“I suspect that at its best your education’s main motive is to fuel your curiosity and teach you how to find out things for yourself. This is adequately simpleminded to cover the situation. Nothing much is remembered without the emotion of curiosity. Even your dogs and cats are full of it. You are unlikely to feel emotion for material unless your teacher has it. The educationists seem to think in terms of methodical steps but a teacher brimming with passion for the subject is what actually works.”
– Jim Harrison, Off to the Side: A Memoir
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“We have to entertain in order to educate, because the other way round doesn’t work.”
– Walt Disney, quoted in The Power of Ignorance by Dave Trott
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What is entertainment but a way to keep us interested enough to see what comes next?
Learning only takes place if we are curious to know the answer to a question. And we are most curious to answer our own questions.
What a wonderful state to experience, this entertaining ourselves by self education.
Autodidact means a self taught person. And anything we truly want to learn or master has to be experienced and deemed worthy of knowing for it to be retained by by our selfs.
Formal education is a type of game. I realised this quite early on. You can move the pieces around, wear the mask and achieve reasonable results, as measured by the powers that be.
What is most important though, is to find out what truly interests me. If we are lucky, a teacher can set us on a course of curioisity based on their own enthusiasm. But most of the time we have to seek it out for ourselves.
It is encouraging to realise that curiosity requires minimal equipment. I don’t need an IMAX screen and Dolby Surround Sound to keep me engaged.
I have the best entertainment system that money cannot buy: a curious mind, attached to eyes and ears that provide me with the full reality experience of self-education ergo self entertainment.
I’ll check the listings to see what’s showing next.
It’s whatever I want it to be.
Conversations With Quotations 