I still remember the first day in Class two when we received our textbooks. The books were full of colored pictures, illustrating the stories, lyrical poems and sweet stories. While reading one of stories, I was also looking what story, others’ are reading. There was a race to find an amusing story or poem and triumphantly read it to fellow classmate. I was reading loudly the stories to my mother, cousins and friends after school and was waiting anxiously for evening so I could read them to my father. At evening when my father returned from work, it was my solo show of reading…… I doubt that I can find any other happier and triumphant day than the first day of class 2 when I learned that I can read books without any aid……
It didn’t stop there as I was enjoying my this newly acquired skill by reading voraciously the story books from my school basement library (fortunately our school had plenty of story books for children), buying from stationary stores (You could buy story booklet; that had illustrative paperback covers ranging in prices from 50 pisa (100 pisa = 1 rupee) to 10 rupees), trading or borrowing books from friends. I was bringing chalks from school and writing everywhere I could find space from roads to walls…..
I am sharing my childhood triumphs from learning reading skills to illustrate, how learning the basics of a new skill change our behaviors and perspectives towards others and other objects…
Another important thing is that every skill has its basic vocabulary and grammar needed to be learned and some of the skills that we value and wish to have but we just want to do them without investing time and resources to learn the basics….
Let me illustrate,
Creative works like drawing, painting and making sculptures, etc are thought as a domain of naturally gifted artists… The reality is a lot of people even don’t try to learn the basic skills in order to know whether they have an aptitude for creative works or not? If one learns the basic skills, he might celebrate his creativity triumphantly as I was celebrating in childhood by learning the basic skills of reading…….
I am sure that everybody knows how it feels when one realizes the barriers of basic skills creating an island between him and his passion….
In our times, the English was taught from class 6th onward… there weren’t English language centers… I was taking some tuition in learning English after school but they lacked an expert teacher and also books… Some of my fellow classmates had access to a University Professor who was teaching them English and they become good at English to a level that they started reading English short stories and novels… For me it was a hidden world. I wish I could read those books to learn what is inside but I wasn’t able…. Believe it or not, I tried to memorize the dictionary as one of my friends who were in lower class was trying…. We were exchanging our new vocabularies whenever we met, so we could soon become able to enter in minds of English thinkers….
I still carry these feelings with me, when I learn about French philosophers and writers whose works are not translated in English. Chinese literature is a hidden world for me and I don’t feel good that I can’t access to this world……. I can know some glimpses through translations but I know that they are not the real soul and spirit of China thousands of years of intellectual journey….
Now that it is clear that a new skill opens a whole new world to us or we start looking world with its new looks….. Let’s see that whether we really know how it really works or we just follow it unconsciously…
During Socrates time….there was a priestess, well known for her wisdom…. When Socrates heard about her, he decided to apply his cross-questioning technique to measure her wisdom. He went to temple and they had a full night of conversation….next day, some asked Socrates…..”What did you find? Is priestess, wiser or you?...”….”I found myself wiser than priestess as I was aware of my ignorance but Priestess wasn’t”…..
Knowledge of one’s own ignorance became as a symbol of wisdom…. So it became a tradition to deny your knowledge and acknowledge your ignorance in order to show your wisdom. There is no doubt that everybody is ignorant to things out of his domain but the behavior of denial became a trend…..
The outcome of this trend and behavior come as a slow diversification of disciplines of knowledge….
Let me illustrate,
In last few years Edward De Bono’s thinking hats became famous among decision makers… Just by changing your thinking hat, you can think very differently…. You didn’t gain no knowledge…you are still ignorant to fields and things outside of your domain….where come all those of new ideas?
They come from new perspectives….acknowledging ignorance is good but acknowledging ignorance as a show of wisdom is a wrong behavior as it stops you of changing your thinking hat and make you live with a single life perspective……Changing thinking hat is a skill introduced by Edward De Bono…..
There are countless of skills that learning them make you able to have new products out of what you know….and even more to realize that you know more than what you think you know………
Sometimes people confuse Science with scientific information….While scientific information is necessary as a raw material the Science is a mechanism or machines to investigate hypotheses or questions…. The same is true about philosophy…. It is a mechanism by which we find answers for hypotheses and questions…. The product of philosophy and science is different just as by changing thinking hat you get different answers to same questions…..
In our time the emphasis on innovations and new ideas have forced us to abandon the traditional behavior of denial and look for new kinds of thinking hat to reproduce innovatively what is known…. And there is unlimited possibility in this trend….. Though this new trend has not fully rooted yet we are looking forward that as globalization and digitalization have forced us to abandon the traditional behavior, the quantum computing will make this new trend boom….
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