Apathy

Apathy bothers me more than anger . When I'm angry, I understand the cause, see it coming on, and see it dissipate. Apathy is more elusive. Sometimes I get stuck in an apathetic mindset and I don't know how I got there and worse - how to get out. 

Apathy ties in with desensitization - and we are desensitized in so many ways. Video games desensitize us to rampant violence. Comedy on TV desensitizes us to racist, vulgar humor and makes us critical of others. Lack of healthy outlets to release frustration and anger desensitize us to screaming at one another to get a point across. Impersonal communications such as text or social media desensitize us to how we really connect with others. 

And a personally poignant one - school desensitizes us to learning. 

I was navigating through 'apathy' in Wikipedia and I came across Robert Maynard Hutchins, who I hadn't been previously familiar with. Aside from become the Dean of Yale Law School when he was 30 years old, he has a laundry list of impressive life achievements. As an educational philosopher, he spoke about apathy and the disintegration of our generation. 

His book, The University of Utopia, speaks about a world where students learn about the intellectual concepts behind their majors rather than just the skills to simply 'get it done' - where children are first taught how to communicate with one another and then given the ability to choose for themselves what their school of thought will contain. He talks about having a full range of educational classes which focus on comprehension, rather than just 'getting through the class'. He talks about giving degrees to students who prove masterful comprehension, not just show their 120 credits. 

Utopian, indeed.

There is no question that while going through school my main focus was on getting good grades and getting through it. Not to say that I didn't learn anything, but I was more interested in the simple achievement of crossing the finish line than I was with gathering a deep understanding of the topic which so fascinated me - philosophy. I love philosophy and I loved it then - but it's only now that I'm devoting myself to getting to know it better. 

I'm sure those reading this can remember taking a class because it was pre-requisite credits you needed and you heard it was easy. Did it matter what the subject was? Minimally. And it never becomes as full of an experience as it could have been, and you never learn as much as you could have. 

There are so many distractions outside of class - video games, drinking, social scenes, social media, TV, movies - it's hard enough in this generation to keep focused on school. If the emphasis to really cherish the ability to learn isn't there in the professors, how will it be in the students?

Our culture needs to re-sensitize. Not that we have to become blubbering babies or anything, but we need readjust our grip on reality. If we keep pulling ourselves farther and farther away from reality, there's only so much we can handle before we shut off and ignore it all. 

I think the digital culture is a major culprit, but it doesn't have to be. Technology can aid in our evolution and connection to one another - but people struggle to see the reality that surrounds them when a device is in their midst. It seems more important to type what they are doing, in Facebook, than to actually live it. And the motto for the media and corporations, who keep making more and more and more, seems to be, "if it makes money, who cares what it does to our human culture?" 

Ah, I get apathetic just thinking about it. 

Slov

Asking Questions

I've always been one to ask a lot of questions. When I was young I remember asking question after question, wanting to understand 'what this means', 'how this works', and 'why this is'. My parents were willing to indulge my questions, but it wasn't too long after going to school that I started to develop negative correlations with my many questions.

When I was in school, I had a feeling of isolation from a number of my classmates. There were kids who weren't listening to the teacher, kids who were too intimidated or insecure to ask a question, or kids who weren't motivated enough to ask questions because they didn't realize the benefit questioning could have. Therefore, I felt alone as I stuck my hand high in the air, looking down at those other kids who were slumped down, trying to hide in their chairs.

This latter type of person, the unmotivated questioner, has become an epidemic that I see prevalent in a lot of people (of all ages) today. These people are acting on what they are being told, without questioning it enough to know why they are acting, or whether or not they prefer the action over another one they could freely choose.

It's easy to be pulled along, responding to what you are being told, believing the world is as the people around you are telling it is, and not worrying about other possibilities of existence. This is due to fear of too many options. To avoid overwhelm and failure, we settle.

I did and still do think that it's important to ask questions. I wouldn't have been able to self-motivate and create things for myself if I didn't know why contrasting behaviors wouldn't be beneficial. Trial and error is how we learn, and it involves questioning ourselves before, during and after our active choices. 

However. The next experience I began having in school as I got older, into high school, was a lack of encouragement by my teachers. Some teachers just wanted to get through their curriculum, other teachers probably felt that holding onto one topic for too long was appealing to the lowest common denominator when they needed to keep an average pace to appeal to the general population of students. Either way, many times I was sitting in class, with my hand raised for five minutes, the muscles slowly losing strength, only to have my teacher admit that they weren't going to call on me because I was asking too many questions.

"A symptom of not listening is asking too many questions". This is something that I wrote down the other day and it struck me. I've been having concerns about my focus and deeply listening - can there be too many questions?

I did stop asking so many questions as a result of being ignored (or so it felt) in class. And then, I realized that to many kids, it was cool to pass notes and not pay attention to the teachers. I was pulled into that world, where I began to perfect my skills of half-listening and multi-tasking.

So was it the teacher's fault? I don't suppose so - with a class full of students you can only answer so many from each of them. Was it my fault for not really listening and just trying to think of a question for everything I heard? I wouldn't imagine so - I was learning how to question and understand everything around me, all the time. What really happened, which was no one's fault, was that I went from one extreme, and once learning it was not ideal, went to the other extreme.

I keep coming back to balance. It's all one huge balancing act, and being too aggressive or too passive in the approach yields similarly unsuccessful results. And there isn't a spreadsheet with numerical limits to my questions to keep me aware of when I'm asking too many - "Oh! No, you asked 6 questions in the past 3 minutes. Sorry, you have to wait two minutes before you have another question in your queue."

Ha - spreadsheets and clearly outlined rules - of course I would ask for that.

I've been attempting to allow my questions to come through one at a time. It's sort of like eating: if I ask a question and sit with the response for a little bit, sometimes when I go to ask my next question I'll realize I'm 'full' sooner than I expected and I don't really need to ask the next question.

I need patience so I can review what I know and have just learned and make sure it stays in my mind, before I go and try to stuff more things in there. Previously, my technique involved replacing the thing I had learned before with the new thing I just learned. Didn't make for creating broader contexts from which more knowledge could be inferred.

Speaking slowly and asking questions slowly - I definitely sound like I'm from the west coast now :-)