or Mark Twain? Where, today is Lincoln? Prayers are forbidden in school, and ethics are forgotten. The boring lessons in most classrooms can easily be forgotten for the much more stimulating practice of gang warfare!

The worst handicap of the new media is that it usurps our time for silence and thinking, for choosing other paths!

“In most of us there is the capacity for powerful intuition, artistry and a depth of feeling that needs to be awakened and nurtured, to feel the light, the radiance of an idea, pouring through. Shamans, artists, poets, musicians, painters and all people touched by grace hold the wisdom of the past and the future in their visions. Encourage them to project their knowledge to quicken the spirit and vision in all of us.”

“Changes are beginning to happen. People need not only to hear new voices, but to become them…people must find out how to work with the Earth, to co-create a new world of re-enchantment and caring.”     

 

“Most immediate is Gaia’s voice in multiple tones and octaves. It is heard in the profound depth and poignancy of the whale song, in the ultrasonic cries of migrants from the rainforests, singing of a million insects, fish, or crustaceans, birds, the roars of waterfalls or oceans, the mute pleas from the broken rock of open pit mines, your blood and bones and your hands. Listen, and BE.”

   “Down through the decades, I’ve learned that we can translate the meaning of gardens into our daily lives as places of inner radiance in our minds and hearts. We can nurture gardens of our soul and create places in which to build communities around planning, planting and maintaining physical gardens.”

2012 Voice of Concerned Activism