The Hammock Papers: Irrelevant.

02 January 2017

Irrelevant.

Education ought to be about drawing something out, not putting something in. One of the things that people should be taught at school, is to think critically about the things that they consider most indisputably correct. So all the things that people assume are right, try and argue and find reasons why it might not be right. To be trained in school to argue passionately for something that you believe in, and then to argue just as passionately against it. I think teachers should be subversive, they should be constantly subversive. Why are children bored? Because they are not being made to think. We are boring children, which is a sin. And we’re creating not very good citizens for the future, because they need to be able to think in the round. To think flexibly. And not to be so sure of their opinions that they can shout down people at universities because they don’t like their opinions.

Education shouldn’t be confirming what children are already believing – in that sense the worst possible philosophy is that education should be relevant. It should be maximally irrelevant. It should not aim to tell them all the things they are hearing outside school all over again, but it should be making them think about all the things that people in other times, in other places, believed.

Ian McGilchrist

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL