Learning What to Ignore

TRANSGRESSIONS: CULTURAL STUDIES AND EDUCATION Volume No: 93

Shirley R. Steinberg, Steinberg University of Calgary, Canada

Series Editor:

Founding Editor:

Joe L. Kincheloe (1950(1950-2008) The Paulo and Nita Freire International

Project for Critical Pedagogy

Editorial Board
Jon Austin, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Norman Denzin, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, USA Rhonda Hammer, Hammer University of California Los Angeles, USA Nikos Metallinos, Concordia University, Canada Christine Quail Quail, McMaster University, Canada Ki Wan Sung Sung, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea This book series is dedicated to the radical love and actions of Paulo Freire, Jesus Pato Gomez, and Joe L. Kincheloe.

TRANSGRESSIONS: CULTURAL STUDIES AND EDUCATION

Cultural studies provides an analytical toolbox for both making sense of educational practice and extending the insights of educational professionals into their labors. In this context Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education provides a collection of books in the domain that specify this assertion. Crafted for an audience of teachers, teacher educators, scholars and students of cultural studies and others interested in cultural studies and pedagogy, the series documents both the possibilities of and the controversies surrounding the intersection of cultural studies and education. The editors and the authors of this series do not assume that the interaction of cultural studies and education devalues other types of knowledge and analytical forms. Rather the intersection of these knowledge disciplines offers a rejuvenating, optimistic, and positive perspective on education and educational institutions. Some might describe its contribution as democratic, emancipatory, and transformative. The editors and authors maintain that cultural studies helps free educators from sterile, monolithic analyses that have for too long undermined efforts to think of educational practices by providing other words, new languages, and fresh metaphors. Operating in an interdisciplinary cosmos, Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education is dedicated to exploring the ways cultural studies enhances the study and practice of education. With this in mind the series focuses in a non-exclusive way on popular culture as well as other dimensions of cultural studies including social theory, social justice and positionality, cultural dimensions of technological innovation, new media and media literacy, new forms of oppression emerging in an electronic hyperreality, and postcolonial global concerns. With these concerns in mind cultural studies scholars often argue that the realm of popular culture is the most powerful educational force in contemporary culture. Indeed, in the twenty-first century this pedagogical dynamic is sweeping through the entire world. Educators, they believe, must understand these emerging realities in order to gain an important voice in the pedagogical conversation. Without an understanding of cultural pedagogy's (education that takes place outside of formal schooling) role in the shaping of individual identity--youth identity in particular--the role educators play in the lives of their students will continue to fade. Why do so many of our students feel that life is incomprehensible and devoid of meaning? What does it mean, teachers wonder, when young people are unable to describe their moods, their affective affiliation to the society around them. Meanings provided young people by mainstream institutions often do little to help them deal with their affective complexity, their difficulty negotiating the rift between meaning and affect. School knowledge and educational expectations seem as anachronistic as a ditto machine, not that learning ways of rational thought and making sense of the world are unimportant. But school knowledge and educational expectations often have little to offer students about making sense of the way they feel, the way their affective lives are shaped. In no way do we argue that analysis of the production of youth in an electronic mediated world demands some "touchy-feely" educational superficiality. What is needed in this context is a rigorous analysis of the interrelationship between pedagogy, popular culture, meaning making, and youth subjectivity. In an era marked by youth depression, violence, and suicide such insights become extremely important, even life saving. Pessimism about the future is the common sense of many contemporary youth with its concomitant feeling that no one can make a difference. If affective production can be shaped to reflect these perspectives, then it can be reshaped to lay the groundwork for optimism, passionate commitment, and transformative educational and political activity. In these ways cultural studies adds a dimension to the work of education unfilled by any other sub-discipline. This is what Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education seeks to produceliterature on these issues that makes a difference. It seeks to publish studies that help those who work with young people, those individuals involved in the disciplines that study children and youth, and young people themselves improve their lives in these bizarre times.

Conrad Pritschers insights abide in contradiction: to learn, we must unlearn; not knowing is a sensible way of knowing; to fill up, we empty out. In our hyper-ventilating, drug-fueled, electrified world Pritscher reminds us that human development takes time: we must act and reflect, wonder and wander, live in the worldright here, right now, just thisand rethink all that we know and experience. He tilts his lance at the petrified orthodoxy we call teaching and learning, inviting us on a wild journey into the heart of education. Here we develop a capacity for doubt and skepticism; here we are uninterested in the dogma of easy answers, focusing instead on the next question, and the next; here we find various twisty paths marked by courage, curiosity, initiative, and imagination. This is the way of enlightenment and liberation; this is education for the unruly sparks of meaning-making energy free people can become. William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar, University of Illinois, Chicago, Retired. In this book, Pritscher writes a brilliantly inspirational call to action. The brilliance in Pritschers work is that he takes concepts like certainty and order, that so many regard highly and defamiliarizes them for us in worthwhile and provocative ways; in the end, we see the wisdom in his new vision. The simplicity of these realizations and the insight that Pritscher shows in collecting these words of wisdom for us make the book that much more vital a read for all of us who are ready to better ourselves and thereby the world at large. The more I get to know Pritscher and the more I read his work, the more I come to appreciate the true wisdom in the message that he shares. I encourage all of you who read this to share Pritschers wisdom with others and to begin to flap your wings towards happiness and goodness for all. Carlo Ricci, Professor, Nipissing University, Canada, Author and Editor, Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, Jual. I have been reading Conrad Pritscher for thirty years. From the outset his work has been conspicuously insightful, daring, even inspiring in this nightmare time. Learning What To Ignore is even more so, the perfect place to begin (if this is your first Pritscher) and the perfect place to resume (if you are, as we all should be, students of Pritscher). Don't ignore this book! - William F. Pinar, Professor and Canada Research Chair, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, CANADA.

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6209-117-7 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6209-118-4 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6209-119-1 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands https://www.sensepublishers.com/

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved 2013 Sense Publishers

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..............................................................................xi FOREWORD ..................................................................................................xiii INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................1 Wisely Ignoring ..............................................................................................7 Chapter 1. MINDICIDE ..................................................................................11 Natural Learning and Emergent Systems .....................................................18 Value Difference...........................................................................................20 Certainty and Uncertainty .............................................................................24 Chapter 2. STRUCTURE and STRUCTURING .............................................29 Context..........................................................................................................32 Integrating Integrations .................................................................................35 Concept Formation .......................................................................................39 Chapter 3 WISDOM and FREEDOM .............................................................43 Research on Wisdom ....................................................................................45 Wisdom and Trust.........................................................................................46 Chapter 4. MISTAKES and THEIR ORIGIN .................................................51 Encouraging Students to Transform .............................................................51 Change and Rapidity of Change ...................................................................60 The (A) Meaning of Learning and Knowing ................................................61 Ignoring and Learning ..................................................................................64 Chapter 5. KAPLEARNING AS A WAY .......................................................67 Kaplearning and Wisdom .............................................................................68 Kaplearning and Abstractions.......................................................................72 What Can't Be Said? .....................................................................................74 More Kaplan .................................................................................................81 Attempts to Explain Kaplearning .................................................................84 Steve Jobs and Kaplearning/Zen ..................................................................86 Chapter 6 KAPLEARNING AND AWARENESS .........................................89 Chapter 7 PRE-EPILOGUE ............................................................................97 Mental Stems ..............................................................................................104

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Chapter 8 ENDINGS AS BEGINNINGS ......................................................109 NOTES ...........................................................................................................117 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..........................................................................................123 ABOUT THE AUTHOR ................................................................................127 INDEX ............................................................................................................129

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank my amazing wife Kay who helps me every day in thousands of ways. I owe much to her and my children and their spouses. They bring me much joy and inspiration, as do my grandchildren (Sarah, Levi, Max, Jackson, Henry, and Alex Pritscher David, Rachel, and Joel May Taylor and Kurt Viers and Jordan Cowan.) I owe much to my former students, my teachers and colleagues at Bowling Green State University. I am indebted and appreciate the help of Paul Sullivan, Kevin McKenna, Dan Tutolo, Leigh Chairelott, Carl Templin, Peter Wood, Bill Blackwell, Samu Sunim, Haju Linda Murray, and Erica Goldson for their ideas, inspiration, and stimulating conversation. I am deeply indebted to Nipun and Viral Mehta, Somik Raha, all of my friends at ServiceSpace.org, and Ijourney.com. They have given me more than I can say. I also wish to thank the great work done by everyone at Sense Publishers. Michael OLaughlin, Jim Guinan, David Geoffrey Smith, and Shirley Steinberg have showered me with ideas and inspiration and encouragement for many years. This book would not be possible without the extraordinary help from Carlo Ricci, David Doane, Bill Ayers, Bill Pinar, Sandra Okita, and Steven Taylor. I am deeply indebted to them and the numerous authors to whom I refer. They have my deep gratitude.

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FOREWORD

Carlo Ricci, Professor, Nipissing University, Canada, author and editor, Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, JUAL. In Re-opening Einstein's Thought: About What Cant Be Learned from Textbooks, Conrad Pritscher (2008) provides us with an eye-opening view of education as it is, and an inspirational view of what it can be. Throughout the book, in part, the focus is Albert Einsteins views on the subject. Then in Einstein and Zen: Learning To Learn, Pritscher (2010) makes a strong case for free schooling, using Albert Einstein and Zen to show how self-direction is a key to fostering compassion and harmony toward others while we are learning and living. He brilliantly shows that students who choose to study what is interesting, remarkable, and important for them tend to become more like Einstein than students who follow the rigid school curricula. In short, students who are free to learn often demonstrate empathy, and less rigid rulefollowing. In this book, Pritscher writes a brilliantly inspirational call to action. The beauty of the book lies in his idea of kaplearning and its naturalness and simplicity. He writes, Natural learning is here called kaplearning. Before kaplearning is given detailed attention, more will be said in order to notice the simplicity of natural learning. At its simplest, then, Pritscher reminds us that learning happens naturally; we are natural learners. Furthermore, with his call to action he appeals to Gandhi, and once again it is pure simplicity. Pritscher quotes Gandhi who states, As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world -- that is the myth of the atomic age -- as in being able to remake ourselves. Remaking ourselves is a call to action that is holistic, in the sense that we need to begin with ourselves, and by doing so our actions will ripple out in powerful ways. This is one of many examples where Pritscher reminds us that the local and the global are interconnected, and that as local beings we can indeed have a broader impact by acting locally. He reminds us of the butterfly effect where a butterfly flapping its wings over China can potentially create a storm over New York, and thereby inspiring us to all become butterflies working toward positive ends. Pritscher is not shy about sharing what he believes is the good life, and this is where his wisdom shines. The ideas that Pritscher shares, as I see them, are simple yet vital; in short, if we are interested in wisdom, creativity, kindness, ahas to arise, and mind-opening, we need to allow people to self-direct their learning. I agree with Pritschers suggestion that one of the most limiting aspects of mainstream schooling is that it operates on the assumption of certainty. That certainty is limiting, is obvious on so many levels. Mainstream schooling works on the undemocratic assumptions that others know what is best for learners; more specifically, mainstream schooling assumes that others know best what learners need to learn, and how best to feed them that information.
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FOREWORD

The certainty of these mistaken beliefs result in a diminished learning environment. And the more certain we are, the more we wound those that we purport to care so much about. The more certain we are, the more we follow the path that we have established in the name of certainty and the less love, trust, respect, care, and compassion we show the learners. In the spirit of mindopening, I am even willing to admit that the certainty I just spoke of, and that is so evident to me is not something I would say I am absolutely certain of, because there may be rare cases where individual learners may self-direct themselves into the worldview promoted by mainstream schooling. Now, as long as these individuals understand the position they are in, and are free to reject it at any time, then I support them, even though I may disagree. Instead, a learning worldview that understands certainty in the way that Pritscher does, is one that is mind-opening; is one that operates with love, trust, respect, care, and compassion; is one that insists on self-direction and natural and organic learning. In short, it is one that may result in less order, as Pritscher words it, and I believe that less order leads to greater diversity and happiness. The brilliance in Pritschers work is that he takes concepts like certainty and order, that so many regard highly and defamiliarizes them for us in worthwhile and provocative ways; in the end, we see the wisdom in his new vision. Pritscher gets us to think about schooling and learning, but also about so much more, about life itself. For example, Pritscher quotes Friedman who reports the following: How many people lie on their deathbed and say, I wish I had worked harder and built more shareholder value, and how many say, I wish I could go on to more ball games, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?' To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff. We are heading for a crisis driven choice. We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but were not stupid. The simplicity of these realizations and the insight that Pritscher shows in collecting these words of wisdom for us make the book that much more vital a read for all of us who are ready to better ourselves and thereby the world at large. Again, each of us needs to think deeply about our life and what we deem important. To make this point, I want to share with you a recent experience I had. First, let me ask you, would you be happier as a doctor or as a pest controller? Well, I recently met someone who is a pest controller and has his own business. His 92-year-old father is terribly disappointed in him to this day. His father was certain that his son should have been a doctor. Instead, his son is a pest controller. The pest controller shared with me that he has a Masters in Science and that he cannot believe how blessed he is in his life. He loves what he does, and says that he is making a very profitable living doing it. As well, he values family and friends and spending time with them. He shared with me that he quickly realized, after 3 months in medical school, that becoming a doctor was not his desired path. He is saddened by his fathers disappointment, but is

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thrilled at how his life has turned out. This end is made possible by selfdirection. This is, for me, an example of what Pritscher is talking about. In other words, we may disagree with the path that someone chooses, but we should support their right to do so. Of course, this does not mean that we can never offer our thoughts, but what it does mean is that when we do so, we do so in a spirit of openness, and with an understanding and a respect for the other. The more I get to know Pritscher and the more I read his work, the more I come to appreciate the true wisdom in the message that he shares. I think he is correct in that self-direction does lead to wisdom, creativity, aha moments, and mind-opening. Imagine a world where people are encouraged to self-direct their learning and to follow their passions. Inevitably this will result in a happier person, and a happier person will likely be kinder. If you have lived your life in freedom, you will likely encourage other to do so. Freedom, of course, does include responsibility. Rather than following someone elses agenda, Pritscher is trying to get us to understand the power in living our own lives. John Taylor Gatto and others remind us that hobbyists and amateurs, who are positive examples of what Pritscher suggests, are the ones that create. In other words, it is in self-directing our lives that wonderful things happen. And creation, as Pritscher reminds us, needs to look to the present and to the future. We need to be sure that what is created is sustainable and sustaining, rather than damaging. We need to look at things holistically and ensure that we are not harming, but benefitting our world and all beings and things within it, in the broadest sense. This is wisdom, and it is living our lives holistically. I encourage all of you who read this to share Pritschers wisdom with others and to begin to flap your wings towards happiness and goodness for all.

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INTRODUCTION
A WAY TO OPENING MINDS

Training Is to FORMATION As Education Is to TRANSFORMATION

How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself. -Kenneth Tynan, critic and writer (1927-1980).

How rapidly is change accelerating? Kari Kraus, information technology professor, states we generate over 1.8 zettabytes of digital information a year. She said by some estimates, Thats nearly 30 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever published. Brian Greene, Columbia University physicist and mathematician, speaks of a theory of everything and multiple universes a multi-verse. He states that old times in physics is about two years ago. With our knowledge already doubling rapidly, it becomes more difficult to integrate disciplines. Multidiscipline connecting and building the general skill of acquiring and generating skills require ignoring relatively less consequential events while noticing more fluid, more difficult to measure, broader events. People making broader, more fluid connections are often more multidisciplinary, and are often less reliant on conventional, uninventive thinking while maintaining ample precision. Evidence of unusually rapid technological change is mentioned by MIT award winner, Ray Kurzweil, who says that we will have a 1000 times more technological change in this century than the last. The first hundred years of technological change will occur by 2014. The next hundred years of technological change will take place by 2021. Technological change will occur more rapidly after that. By 2029 Kurzweil thinks we will have artificial intelligence equal to present-day human cognitive power. He thinks ten years later, artificial intelligence will be 1000 times greater. Research by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Bronman support the need to adapt to unusual rapidity of change. They say: There are about 540,000 words in the English language; five times as many as Shakespeares time. It is estimated that a weeks worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century. Virginia Heffernan stated: According to Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions (Duke University), fully 65 percent of todays grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasnt been invented yet. For those two-thirds of grade-school kids, if for no one else, its high time we redesigned American education.

INTRODUCTION

A recent article stated: It is estimated that 4 exabytes of unique information will be generated this year. That is more than the previous 5000 years. For students starting a four year technical degree, this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study. A Swedish company recently invented a computer program which tracks ones eyes so that a computer is operated with eyes only. More astonishing yet is Miguel Nicolelis research (Beyond Boundaries) explaining the brain/ mind interface. He demonstrates that chimpanzees can play computer games with their brains only. Algorithms have been created which transform thoughts to actions moving towards action (flying a fast jet) as in the Clint Eastwood movie, Firefox. More evidence for extremely rapid change is noticed when a recent candidate for President of the American Psychological Association stated that by 2024, our fund of knowledge will be doubling every 17 days. The memory capacity of the human brain is 2.5 petabytes. The world's current digital storage capacity equals 1 zetabyte. One zettabyte is a billion terabytes. Emergent learning is now more noticed and it implies ground-up and top down skill acquisition. The broad skill of integrating disciplines requires development of discerning judgment, self-direction and interest in making possible broad connections. Discerning judgment, selfdirection and interest in making broad connections more easily arise in open, free environments. Because of the fluidity of broad judgments, their measurement is difficult. Because of societys interest in measurement, numbers, and certainty, what is difficult to clearly measure is frequently put in the background. What if they were more often placed in the foreground? Dr. Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University, is teaching computers how to spot deception and programming them to parse peoples speech for patterns that gauge whether they are being honest. Through algorithms developed with her colleagues, she has been able to spot a liar 70 percent of the time in test situations, while people confronted with the same evidence had only 57 percent accuracy. She said: The algorithms are based on an analysis of the ways people spoke in a research project when they lied or told the truth. In interviews, for example, the participants were asked to press one pedal when they were lying about an activity, and another pedal when telling the truth. Afterward, the recordings were analyzed for vocal features that might spell the deception. For this sort of lie detection, theres no need to strap anyone into a machine. The persons speech provides all the cues loudness, changes in pitch, pauses between words, ums and ahs, nervous laughs and dozens of other tiny signs that can suggest a lie. With more knowledge available it is more difficult to be certain. Certainty, as the term is used here is clarified by Richard Rohr who said: The freedom not to know, not to have answers for everything, to be able to combine a degree of knowing with the degree of not needing to know can be liberating, and help generate broader more satisfying knowing. He thinks we have the security to be insecure because we are beings who are more than cerebral. Schools and universities can profitably help students come to know

INTRODUCTION

that they do not know. Some scholars hold that the beginning of wisdom arises when one knows one does not know. We have, according to Rohr, enough certitude to entertain a good degree of uncertainty, enough full-body knowing that we don't give the whole job of understanding to our minds alone. This knowing does not need to eliminate all doubt but includes creative thought in the process. He thinks with less of a need for certainty we are then more open and receptive. Corey S. Powell, Editor-in-chief, Discover Magazine stated: "It is a beautiful paradox: Uncertainty as the optimal path towards certainty." There is a likelihood for less certainty when quickly adapting and connecting includes risk and fluidity. Many have unconsciously accepted old ideas to the point where excessive certainty is desired in our schools and universities. The desire for certainty has been with us so long we barely notice it. One way we allow excessive certainty is our failure to notice schools and universities mainly require easily measured, relatively less consequential events. The push for STEM courses (science, technology, engineering, and math) thrives when desire for certainty is high. Another type of stem learning (mentioned later-more like mental stem cells) is less certain and more difficult to measure. It includes the skill of "letting go." Mental stem learning 1. is: "Increase the tendency to allow events to happen rather than make events happen. Desire for certainty influences us to neglect the semi-uncertain process by which content is related. Many of us have been trained to unconsciously mistrust estimating and guessing. "Content" relates to a separate sub-whole. A whole larger than any set of content is a dynamically complex process by which content is related. This process is more than the sum of the parts which comprise it. The Miguel Nicolelis neuroscience research supports this. About universities disseminating content while avoiding the process by which content is related, Neal Gabler, Annenberg Norman Lear Center, USC states: There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring for tending potted plants rather than planting forestsIn the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us. It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. In the new article: The Deep Politics of Power and the Curriculum of Disillusion, {in Policy Futures in Education, 10 (3) 2012} the noted Canadian scholar, David Geoffrey Smith, Univ. of Alberta, stated (regarding the phenomenon of specialization):

INTRODUCTION

Young academics today are typically encouraged early in their careers to carve out a niche of specialized knowledge for which they become known as experts. As such, they claim no responsibility for the expertise areas of others. Each person becomes an authority within his/her own intellectual fiefdom, but it is an authority based on isolation rather than collective responsibility for a common good. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of Teacher Education. Preparation of teachers in most colleges and universities today most often takes the form of students accumulating credits in a bundle of different course areas such as Educational Psychology, Curriculum and Instruction, Classroom management, Assessment etc. with little attention to the overall character of teacher formation and the role of teacher within the broader configurations of culture. Again, this profile enables one to say, Im a teacher. Dont bother me with politics. It should be noted that specialization is also a feature of industrial capitalism. Frederick Taylors Principles of Scientific Management, first published in 1911 (see 1997 citation here), outlined the importance, in the name of efficiency, of breaking production activity into small specialized tasks for which individual workers or teams of workers assumed responsibility. Taylor was clear that the big picture of production should be left with managers and factory owners; individual workers had no need of such knowledge, indeed meddling in such knowledge would impede the overall efficiency of production. Today throughout the academy one can see this logic at work, especially since the introduction of neoliberal management policies in the 1990s. A new class of managers has assumed supervisory control of educational practices, for example via pressures to technologize instruction, as well as educational planning targeted at producing graduates who can directly serve the market logic of global capital. Nipun Mehta reported: Practically Preposterous ... and that's actually a double paradox. Because the word preposterous comes straight from the Latin word praeposterus -- a curious conjunction of prae meaning before and posterus, meaning "coming after. So put them together and you've got the before coming after. And that could mean doing things backwards -- or it could just mean starting from where you want to get to. It could just mean Living the Dream instead of Dreaming a Life. And maybe that's what he, Mohandas Gandhi, meant by Being the Change. He was -- if you think about it -- a pretty preposterous man. Gandhiji. Because everyone knew you exchanged blows to fight a battle to win your peace until he came along and placed peace before the battle and the battle before the blows (and the whole point was that you never got that far). Doing things backwards. Practically Preposterous! To Einstein, if an idea was not at first thought to be absurd, there was no hope for it. As we learn how to learn we not only learn what content to ignore, we also learn to ignore some certainty thereby placing the process of relating content and creating content in a position equal or higher than any set of content. Education would then be placed ahead of training and transforming placed ahead of forming. Doing so helps one further learn what to ignore so that larger

INTRODUCTION

multidiscipline events may be openly noticed. As management consultant, Peter Drucker, said: There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Carlo Ricci, Canadian scholar, stated: I think that is what education (what I call schooling-my note) boils down to. Its a technical process or some kind of treatment that somebody does to somebody else, presumably for their own good. And the person who receives the treatment comes to believe this as well, to internalize the need for that process or that treatment and feel deprived if they dont get it or get enough of it. Leibnitz and Newton invented an infinitesimal to help calculate. An infinitesimal is an amount too small to measure. If we can invent an amount too small to measure, it seems likely we can invent an amount too large to measure. Such an invention would probably require ignoring many less consequential events. Such ignoring would also need to include the ignoring some certainty as physicists are now uncertain about M theory (a unification of string theories attempting to explain everything). Physicists are also uncertain about space and time. Space and time are two foundations for all measurement. Science is based on measurement and measurement is based on space and time, yet they are uncertain. When we can accept the uncertainty of the exact size of an infinitesimal, we can accept other uncertainties which tend to provide conditions for cooperation, harmony, and peace. It would be wonderful if educators were working to find an educators equivalent to a physicists M theory. Working on an educators equivalent to a mathematicians zero may also be helpful but wanting certainty often prevents such exploration. Wanting certainty in school and university classrooms is part of our misevolved social structure. The Monthly Review Press states in recently published Class Dismissed: John Marsh not only shows that education has little impact on poverty and inequality, but that our mistaken beliefs actively shape the way we structure our schools and what we teach in them. Rather than focus attention on the hierarchy of jobs and powerwhere most jobs require relatively little education, and the poor enjoy very little political power money is funneled into educational endeavors that ultimately do nothing to challenge established social structures, and in fact reinforce them. Marsh is a Penn State Professor. Einstein noticed that if an idea was not thought at first to be absurd, there is no hope for it. As a result of our failure to ignore certain, less consequential events, our brains and our inquiry are less open. Experimenting with appropriate ignoring is posited to enhance learning. Crises can be reduced with appropriate ignoring. Thomas L. Friedman refers to: "A crisis is coming that will change the way the world works." Friedman thinks we are in a state of denial regarding governments being threatened by world populations that were displaced by floods, record-setting droughts, record-setting tornadoes, soaring energy prices, and greatly increased food prices. While we can't have process without content, making content more important than the process by which

INTRODUCTION

content is related, and a desire for certainty, could well be contributors to this state of denial. About the impact of the imminent great disruption, Friedman says: "Our response will be proportionately dramatic, mobilizing as we are doing more. With a change of scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transportation industries, in just a few short decades we will realize that the consumer driven growth model is broken, and that we have to move to a more happiness driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. Bhutan was the first country to change its measurement of growth from a gross national product to gross national happiness. Bhutan, as a result, has avoided some crises. Eventually, the USA will hopefully move in that direction, and in order to do that, a transformed kind of schooling will need to emerge, instead of our present schooling for job training. An alliance of scientists called Global Footprint Network calculates how many planet earths we need to sustain our current growth rates. Friedman says: It measures how much land and water we need to produce the resources as we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, Global Footprint Network says: We are growing at a rate that is using up the Earth's resources far faster than can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. By now, global growth is using about 1.5 earth's This is not science fiction. It is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. In China's thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today, said China's environment minister. The depletion, deterioration, and exhaustion of resources and the worsening of ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation's economic and social development. Some estimates say artic ice will be gone by 2015. A recent estimate is coastlines (rising ocean levels) may be in trouble sooner than most think. Within the relatively near future, potable water may replace oil as our most desired commodity. Within a decade, Sanaa Yemen could be the first big city to run out of water. That is what occurs when one country lives at 150% of its capacity, said Friedman. May a crisis be here but unnoticed when we note a fairly recent survey which revealed that 18 percent of Americans believe the sun revolves around the Earth. With foundational flaws as serious as this, how can one ever hope to get to epistemic first base, as Friedman states. A possible solution is kaplearning coupled with Martin E.P. Seligmans well-being program (the Penn Resiliency Program). Kaplearning (includes more open inquiry with social/emotional learning plus noticing more-mentioned later). This tends to transform and help one adapt to the soon to-bewidely-noticed rapid change. Minds often deny reality and die when they do not inquire. No one is required to inquire. Inquiry is what we naturally do unless it is blocked by artificial constraints. The school and university need for certainty is an artificial constraint. Excessive remembering what teachers and professors want

INTRODUCTION

one to remember for job training is projected, at times, to be an artificial constraint. When minds don't inquire they often close and deal mainly with static ideas and trivia. When we do not openly inquire we do not notice global warming and other problems facing us. Minds are not static unless they are constrained.
WISELY IGNORING

Is there a certain number of is(s) needed to make an ought? How do different perceptions of what is influence what one thinks one ought to do? How do early experiences, elementary/secondary school experiences, and university experiences affect one's perceptions? How do these early experiences influence our inability to ignore less consequential events? Neuroscience research is showing that a human brains frontal cortex, the part that, at times, helps adults make mature decisions, does not more fully develop until near age twenty-two. One possibility for lack of earlier frontal cortex development may be the fact that schools, and many universities, constrain students from broadly deciding matters of vast consequence from which the frontal cortex may more rapidly develop. Students deciding what to learn and how and when to learn it have vast consequences for greatly improved learning and possibly for further frontal cortex brain development. Too often, teachers and professors believe it is the teacher or professor who is responsible for the students learning thus constraining the students from making consequential broad decisions. When students do not make broad, vast decisions (which the schooling and university obedience to authority frame frequently prevents students from making), students often deal with matters which use only lower levels of consciousness and less frontal cortex. If the responsibility for learning were shifted to the student, we could test whether the frontal cortex development arose earlier. Brain researchers have shown that educating the mind changes the brain. Some researchers use the word "training" for the word education. "Training" the mind (in Sharon Begley's sense (mentioned later) means educating" as I am using the term here. Brain researchers are also finding that evolution has created instinctual unconscious parts of our brains that compete with each other for expression. The frontal cortex, the latest part of the brain to evolve, seems to help consciousness partly determine which competing parts of the brain will win the competition. Brain evolution has been going on for millions of years and brain researchers are finding it is messy. The evolving brain does what works. Many schools and universities do not do what works in terms of developing readiness for rapid adapting and mental evolution. Recent research has shown that a more rapid Lemarckian evolution is now operating to pass on changes to offspring in very short periods. To very briefly demonstrate what neuroscience has found notice what Sharon Begley recently said: The movements of elite athletes are beautiful to watch. But what goes on inside their heads? The best players learn their moves by encoding the whole sequences in the cerebellum through intensive practice

INTRODUCTION

and then, in game situations, activate them without conscious thought. To return a serve, for instance, a tennis player uses her thalamus to focus on her opponent, while the prefrontal cortex quashes distractions. Visual information from the occipital lobe activates the unconscious motor program in the basal ganglia, which passes instructions to the posterior parietal cortex (which calls up automatic movements) and the pre-motor cortex (a staging ground for complex movements). The pre-motor transmits commands to the motor cortex, which orders muscle movements. Swing! Because of the rapid acceleration of technological change, what worked at one time appears may not work in the near future. Can brain evolution be accelerated? The answer appears to be yes. If schools and universities provide conditions whereby students are freed to study what they find to be remarkable, interesting and important in an ungraded atmosphere, the acceleration of brain evolution will also tend to accelerate. In the relatively near future we will have relatively few of the old time jobs, yet most schools and universities are still training students for jobs which will not exist in the near future. With kaplearning and well-being programs, we will have well-being/powerful learning while accepting the fact we probably will have fewer material goods. Simultaneously, with greater selfdirection, we will more readily accept what can't be changed. We are getting close to being too late to do what needs to be done regarding global warming, but our youth, still more open to a wider variety of possibilities than many of us with many fixed ideas, may be able to do what many of us now seem to think is near impossible. What follows presents a kind of learning, initially to be advocated by schools and universities, and later shifted to creative places (maybe everywhere) so different from present-day schools and universities that we do not yet have a name for them. The name of one different approach to learning to help one calmly and happily adapt to rapidly changing, complex events is kaplearning. Kaplearning is helpful for maximizing transformational adaptive shifts. Part of the "more" of kaplearning is learning for well-being as mentioned in Martin E.P. Seligmans Flourish. Seligman is a founder of positive psychology. China and India are the first countries to have positive psychology congresses (2010) partly for growth of national happiness indices. Positive psychology deals with development of well-being/wisdom which will be later discussed. The Southern Poverty Law clinic is moving in the appropriate direction as follows: SPLC sued the Jackson, Mississippi Public Schools over shackled students. The SLPC said:
We've filed a federal lawsuit to stop a school's punitive and unconstitutional disciplinary tactics. The Jackson, Miss. Public School District has been allowing one of its schools to shackle and handcuff students as punishment for minor infractions, such as not wearing a belt or talking too loudly in the hallway. Not only does this handcuffing policy violate the constitution, but it demonstrates an all too common model of school discipline that focuses on criminalizing students at the expense of educating them.

INTRODUCTION

Handcuffing and shackling students is clearly coercive. What is less evident is the excessive obedience to authority frame under which most school and university classrooms operate. Perhaps the Southern Poverty Law Clinic would notice mental coercion and perhaps file a lawsuit to eliminate some mentally coercive school practices. The Associated Press reported in early December, 2011, a 13-year-old boy was handcuffed and brought to juvenile detention for burping in a physical education class in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The boy filed suit against the school principal, teacher and the school police officer. I do not know all the details and it is possible that the detention was helpful. Rather, my guess is that this is an example of the failure of the obedience to authority frame so prominent in so many classrooms at all levels. Students and most citizens could profitably learn to ignore unwarranted and excessive authority. Failure to so ignore continues to encourage Nazi mentality. CNN reported on December 3, 2011, a 9 year old boy told a friend that his teacher was cute. That was all he was reported to have said. His cute teacher did not hear him but a substitute teacher did. The boy was suspended from school for two days for sexual harassment. Another example of excessive obedience to authority and narrow thinking on the part of school officials. The Boston Globe reported a 7-year-old Boston 1st-grader faces an investigation for sexual harassment after he allegedly struck another boy in the groin. The boy's mother says her child was simply defending himself, and that the boy he struck had choked him in a previous incident. Recently, a teacher placed an autistic boy in a bag. These are examples of excessive obedience to authority and narrow thinking on the part of school officials. They occur too often. Learning to ignore grades and degrees may be spreading. In the fall of 2011, a free online, ungraded course on artificial intelligence was offered by Stanford Univ. It was taught by two leading experts, Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun. The course has attracted more than 58,000 students from 175 countries. This class is nearly four times the size of Stanfords entire student body. Several prominent law schools have recently moved to pass/fail grading to avoid ill effects of grading by number or letter.

CHAPTER 1.

MINDICIDE

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials. -Lin Yutang

As Kelly Gallagher stated in Readicide: The standard instructional practices used in most schools are killing reading by much of what they VALUE and do. Standard instructional school and university practices beyond reading often cause mindicide. About these practices Einstein said: "Is it any wonder that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry, for this delicate little plant, besides stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom." There is a likelihood that schools and universities are stifling growth of consciousness by equating training with education. Equating training with education ignores self-directing learning. Training alone does not help one notice that they may be efficiently doing that which should not be done at all, as Peter Drucker stated. Training builds skills. Self-directed learning opens minds to a variety of mind expanding experiences from which chosen skills may be developed. Mindicide occurs when time is spent on excessively absorbing content rather than on focusing on the process by which content is related. The kaplearning process helps students arrive at broader experiencing and mind-opening. In the not too distant future we will probably work less and earn less. We will also have more leisure time. Fulfilling use of leisure time is often augmented by self-directing education rather than training for jobs. Edith Hamilton said: "It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education, so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought -- -- that is to be educated." Students experiences often arise from how a teacher expresses thoughts, feelings, and beliefs as well as the difficult to define "connections a teacher makes with students. The "positive connections" a teacher or professor makes are often much more important than the content the teacher or professor delivers. Some training is certainly needed to become educated. Training is often not an end in itself whereas self-directed learning is for more self-directed learning as John Dewey implied when he stated that education is for more education. Instruction in clearly defined goals (training) allows for easy and certain accounting. Self-directed learning, including
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development of love of learning, and development of free, open inquiry, are difficult to measure, and difficult to account for, yet the feeling of being educated and self-directing can produce a high which those only trained do not experience. Albert Einstein said that education is that which helps one think something that can't be learned from textbooks. Thomas Jefferson said the purpose of education is for students to decide for themselves what will secure or endanger their freedom. Excessive training has had the effect of subverting Jefferson's goal of developing self-direction to free oneself from a variety of constraints. Primarily being trained does not help one think something that can't be learned from textbooks. Diane Ravitch, education expert and author, questions the ongoing influence of businesses and private groups on education policy. An ASCD (Association for Curriculum Development) bulletin reported Ravitch said: These groups and businesses support self-serving reforms such as online learning, video gaming and test-based accountability, which Ravitch argues may not be as good for students as they are for their corporate benefactors. The handing over of public education to the free market makes me profoundly uneasy, she writes. As will be mentioned several times, Laura Vanderkam reported that an article in an American Psychological Association Journal concuded conservative thinkers are prone to fear and aggression, are resistant to change and are intolerant of ambiguity. These conservative thinkers often want the free market to rule everything, everywhere. If free markets ruled everything, everywhere, there would be no public education (although government financed job training would be one way corporations take more from taxpayers that they give). When students increase their ability to self-direct, when they increase their love of learning, and when they increase their ability to openly inquire, what they do surpasses training. Ravitchs recent article uncovered what she called statistical sleight-of-hand when reporting school improvement. Most teachers and professors do not help students self-direct since excessive training is now of prime importance. Teachers and professors, through their programmed training often primarily disseminate information rather than provide conditions for developing student open inquiry. The lesson plans of most teachers and professors (in required courses) often do not include experiences that will increase student's love of learning, ability to openly inquire, or the ability to self-directedly learn. Most courses are required. The federal government's stated goal for Race to the Top grants for States was initially given to States which propose merit pay based on value added. Value added is the difference between a student's expected growth and actual performance during the year with a teacher. These grants are supposed to be designed for experimentation for improving schools. This sounds good but merit pay based on value added to student test scores is often thought to be a poor way of determining merit. The chances of noticeable improvement occurring are slim when training for corporations is

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MINDICIDE

the primary goal of instruction. About the New York City teacher value added scores, Michael Winerip stated: For example, the margin of error is so wide that the average confidence interval around each rating for English spanned 53 percentiles. This means that if a teacher was rated a 40, she might actually be as dangerous as a 13.5 or as inspiring as a 66.5. Nat Hentoff recently said: Some teachers are learning that far too many public schools are sucking the joy and life out of learning and school by viewing education solely through the narrow lens of tests, tests and more tests. The traditional emphasis on learners storing information in their heads no longer makes much sense. The young need to learn to process and to apply information. They especially need to get the confidence and satisfaction of being able to think critically, and, in doing so, become lifelong learners. Otherwise, as Albert Einstein once said, It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. Einstein uses the term "education" to mean schooling. Thomas Friedman reports: "How many people lie on their deathbed and say, I wish I had worked harder and built more shareholder value, and how many say, I wish I could go on to more ball games, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?' To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff. We are heading for a crisis driven choice. We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We may choose the latter. We may be slow, but were not stupid. Movement towards focusing on self-directed learning and open inquiry may be assisted by frequent large scale open noticing (awareness, consciousness). Teachers and professors could profitably provide classroom conditions for open, expansive noticing, at all levels of schooling. Open, expansive noticing also implies higher level consciousness, as well as open, scientific and nonscientific inquiry. Also implied in self-directing learning is a likelihood that one might live more remarkably and peacefully when one is self-directing. A self-directed learner has a greater chance of facilitating consciousness emergence. Consciousness emergence helps one understand the difficult to define notion of becoming a self-directing learner. Research from van Rossum and Hamer support this (mentioned later). Training often includes a trainer dispensing information to trainees while often providing practice time. MIT award winner, Ray Kurzweil, said that kids with a smartphone today have more information at their fingertips than the President of the United States had 15 years ago. He also said that by 2045, computers will be 1 billion times smarter than today. Will we be ready for rapidly accelerating technological change? Jobs are being lost through artificial intelligence today, but the rapidity with which jobs will be lost to artificial intelligence in the very near future is amazing and rarely discussed. David Brooks reports that an Edge symposium was organized around Steven Pinkers question, (What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit). Readers shared their thoughts. Several are placed below from Edge.org (organizer of a symposium).

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While Pinker's question is highly worthwhile and gives us many important ideas to think about, what if the word scientific were removed from the phrase, what scientific concept etc." Other concepts, along with scientific concepts, are probably worthy of consideration, and may lead us to an even more human (cognitive, affective and psychomotor) toolkit. Is our use of primarily scientific concepts the best way to moving toward openness and emergent experiencing? The promoters of STEM learning (science, technology, engineering, and math) seem to pay a little attention to openness and emergent learning because openness and emergent learning are very difficult to define (highly fluid) and are very difficult to scientifically measure. Those wanting to be overly certain seem to be narrow and may be moving toward scientism as a result. That narrowness might now be shifting somewhat as per a recent ASCD report. About interconnecting disciplines and their processes, the ASCD recently reported: Some experts perceive a special connection between the arts and the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) making (STEAM). Mr. Seifter, for instance, points to a 2008 study led by Robert Root-Bernstein of Michigan State University, which found that Nobel laureates in the sciences were 22 times more likely than scientists in general to be involved in the performing arts. Others note that Albert Einstein was an accomplished violinist. And then theres the Renaissance figure who some view as the personification of STEAM: Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian painter and sculptor who also made a name for himself as a scientist, engineer, and inventor. One powerful answer to Pinkers question was given by David Brooks saying Edge.org noted: Public life would be vastly improved if people relied more on the concept of emergence. Many contributors to the Edge Symposium hit on this point. We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their constituent parts. But emergent problems cant be understood this way. Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements. Emergent systems are bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. They have to be studied differently, as wholes and as nested networks of relationships. We still try to address problems like poverty and Islamic extremism by trying to tease out individual causes. We might make more headway if we thought emergently.Wed certainly be better off if everyone sampled the fabulous Edge symposium, which, like the best in science, is modest and daring all at once. Self-directed learning is education and can be simultaneously modest and daring. Self-directed learning is an emergent system. To lead us to more emergent thinking and more emergent experiencing, let us notice the Harvard University battle between Steven Pinker and Lewis Menand. The battle resulted in Pinkers side winning the title for course requirements in culture and belief instead of Menands suggested category of reason and faith.

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It may seem more reasonable to settle for faith not being the equivalent of a reason, as Pinker suggested. Learning what to ignore would help us be less certain and help reduce fixed ideas. As John Dewey said: "The great systems of Western philosophy have all seen themselves as dealing with something which has variously been termed Being, Nature, or the Universe, the Cosmos at large, Reality, the Truth. Into this state of affairs there recently entered the discovery that natural science is forced by its own development to abandon the assumption of fixity and to recognize that what for it is actually universal is process; but this fact of recent science still remains in philosophy, as in popular opinion up to the present time, a technical matter rather than what it is: namely, the most revolutionary discovery yet made. Process involves connecting content rather than only remembering, disconnected content. Broader connections require ignoring of the less consequential to arrive ate the more consequental. Many teachers and professors deal with fixed ideas which are often called "content." Because the process by which content is related is difficult to measure and be certain about, teachers and professors give little attention to process. Content can't be ignored when processing, but process has been ignored as a result of giving lip service to what may be the most revolutionary discovery yet made as Dewey stated. Regarding the Pinker/Menand Harvard battle, Culture and belief seems broader but not necessarily so. Science has faith in the verifiability principle. The verifiability principle can't be empirically verified. Lisa Millers Newsweek article about this Pinker/Menand exchange mentions Harvards education is the pursuit of truth through rational inquiry. Pinker believes religion has no place in that. Pinker neglects to include that education has elements that are beyond reason as may later be clarified. Consider that education has elements beyond reason when trust is noticed as promoting human relations, including teacher/learner connections". Pinker holds that a rational worldview is the highest achievement of the human mind. Miller said Pinkers wife, and novelist, Rebecca Goldstein, said to Pinker: All forms of irrationality irk you, but (religion) is the form of irrationality that irks you most. Pinker says he wants to move away from superstition, witch-craft, and idol worship which is religion and move toward something like a Scandinavian austerity and secularism. The philosopher Friedrich Schiller may differ with Pinker when Schiller held that man is most man while at play. Some forms of play and joyful silliness are more than rational. The way we use rationality with the givens we create may, at times, be seen as a form of play. Once again, when we can choose to reason or not, as in some forms of play, we are not a slave to reason. When we must always reason, we are slaves to reason and may, therefore, be unreasonable. Being a slave to reason may be evidence of lesser emergent consciousness and lesser expansive noticing. A slave to reason is projected to more likely be intolerant of ambiguity, be more resistant to change, and be more prone to fear and aggression. Steven Taylor points out that Freud said: Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

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Pinker stated that requiring students to take a course in a reason and faith category would be like requiring students to take a course in an astronomy and astrology category. He thinks that faith is believing in something without good reasons to do so. Pinker seems to be doing what some early Greeks did. That is, to know the highest virtue only through reason. That made reason itself the highest virtue and Western civilizations still have difficulty noticing that there is more to human interpretation and living than reason; for instance, some forms of play, trust and what Menand suggests. Menand states he wants students to engage fully with the messiness and contradiction of clashing ideas as are found in attempts to unify science and art/poetry. Menand said that Pinkers scientistic worldview, that is, submitting everything, from painting to romantic love to empirical measurement -- leads to a narrow and sometimes wrongheaded understanding of things. Menand thinks that science isnt the only -- or even the best - tool for understanding human experience, and to hold science up as the one and only truth is a kind of fundamentalism in itself. Menands point is powerful and relates to much of what needs balancing between our classic and romantic sides (what Einstein said about our intellectual and artistic sides.) Pinker did not ask what concept would improve everyone's cognitive toolkit. He asked what scientific concept would do so. Pinker includes less fluidity and openness of thought than Menand. Menand would probably ask the question without the word scientific before concept. Menand was courageous in allowing Pinker to win since their battle was not useful if it would have continued longer. Menand was talking about what has been called mental stuckness (functional discontinuity) when he talked about helping students unsettle presumptions, de-familiarize the familiar, to reveal whats going on beneath and behind appearances. We could add between appearances as between the conservative and liberal views, or between the religious and secular views. Noticing what is going on beneath and behind appearances is evidence of emerging consciousness and possible unifying science and art. Open noticing is assisted by primarily focusing on the process by which content is related, rather than on isolated content. There can't be process without content, but primarily noticing separate pieces of content promotes intolerance of ambiguity, resistant to change, and proneness to fear and aggression. The Menand/Pinker battle was somewhat political with neither side being able to prove their position. Some of what is said here in moving toward emerging, open consciousness, (that which generates openness as well as the bases for skills). Being involved in the process of providing conditions for emerging consciousness includes elements that cannot be fully proven. Many interactions between scientific artists and artistic scientists relate to more than can be stated. Pinker's position moves closer to the notion that we can tell what we know whereas Menand's position is more like Michael Polanyis notion in Tacit Dimension -- that we can know more than we can tell.

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Tacit knowing occurs when we can tell when someone has a puzzled expression, but we cannot simultaneously describe, or explain detail, the facial configurations which comprise the puzzlement. This may be similar to Heisenbergs principle of uncertainty where we cannot simultaneously be certain of both the speed and location of a particle. Kurt Gdel's incompleteness theorem in mathematics also applies, as does the Nicolelis principle of uncertainty in neuroscience. All explanations may be incomplete in that more may be included. Including more is an emergent activity. Outdated ideas of science are probably not adequate for 21st-century conscious experiencing. I mention conscious experiencing because conscious experience is more than rational cognition. Much of what Pinker concludes is powerful yet Menand seems to have a more emergent, broader view, not in choosing the reason and faith category, but for his noticing that an excessively rationalistic view can itself lead to a variety of fixities which reduce further inquiry which, in turn, can lead to a fundamentalism, and excessive certainty. Moving toward attempting to explain all experience on the basis of science is scientism. Richard Rohr states our original mistake is wanting certainty. This original mistake tends to submerge rather than emerge consciousness and human experience. While a culture and belief category of learning is important and may be more secular than a reason and faith category, scientists, at times, forget that faith in the verifiability and falsifiability principles is a faith, and exists only through agreement. The falsification principle can't be falsified. Connected to this is the wisdom of Noam Chomsky, which states: "In one of the standard fairy tales, the handsome prince is turned into a frog by wicked witch, and finally, the beautiful princess comes around and kisses the frog, and he is the Prince again. Well, every child knows that the frog is actually the Prince, but how do they know it? He's a frog by every physical characteristic. What makes him the Prince? It turns out there is a principle: we identify persons and animals and other living creatures by property that's called psychic continuity. We interpret them as having some kind of a mind or soul or something internal that persists independent of their physical properties. Scientists don't believe that, but every child does, and every human knows how to interpret the world that way. As we may later notice, kaplearners may both agree and disagree with the notion of psychic continuity. Asking about scientific concepts is worthwhile but more worthwhile yet may be asking about the integration of scientific and nonscientific concepts as well as asking about the integration of thought and feeling and the integration of content and process, and the integration of secular and spiritual. The edge.org reports other responses to Pinkers question: Evgeny Morozov, the author of The Net Delusion, nominated the Einstellung Effect, the idea that we often try to solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms. This effect is especially powerful in foreign affairs, where each new conflict is viewed through the prism of Vietnam or Munich or the cold war or Iraq.

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It appears that being somewhat less scientistic would help find more peaceful solutions to social problems, including problems of how to make schools and universities more powerfully learning oriented for the 21st century. Einstein would seem to agree (with the value of not being scientistic) when he said: "It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure." About ideas Einstein also said: If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. What follows are ideas that may seem absurd to some yet a closer consideration of them may help one change one's mind. Learning changes minds and brains. As Harvard philosopher Joshua Greene said about scientific concepts (when an electronic picture of a dog appears on computer screen): The high-level properties (dogness) supervene the low-level properties (pixels). As supervenience is further explored, we may find that enlarging contexts and including more of the "ground" in the "figure" which we are observing, may help one reach unconsidered levels of natural, self- directing learning. Natural learning is here called kaplearning. Before kaplearning is given detailed attention, more will be said in order to notice the simplicity of natural learning.
NATURAL LEARNING AND EMERGENT SYSTEMS

Educator Steven Taylor remarked: In a recent letter to the editor in our national newspaper, The Globe and Mail (A14, Globe and Mail, July 12, 2011), Henry Milnar (Canada Research Chair in Electoral Studies, University of Montreal) said that voter apathy should be addressed by civic education and electoral reform in order to create interest in political campaigns, social issues and public policy. But to me, it's educational rather than electoral reform that will encourage citizenship. Civic education aimed at engaging students in democratic process and culture is undermined by schools where democracy is never practiced. Children have no say, no interest or stake in the school system that surrounds them; they are not allowed rights of citizenship. Experiencing the power and value of helping make real decisions is the very thing that is conducive to civic engagement; in fact, it IS civic engagement. Respect for democracy cannot be extracted from textbooks, nor applied to students in workshops like a coat of paint. It must exist in the very operation and ethos of the school. Or even better, in the everyday, unschooled living and learning of children, free to follow their own interests. As birds learn to fly, and as spiders learn to build webs, humans naturally learn to learn. When a lamb is born it naturally searches for its mother's milk. Sir Arthur Eddington said: "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. It is natural to explore and exploring uncommon ways of living and learning may help us evolve to more peaceful natural ways of living. Learning to learn may even help us accept economic circumstances when machines are doing much work while humans have much leisure time.

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As Clemson University Endowed Chair of Philosophy, Todd May, said in Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction: Consider the possibility that there is more to our world than we can perceive, and more than we can conceive. Suppose the world overflows the categories of representation that the dogmatic image of thought imposes on it. This is not to say that our particular categories are lacking something that other, better categories would give us. Our imagination must go further than that. We need to consider the possibility that the world -or, since the concept of world is too narrow, things or being or what there is -outruns any categories we might seek to use to capture it. Imagination is a natural facet of brain functioning. Neurologists and brain scientists are telling us our brains can do more than they have done. It now seems natural for the brain to continue to develop even into old age. Letting the brain do what it naturally does (partly by getting out of its way) may be worthwhile to explore. Letting oneself be involved in what may be called the action of no action (wu wei in ancient Chinese), may help us develop schools and universities for the mid-and late 21st century. It is natural not to know some things and events. As a wise man said, if you want to know where you should be, look at your feet. To Einstein, imagination was more important than knowledge and the mysterious was natural. He also thought character was more important than knowledge even for scientists. We can notice clues to what is natural by watching young children, young puppies, or other young animals. It is not that we cannot see what is natural by noticing other events in our lives, but they are more difficult to see partially because of our cultural programming to conceive fixed ideas. Fixed ideas lose the emerging nature of everything. A fixed Western idea is one that cannot be and not be simultaneously. At times, especially in ancient China, that was not so; something could be and not be simultaneously in a beneficial way. A modern researcher, Kaiping Peng, agrees that is true today as stated in his American Psychologist article. Robert Buswell, UCLA scholar, said about being uncertain (doubtful),: By engendering questioning,questioning thus opens the possibility of an entirely new way of perceiving the things of this world, a new way of thinking in which clinging to our own views alone does not hold sway. To truly have certitude one must first have doubt (uncertainty). Steven Taylor said:
Thoreau's (Walden) describes how acknowledging what we don't know through inquiry is often obscured by our enslavement to facts: Thoreau said there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men How can he remember well his ignorance19

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-which his growth requires--who has so often to use his knowledge?... Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them...He has not time to be anything but a machine.

To the ancient Chinese, not doing could be a form of doing. We may be getting back to this now. Paradoxically, reducing some fixed conceptions may help one live a more natural, fulfilled life. A natural life is often spontaneous and joyful. One may find it helpful to explore whether or not to rid oneself of some fixed ideas. What I am suggesting for living a natural life, it may be helpful to rid ones self of what one has learned about excessive competition, selfcenteredness, and greed. When we are less competitive, less self-centered, and less greedy, we can find more peaceful, natural ways of living and learning. Paradoxically excessive striving to rid oneself of competition, selfcenteredness, and greed can be a very competitive, self-centered and greedy act. If we allow ourselves, in an aware manner, to be as we are, we may be on the route to practicing natural wisdom.
VALUE DIFFERENCE

Do most students value study for learning more than for grades and degrees? Professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in a four-year study of several thousand university students, found that 32 percent of university students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. Arum and Roksa said: The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy S. Marks. Large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning. Learning to move ones consciousness to a higher level is often not a stated school or university course goal. Martin Seligman, author of Flourish, states that after thousands of parents were interviewed they said they want happiness, contentment, balance, good stuff, health, love, etc. for their children. They then asked the parents what they want, in one or two words, from their schools. The parents responded; achievement, success, conformance, test taking, discipline, etc. Seligman said: "In short, what schools teach is how to succeed in the workplace. Seligman believes that well-being should be taught in schools and only a part of their well-being can be learning new skills for jobs. In other words Seligman is saying schools and universities need to do more than train for students to remember fixed ideas. Schools and universities need to train and self-directingly educate.

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Seligman states that happiness is more contagious than depression and produces upward spirals around positive goals which help one flourish To what can every human being affirm? Seligman said:
We can all say yes to more positive emotion. We can all say yes to more engagement. We can all say yes to better relationships. We can all say yes to more meaning in life. We can all say yes to more positive accomplishment. We can all say yes to more well-being.

In the appendix of Flourish, p.243, Seligman has a self-administered signature strengths test. Schools and universities give little attention to flourishing as described by Seligman. As reported in Brains Inventing Themselves: Choice and Engaged Learning, the APA Monitor reports on the University of Michigan fall, 2010 semesters theme of "What makes life worth living?" The article states that positive psychology research shows that work, love, play and service to others makes our lives rich and fulfilling. They state it is not material goods that fulfills us. The University is offering special courses, workshops, lectures and other events under this theme. Christopher Peterson, PhD, who is directing the semester along with two other professors, states this topic of what makes life worth living is a way to teach students about positive psychology and for students to think about what makes them truly happy. The University will also host art and poetry competitions around that theme and student dance groups will offer workshops and free performances related to that same goal of helping students learn what makes life worth living. The University of Michigan goal is to encourage an alternative spring break that involves service. Peterson states: There is, of course, no single answer to the question of what makes life worth living, our hope is to underscore the importance of the question and a variety of possible answers." The American Psychological Association is promoting a capstone psychology course similar to the Cornell model which includes scientific methodology while ensuring breadth and depth in content areas while ending with the capstone experience. Choice within kaplearning promotes each course being a capstone course with the idea that there is no capstone without other connected stones. The mental capstone is not a final stone as is a physical capstone. When the process of open inquiry, self-direction and the exploration of what makes life worth living are primary goals of schooling, teachers and professors will find less of a need to disseminate information and instead, will facilitate consciousness raising at the later mentioned van Rossum and Hamer levels 4-6 of learning and knowing.

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The opposite of this wisdom is now being promoted by schools and universities. The Los Angeles Times offers what I consider evidence of the opposite of wisdom. It reported: (6/3/11 that Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: Americans would be stunned if they knew how expansively the government uses the Patriot Act to collect information on citizens.) How far have we removed ourselves from schools and universities providing conditions so that we may decide for ourselves what will secure or endanger our freedom? Some research might place all of Seligman's 24 categories under the general category of wisdom. This wisdom often arises from self-directed love of learning, and open inquiry. Seligmans ideas are mentioned because selfdirected learning/kaplearning embodies the van Rossum and Hamer higher stages plus Seligman's visionary new understanding of happiness and wellbeing elaborated on in his book, Flourish. A basic value difference often arises partly from a difference in noticing. The more closed, narrower views of what a person is holds that a person is one who needs to be forced to learn and conform to a culture whose prime unstated goal is to obey authority. Pressure and coercion are needed to accomplish these goals. Striving for grades and degrees are more important than higher-level learning with this closed, force students to learn view. Nat Hentoff said, (Panel Finds Few Learning Benefits in High-Stakes Exams--Education Week, June 8, 2011): The source of this vital discovery is a committee of the National Academies' National Research Council, composed - as Education Week reports - of a who's who of national experts in education, law, economics and social science. This committee undertook a nearly decadelong study of test-based incentive systems ... While the panel says it supports evaluating educational systems and holding them accountable, it was discovered that this fixation on standardized testing of students collectively not individually - has had little or no effect on actual student learning, and in some cases has run counter to their intended purposes. Wow! Nolan Rosenkrans reported on November 20, 2011 a large school systemss literacy coach stated: We are going to live or die by these tests. In our culture of academic accountability, test scores are king (evidence of widespread narrow thinking). A more open view holds a student naturally learns when given the opportunity to explore what the student finds remarkable, interesting, and important. The more open view accepts greater diversity in thought and behavior. Research reported by the American Psychological Association shows that those holding the more conservative (closed) view are prone to fear and aggression, are resistant to change and are intolerant of ambiguity. Intolerance of ambiguity is near to wanting certainty. The value of an open or a closed view of a person cant be fully demonstrated but as one notices more, one may see the greater long-term value of student openness and freedom rather than fear and coercion. The more open view holds that a more open, self-directing person will opt for learning in schools and universities rather than working primarily for grades and degrees.
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Those prone to fear and aggression, etc. seem to be less peaceful. When one is peaceful, one is often more open. One view of wisdom holds that open people have a greater chance of having right understanding, right-thinking, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. This view of wisdom is also followed in the later mentioned kaplearning. When kaplearning is given attention the reader may later find that kaplearning helps one follow a positive and open direction. The direction one wants to follow often results from a fundamental value judgment at least partly formed by what one notices and experiences. Fundamental value judgments are what one notices and they are heavily influenced by parents and early childhood experiences. Different early experiences help produce different lenses through which one sees. Fundamental value judgments are impossible to logically refute. If, however, as Einstein suggested, there is agreement on certain values and goals, an exchange of ideas is often useful for determining the manner by which these goals may be met. We use logic on the values (givens) we hold. The values themselves are most often pre-logical. Unstated school goals (values) now are tending to train students to obey authority so that our economy improves by providing trained workers for corporate profit. As Erica Goldson so ably stated in her 2010 valedictorian address: "The majority of students are put through the same brainwashing techniques in order to create a complacent labor force working in the interests of large corporations and secretive government, and worst of all, they are completely unaware of it." School and many university classes do not often develop students to be self-directing, open-minded generalists who make discerning judgments. Those who are tolerant of ambiguity, who are open to change and who are not prone to fear and aggression are more likely to agree with Bill Smoot, author of Conversations with Great Teachers, when he said: What can the humanities offer students in the 21st century? Merely the possibility of teaching them to pay attention, to contemplate, to appreciate beauty, to experience awe and wonder, to think with depth and sensitivity about life, and to know there are values beyond profit and self-interest. The humanities teach us habits of critical thought and the historical perspective necessary for citizenship in a democracy. And they help us to think about how to use technology to make the world a better home for humanity. What values do schools hold when training is for more training? A Dec. 2010 ASCD Newsletter mentioned: Elementary schools promote college as the end goal. While education (powerful self-directed learning) is for more education, it is unfortunate when training is often the primary goal of schooling. Education as I am using the term, has primary goals of developing self-direction, love of learning, and open inquiry. Of course some training is needed to be educated, but education has been neglected because of excessive training which fosters more certainty partly because of easier measurement. School and university problems may arise from excessive training and an imbalanced valuing of the obedience to authority frame arising out of fear.

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Dale Stephens, (CNN 6/3/11) said: I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.
CERTAINTY FROM UNCERTAINTY

Einstein said: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. As far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." May we be more certain by being less certain? Within the last few years physicists have found that only 4% of the universe is composed of matter and energy as we know them. Dark matter and dark energy, about which very little is known, compose the other 96%. Within the last few years we have discovered several hundred planets, and within the last year, the Kepler telescope indicates some 1200 planets in our galaxy. Ray Kurzweil said that we will have 1000 times more technological change in this century than the last. A national public radio news report in January 2012, stated there may be as many planets in the universe as there are grains of sand on earth. Desire for certainty leads to avoiding guessing. Anne Murphy Paul, Time Magazine, December, 2012, elaborated on why we shouldn't underestimate the value of guessing. Guessing is uncertain. She said: "Research has shown that everyone, even a baby, possesses a basic ability to estimate." She reported that those who guess better are linked to a more general facility with arithmetic. Helping students develop their ability to guess has been often neglected by teachers and professors because guessing is not certain enough. When moving to the higher levels of consciousness it is often helpful to use what is sometimes called functional discontinuity. Neuroscientist, David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, tells us that perception reflects the active comparison of sensory inputs with internal predictions. And this gives us a way to understand a bigger concept: awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. (The Nicolelis neuroscience research also supports thismy note). When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well. For example when you first learn how to ride a bicycle, a great deal of conscious concentration is required; after some time, when you're sensory motor predictions have been perfected, riding becomes unconscious. I don't mean you're unaware that you're riding a bicycle, but you are unaware of how you're holding the handlebars, applying pressure to the pedals, and balancing your torso. From extensive experience, your brain knows exactly what to expect as you make your movements. So your conscious neither of the movements nor of the sensations unless something changes like a strong wind or a flat tire. When these new sensations cause your normal expectations to be violated, consciousness comes online in your internal mode. Teachers and professors providing functional discontinuity in classrooms helps violate students normal expectations, thereby facilitating open inquiry.

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Functional discontinuity is the process of making what appears to be ordered, somewhat disordered, and is often involved in kaplearning about which more will later be said). The blooming, buzzing, confusion of which William James spoke is what many multidiscipline brain researchers are attempting to understand. Much as a computer program compresses data to save storage space, brain researchers consider evolved brains are attempting to save brain energy and space with predictive coding. Clark says: "The trick is trading intelligence and foreknowledge (expectations, informed predictions) on the part of the receiver against the costs of encoding and transmission The well predicted stuff is filled in by the receiver. The only information received is surprising or unpredictable. All else predictable. Clark stated: All this, if true, has much more than merely engineering significance. For it suggests that perception may best be seen as what has sometimes been described as a process of controlled hallucination (Ramesh Jain) in which we (or rather, various parts of our brains) try to predict what is out there, using the incoming signal more as a means of tuning and nuancing the predictions rather than as a rich (and bandwidth-costly) encoding of the state of the world. This in turn underlines the surprising extent to which the structure of our expectations (both conscious and non-conscious) may quite literally be determining much of what we see, hear and feel. Clark thinks perceiving, understanding, and imagining can be seen in a single package? Clark's book: Thrifty Brains Make Better Mind. A thrifty mind notices the slightest movement of grass could be a signal to the hunters amygdala to almost unconsciously ready himself and his group for an attack, or to flee in a hurry depending on circumstances. Lengthy deep deliberation before action could have been costly. Some deep deliberation at times can be very helpful. Excessive attention to excessive detail dampens the effect of predictive coding. The aspect of mental stem learning one (mentioned later) is to pay more attention to one's gut brain than to constantly rehash everything easily predictable in order to be more certain. Learning what to ignore helps one appropriately follow one's gut brain when the goal in back of one's mind is the greatest good for the greatest number rather than for one's temporary selfish individual gain. The L.A. Times reports: A system involving 74 DNA strands can calculate square roots of numbers up to 15, though very slowly. Scientists say the goal is to devise computers that can interact directly with living cells and perhaps fight disease. Many more discoveries have recently been made such as treated mice now have an extended lifespan far beyond what was previously expected. As was mentioned, Richard Rohr, states that desire for certainty is our original mistake. Other mistakes arise from this mistake. Being more tentative about what we know may have the effect of helping us know more by knowing less (being less certain of what we know). Knowing less, paradoxically, may help us better deal with accelerating change, and again paradoxically, have the effect of knowing more. These paradoxes deal with kaplearning.
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David Brooks reported people use a metaphor every 10 to 25 words, and we are often unaware of how metaphors affect our perceptions. Brooks reminds us: Being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend relationships, and pursue unexpected likenesses. We can then be less scientistic. It is interesting to note that the ancient Eastern thought never separated philosophy and poetry. Brooks thinks it is important to occasionally notice that we do not see the world directly. He said: "It's good to pause to appreciate how flexible and tenuous our grip on reality actually is To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is Metaphors help compensate for our natural weaknesses. Most of us are not very good at thinking about abstractions or spiritual states, so we rely on concrete or spatial metaphors to imperfectly do the job To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the under currents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. Thinking often results in structuring and restructuring what we believe to be reality. Preconceptions and excessive desire for certainty often prevent noticing the naturalness of continual changing events. A few ideas about structure and structuring may help us better understand kaplearning as well as help us notice the natural simplicity of self-directing learning. Steven Taylor informs us that Harvard's David Weinberger (Too Big To Know) stated: "Scientific knowledge is taking on properties of its new medium, becoming like the network in which it lives John Wilbanks, vice president for Science at Creative Commons said it used to take a year to map a gene. Now you can do thirty thousand on your desktop computer in a day....The result of having access to all this data is a new science that is able to study not just the characteristics of isolated parts of a cell or organism" (to quote Kitano) but properties that don't show up at the parts level. For example, one of the most remarkable characteristics of living organisms is that we're robust -- our bodies bounce back time and time again, until, of course, they don't. Robustness is a property of a system, not of its individual elements, some of which may be non-robust and, like ants protecting their queen, may sacrifice themselves so that the system overall can survive. In fact, life itself is a property of a system....There are many fewer universals than particulars, and you can often figure out the particulars if you know the universals: If you know the universal theorems that explain the orbits of planets, you can figure out where Mars will be in the sky on any particular day on Earth. Aiming at universals is a simplifying tactic within our broader traditional strategy for dealing with a world that is too big to know That is, too big to know with great certainty. Aiming at universals is educational. Training deals more often with particulars. As Kitano stated: "You can figure out the particulars if you know the universals."
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Some details may be ignored but what is not to be ignored are fluid concepts, the robustness which is not seen when looking only at parts. Russel Smith remarked: For the past 40 years the humanities have been experimenting with new language to describe fluid concepts, and its the very fluidity of the concepts their very resistance to explanation in everyday language that makes them useful. The idea is generally that we cant see the ideological and economic structures that we live in unless we change our language for language is a pillar of that very structure. Furthermore, the veneration of clarity or simplicity is itself an ideological position, one that limits thinkers to conventional thoughts. This excessive veneration of clarity is more often seen among those less open. Science, technology, engineering, and math are often stressed in schools because they can be more easily measured. Overly easy measurement can stifle self-directing learning thus contributing to more closed views. Excessive stem (science, technology, engineering, and math) emphasis deemphasizes the humanities. A recent report noted that Nobel laureates have a proficiency in humanities 22 times greater than non-Nobel scientists.

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STRUCTURE AND STRUCTURING "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that, behind all discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Albert Einstein

About the structure of most present-day schooling, David Schenk reports that Bruce Springsteen said of his early days: "One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence. And it is incredibly restrictive very, very restrictive. There are so many types of intelligence, and people who would be at their best, outside of that structure get lost." Springsteen is speaking about a graded, coercive, narrow school and university structure. A New York Times editorial said: But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this years graduating class (2011) has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt. More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This years graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree. Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Peter Gray, research professor in psychology, Boston University, thinks his research leads him to notice that hundreds of thousands of years of evolution moves people towards freedom, self-direction, and self-education. He noticed that people evolved to see the wisdom of using their own initiative to do things for the welfare of their entire group. He also noticed hunters and gatherers required great creativity and initiative. He thinks the adults in the hunter gatherer groups understood that children best developed in free, trusting, cooperative environments. His research reveals that children were free to educate themselves through play and self-directed activities. When given the trust and freedom, the children were motivated to learn and contribute to the group without coercion. He said children would grow up to be free, trusting, cooperative adults when they were given that freedom, trust, and cooperation in their childhood. He notes that these hundreds of thousands of years of evolution are not used in schools today because of the excessive structuring by teachers and administrators rather than by students. See note 19 for his remarkable findings. Excessive structuring arises from a need for great certainty. As was mentioned, Richard Rohr states that desire for certainty is our "original sin." The desire for certainty, perhaps the first mistake, often leads us to be overly

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ordered and overly structured. This prevents us from noticing the dynamic universals that are in the process of being continuously ordered or structured. The results of the narrow schooling has led us to fail to notice what is reported by David Geoffrey Smith: (In his Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth): The largest 300 multinational corporations control 25% of all the worlds productive assets, 70% of all international trade, and 99% of all direct foreign investment (see Clarke 1997, Chapter 2). The loyalty of these huge firms is less to the country of their origin than to new virtual communities of international stockholders. The result is a diminishment of the tax bases that national governments are able to wrest from commercial ventures, which in turn affects the quality of social programs that local communities can offer citizens. Knowing can be healthy, satisfying, fun, and convenient. Often, the more we broadly know universals, the more potential we have for being healthy, wise, and for finding meaning. We can better predict what will happen when we broadly know universals. We can control what happens to us and what happens around us when we can predict better. Controlling "any situation" your situation often helps you feel good. Restructuring something means giving that something a new order. New orders can contribute to one's temporary feelings of discomfort and comfort. Plutarch said: "Music, to create harmony, must investigate discord." The musician Paderewski said that all piano players play the notes. He was thought to be great because his pauses between the notes were so wonderful. I am using this example of music because we can look at order and chaos through the notion of notes themselves, or via the pauses between the notes. Is one figure and the other ground? Are they interchangeable? Notes and pauses form a whole such as Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. The whole is that which is most satisfying. Satisfying experience may be ordered in terms of sensation, perception and/or conception, plus more of noticing and creating universals that cannot be clearly said. Westerners often reduce anxiety, worry, and fear through degrees of ordering. It was Plato's desire for order that generated Plato's notion of what is good. This good was found by Plato to be excessively fluctuating. He could not get a satisfying grasp of it. He could not be as certain as he wanted to be with the fluctuations of the good. What Plato did was say that the good is the highest virtue, and that we would know the good through reason. In effect, he made reason the value that determined other values for us, and since then, Western people have been excessively desirous of high degrees of order and certainty. Early Eastern thinkers have had less of a need to be certain. They were more open. We may connect our initial mistake (wanting certainty) to other mistakes. The ancient Chinese way of thinking included less of a need to be certain by consciously refraining from making a distinction between poetry and philosophy. Many modern Westerners have analyzed too much and synthesized too little largely because of their desire for certainty, and because of their narrow training in classrooms.

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In Western civil courts, what goes on is often to determine what is true and what is false, and on that basis find for the plaintiff or the defendant. African civil courts, and Eastern courts, have had their goal to reconcile the parties concerned. It seems that the truth is more context bound and the African and Eastern thinkers are more aware of the broader context than many Western thinkers seem to be. Michel Foucault's and Todd Mays ideas about helping society and individuals grow by uncovering practices in the human sciences so that we can be more aware of how the findings truths of the human sciences-- allow us to more conveniently control people. Feelings of certainty that come from "truths" are convenient and satisfying to Westerners. Early East Asians come to feelings of certainty and satisfaction by greater acceptance of uncertainty. "Truths" are frequently fixed. These fixities John Dewey found to be inaccurate. Ultimately it is a combination of rationality Western thinking and transrationality early Eastern thinking that will allow us to feel more certain or more accepting of uncertainty. Westerners too may feel more certain when Westerners allow some degrees of uncertainty. We may even feel less foolish and embarrassed in the long run if we allow ourselves to be somewhat foolish and to be somewhat embarrassed at times. A Sage said, we can notice that we are what we think. Fritz Perls gestalt psychotherapeutic thinking holds that we can allow ourselves to know what we want and how to get it when we allow ourselves to feel emotions that in the past were thought to be overly embarrassing to notice. Some of these emotions are only experienced as being different when we allow ourselves to experience them for longer than usual. As we allow ourselves to experience those different feelings for a while, we become more familiar with different emotions, and therefore, are often less fearful of them. Order and chaos might be considered to be on a continuum. At one end of the continuum, there are simple orders. At the other end are the highly chaotic (no perceived order). In between there is a whole set of simple and complex orders, including language and music as well as other examples that could be drawn from art, architecture and other artifacts. Other kinds of orders such as social structures and rituals may have simple or complex orders. Clearly, life itself is comprised of an almost infinite set of orders. Such orders are also found in innate physical systems. Sir Arthur Eddington said: The universe is not only stranger than we imagine. It is stranger than we can imagine. It seems that those who can imagine more are those who do not hold too strictly or too rigidly to what is, or what is not. Those more imaginative people greatly expand contexts. Teachers and professors too often focus on what is already ordered. If more focus were on what is disordered for the students, and if the students were allowed to do more of the ordering of their own experience, greater emergent consciousness and wisdom would have a greater chance of emerging. Students would then be creating the orders and it is in the creating of order the process of structuring through which we generate solutions to

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problems as they arise in our lives. When we deal with kaplearning we may see that more expansive, flexible noticing can help us have fewer problems. This flexibility is difficult for those of us who have been trained in a Skinnerian universe that was highly determined where chaos and disorder were to be abhorred. As we extend our notion of the spectrum of order to include a variety of kinds of orders, we may then have the resilience that will allow us to focus on disorder. The focusing on disorder and chaos gives a means of determining greater degrees of order. We may find this process of moving from chaos to order a quasi-continual reordering, and we may find reordering generally more convenient or satisfying when we allow for greater degrees of uncertainty. Nothing in the world or our lives is permanent yet we have been conditioned to disregard that. People at the Nobel level of thought, some researchers say, can handle paradox and complexity with greater ease. Some wise people have said that Nobel laureate types think that whatever they say anything is, they can simultaneously hold that it isn't it is also something more and something different than what it appears to be when contexts are expanded. That was also true for early Asian thinkers. Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, when expanding contexts in physics said: "We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, a language can be used only as in poetry." Some scholars hold that necessity is a particular form of chance. Some also hold that chance is a particular form of necessity. This relates to the notion of what is randomness in one context, may not be randomness in another context. The contexts for the process of education are infinite. Relating content to the point of satisfaction and peacefulness is connected to the process of education, which, like the process of self-organizing, is at the heart of sentient living. Education, like life, is a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Selfdirected learning/education and life are somewhat uncertain and that may be why schools and universities train rather than help students learn to become more self-directing.
CONTEXT

We are aware that the excessive training by schools and universities is primarily for corporate profit. Seligman states that excessive training is primarily for more material prosperity and more wealth. Seligman reports: "Positive psychology is a politics that advocates no particular means but rather another end. That end is not wealth but well-being. Kaplearning has an end similar to positive psychology. Material prosperity matters to positive psychology and kaplearning, but only insofar as it increases general wellbeing, including freedom, and peacefulness. Self-directing learning moves one towards Seligman's ideas in that it helps one see that wealth and economic prosperity are in service of individual and group well-being. Narrow views hold that wealth is for producing more wealth for individuals. This view may be a cause of schools and universities excessive training which retards providing conditions whereby students may selfdirectingly learn. Well-being is also then retarded when training is excessive.
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As was mentioned elsewhere, the government of Bhutan has a well-being index that is more important than their gross national product. Costa Rica years ago voted to educate seemingly to the point of producing more well-being than defensiveness (excessively expansive -- and expensive military and police efforts were reduced or eliminated). To many Western nations, and especially the United States, defensiveness seems to be more important than well-being. The narrower defensive group argues that we can't have well-being without being highly defended (much spent for military and police) rather than spent for self-directed learning for well-being, much as Finland does. Many hold to the notion that the whole is more than the sum of the parts as in quantum theory. Einstein alluded to the fact that Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is placed in the category of music rather than acoustics indicates a context in which order is viewed from one point of view as opposed to another. The complexity of language may, at first glance, seem to be almost random, but the variety of orders that are generated are viewed as different than sounds of thunder. The basis on which we distinguish language from thunder is structure which orders. Kaplearning and its facility to order orders (and accept some disorder) is best viewed in the largest possible perspective. Figures and grounds can merge with kaplearning and learning for well-being. Kaplearning helps one notice ones present structure of the process of structuring. This may be an aspect of a whole so large that it can't be said. That is similar to Deweys notion of education as the continuous reconstruction of experience. Unless we are flexible we will never create new orders. The history of thought is full of evidence which shows new orders are created from previously known orders. What reordering might educators now do to restructure schools in a more long-range, convenient, and satisfying way? Depleting the ozone layer may be found to be temporarily convenient. Convenience refers to long and short-term considerations but too often ozone depletion only connotes short-term gains with the implication of long-term losses. Part of our training has been to maintain the status quo which has the effect of keeping orders as they are. The obedience to authority frame also encourages us not to change orders until some higher authority changes order, then it becomes okay for the rest of us to follow that new order. Higher authorities often maintain present orders so as to keep themselves as higher authorities. At first, new orders are uncertain and our tendency is to avoid them. Neuroscience is now showing us that our brain changes with new learning/new ordering. The desire for certainty can be so powerful as to prevent us from learning and adapting to change. In terms of present conceptions within the sciences, natural and human, whatever could be the basis for newer kinds of order in natural processes would probably be apprehended "as no order at all." I'm talking here of uncommon, little-known orders. We need orders that will help more people better understand universals amounting to the opposite of an infinitesimal (such as life, consciousness, and noticing what is to be noticed). It should therefore be clear how important it is to be open to new notions of order, if the science and art of education is not to be blind to very important but complex

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and subtle orders that are only viewed from our traditional and conformist (certain) ways of thinking. As former National Security Agency consultant Eric Haseltine said when answering the question: what is worse than being blind to something, Haseltine said: "Being blind to your blindness. Are we excessively blind to our blindness when we are stressed? Amina Khan, Jan 12, 2012, L.A. Times. Reports: On a scale of 1 to 10, residents of eight U.S. metropolitan areas told psychologists they rated their level of stress as 5.2, according to survey results. That may not sound so terrible except that these Americans also said their ideal level of stress would be around 3.6. Have we reached the point of becoming a chronically stressed nation? said Michael Ritz, a clinical psychologist in Irvine who serves as the public education coordinator for the California Psychological Assn. The data might suggest we've reached that point where it just [becomes] a fact of life. Stress contributes to chronic illnesses, like heart disease, diabetes and obesity, Ritz said, adding that about three-fourths of healthcare dollars go to dealing with chronic maladies. Avoidance of social emotional learning at all levels of schooling contributes to developing stress and keeps us in the older Newtonian thinking in this quantum age. Within the Newtonian system of thought the universe was thought to be running down there was an increase in disorder within a system. It was the heat loss moving toward stasis between matter and energy. If we look at the notion of chaos as potential order, an increase in noticing chaos can then be understood in a different way. It can be understood in terms of a kind of change (or at least a potential change) of order. By focusing on disorder one can potentially find more comprehensive order. As early chaos researchers found, small differences in initial conditions can bring about large differences in later effects (the butterfly effect - a butterfly flapping its wings over China can potentially create a storm over New York). This was earlier thought not to be true by the scientific community. David Shenk reports (The Genius in All of Us) evolution as explained by Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who spoke of evolution as "the inheritance of acquired characteristics the notion that an individual's actions can alter the biological inheritance passed on to his or her children. These actions may be small. Shenk reports: "People used to think that once the genetic code was laid down in early development, that was it for life," says McGill University genetics pioneer Moshe Szyf. He said: Life is changing all the time, and the epi-genetic code that controls your DNA is turning out to be the mechanism through which we change along with it. Epi-genetics tells us that little things in life can have an effect of great magnitude." The Lamarckian system is said to show greatly accelerated evolution. As a result Schenk remarks that: "Schools can adapt to the reality that different people have different ways of learning. It is not a contradiction to maintain high expectations expected of every student and to show compassion and creativity for those who, inevitably, do not immediately meet those expectations. Failure should be seen as a learning opportunity rather than a revelation of students inherent limits. If nonlinear leaps in intelligence and

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ability now are possible writes John Mighton, why haven't these effects been observed in our schools? I believe the answer lies in a profound inertia of human thought: when an entire society believes something is impossible, it suppresses the evidence that should contradict that belief." Shenk also said: Modern science is built on standardization; new experiments change one tiny variable from a previous study or a control group, and any changes in the outcome point crisply to cause and effect. The notion of hidden, undetectable differences throws all of that into disarray. How many assumptions of environmental sameness have been built right into conclusions over the decades? What if there really is no such thing? Growing interest in Lamarckian evolution generates interest in questioning many of our assumptions. The structure of the later discussed kaplearning may be seen as a paradoxical, semi-uncontained container. A few more ideas are given before there is an elaboration of kaplearning and functional discontinuity which focuses on disorder to create order (disintegration used to integrate).
INTEGRATING INTEGRATIONS

First note disintegration. The L.A. Times recently reported: Cheating scandals have received increasing attention nationwide. In the Atlanta school system, 82 educators have admitted cheating, with misconduct documented at 44 of 100 schools. In Washington, D.C., concerns have risen about cheating in response to the high-stakes improvement mandates of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Locally, at six charter schools operated by Crescendo, principals were ordered last year to require teachers to review the state tests in advance and then use that material to prepare students. L.A. Unified recently closed those schools in the aftermath of the scandal. Such episodes underscore the pressures and pitfalls of testing systems that, nationwide, increasingly affect teacher and principal evaluations and whether schools achieve acclaim or censure and penalties. The New York Times reported: As the city (New York) and state turned test scores into make-or-break indicators of school and student success, the portion of city public high schools facing allegations of test tampering rose to 7 percent in the 2009-10 school year, from 1 percent in 2002-3. Over all, the state has recorded complaints of cheating by educators in more than 100 city high schools, about a fifth of the total, since Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002. During the same period, the number of complaints in the rest of the states high schools tripled. Sophisticated cheating in school has become an epidemic, said Robert Bamucci, vice chancellor for technology and learning services at South Orange community college district in Mission Viejo, California,. He said: "Were not catching them." Greg Toppo reported that common sense media, a nonprofit advocacy group: Finds more than 35% of teens ages 13 to 17 with cell phones have used the devices to cheat. Toppo mentions several security-related companies, Spycheatstuff.com: "Will even overnight-mail a kit that turns a cell

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phone or iPod into a hands-free personal cheating device, featuring tiny wireless earbuds, that allows a test-taker to discreetly phone a friend during a test and get answers remotely without putting down the pencil. Jill Madenberg, a Great Neck, New York, college consultant, said: "This is about the pressures that kids are feeling in school. The pressure to do well, the pressure to get into a good college." She believes cheating is literally all over the country. Considering broader integrations, it is useful to note that we infrequently consider physicist Eugene Wigner's idea: When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again. It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness. Connected is the doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness, turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment. Let us further note that before a new theory is formed (a synthesis of previous thought, a fusion of previously disparate events) one must deal with confusion. A new theory (a new order) may be considered a mental interruption. Some scholars hold there is no mental eruption (a new concept or paradigm) without some mental disruption. A new theory is like a new orientation. A new orientation may not arise without paying attention to disorienting facets for longer than usual time periods. Physicists like David Bohm noted there is no order without paying attention to disorder. As Bohm said: Matter is like a small ripple on this tremendous ocean of energy, having some relative stability and being manifest.and in fact beyond that ocean may be still a bigger ocean... the ultimate source is immeasurable and cannot be captured within our knowledge. While many professors are doctors of philosophy, the specialization in many PhD programs may have carried the PhD candidate to the point where some basic scientific assumptions could profitably be revisited. We often research to find the truth of a matter in which we are interested. The confusion, disorder, disorientation, and discontinuity are often avoided when the primary focus is on the economy. Well-being programs and kaplearning are open to confusion, disorder, etc. since the goal is broader than temporary development of an economy. Some new ideas from chaos theory and learning research indicate that paying attention to discontinuities for longer than usual time periods may help generate new paradigms. A teacher's use of functional discontinuity may help students inquire and help prepare one for a rapidly changing future. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, spoke about how the elite of the governmental-industrial-complex keep many of us in the dark. When we are in the dark, we can be more easily manipulated without being aware of it. Fuller relates how the Great Pirates would establish a land-based home and made someone the Governor. The Great Pirate would tell the Governor to tell the Great Pirate when a smart young person is noticed. The

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Great Pirate would then ask the young person to study a specialty such as accounting, finance, navigation, shipbuilding, or some other important skill of the day. The Great Pirate would tell the young man to study only that specialty because the Great Pirate would be the only comprehensive thinker who considers all fields of thought. These specialists were paid reasonably well but they always took orders from the Great Pirate. They were not independent comprehensive thinkers as was the Great Pirate. The specialists were partly enslaved as students often are in present day schooling. Specialization that began with the Great Pirates continues in schools and universities. After a while, the manipulation to specialize is so thorough that one, at times, enjoys being manipulated and unconsciously wants others to think for him or her. School and university training concentrates mainly on Alfred North Whitehead's specialization stage of learning thereby neglecting self-directing education. As a result, students and former studentsmany of us, are more often in the dark, and semi-blindly follow the obedience to authority frame as well as the scientistic frame. Electrons appear to be affiliated with all natural sciences. It may be helpful to consider what the director of the atom bomb (Manhattan project) J. Robert Oppenheimer said: If we ask, for instance, whether the position of an electron remains the same, we must say no; if we asked whether the position of the electron changes with time, we must say no; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say no; if we asked whether it is in motion, we must say no. Consider Werner Heisenbergs statement: The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts." Physicist Martin Rees said: "In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it." These ideas are presented to help us notice that Nobel laureates are often uncertain even though they notice well. One's noticing is equivalent to one's awareness. Expanded awareness helps one notice more. Before one pays attention one often needs to intend to pay attention. It may be helpful to pay attention and be aware of one's awareness since one's awareness precedes thought at all levels. Could we profitably give much more attention to noticing our noticing? Dean Sluyter suggests that in order to become more aware of awareness, it helps if we carefully notice a dollar and a penny. He said: "Notice the penny is round, brownish, and smooth, and the dollar is rectangular, greenish and crinkly." He asks us to notice that the sensations of crinkly and roundness etc. are experienced in our awareness. He then asks us to notice closely, "whether our awareness is itself brown, greenish, and crinkly, or smooth." Here he cautions us and suggests that we take our time in this noticing... he then notices, It is none of these and awareness is itself pure. Awareness has no shape, texture, size, or any sensory characteristics but it is an unchanging, luminous clarity within which arises the ever changing display of sensations.

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Sluyter is saying: "Underlying all perceptions is pure awareness." The awareness, "is the background of every mind moment. It just needs to be promoted to the foreground." Awareness can only happen in the present. When noticing, Nobel laureates Richard Feynman and Irwin Schroedinger noticed "now" differently. We can also notice that awareness is difficult to understand even though one can be aware of one's awareness. Sluyter is talking about the ground on which our understanding arises. "Not knowing" is similar to one's understanding that one does not understand. Perhaps within this "not knowing" is a kind of knowing in that some events may not be knowable in a conceptualizable sense. As Michael Polanyi has suggested, (Tacit Dimension), we can know more than we can tell, but within some scientistic interpretations, one cannot know more than one can tell. Hypothesis formation is clearly a part of scientific endeavor. Unless one is replicating previous research, notice hypothesis formation is not totally scientific or logical. There are trans-logical elements to forming hypotheses. According to Nobel laureate Percy Bridgeman: "Science is nothing more than doing your damnedest with your mind no holds barred." May it be said that any scientific endeavor is not totally scientific? Can we clearly tell when someone is doing ones damndest with ones mind? If we cant is that a reason to accept being less certain? If wanting to be certain is our original mistake, perhaps wanting to be certain has led scientists to disregard philosopher John Dewey's 1920s statement about science and process: The great systems of Western philosophy.(found process to be) the most revolutionary discovery yet made. What is called an unstructured classroom is often seen as chaotic. In an unstructured classroom, students do self-structuring. Self-structuring is selfdirection. Self-direction is self-organization and self-organization is a necessary ingredient of a living system. When we prevent self-organization, we constrain life. Student structuring is an ongoing process from which students become educated. From a students perception of disorder, they order their experience. When students can explore what they find to be remarkable, important, and interesting, the highest form of emergent consciousness, and the higher levels of learning and knowing arise. Hanging over the entrance of many universities is the statement: Knowledge will make you free, implying higher level learning results in an emergent consciousness and wisdom which those who are only trained do not yet have. When studenting (studying for grades and degrees) becomes more important than learning, as is now the case, wisdom and emergent consciousness do not often arise. Teacher structure is frequently fixed and often used to train students in a particular skill. An unstructured classroom is often seen as disordered. It is from the students perception of disorder that they order their experience. Everything has order. It wouldn't be a definable event if it didn't have order. Disorder makes it different from other events often in a temporarily

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unknowable manner. We know something through its order. Whatever it is, its boundaries are its order. Unbounded learning (unschooling) creates order rather than simply having a student remember an order previously structured by a teacher or textbook author. Do students often learn best by doing? Many learned people say yes. Putting ideas and experiences together is a doing. Students even do better with kaplearning which helps a student put together wholes that were not previously put together (not previously synthesized). Integrating various disciplines can be considered an integration of integrations, not unlike noticing the expanding the context of contexts.
CONCEPT FORMATION

Think of a concept; any concept. Think of another one. Are the two connected? The process of relating or connecting concepts surpasses the sum of the concepts connected. Schools and universities often focus on data and concepts rather than the process by which concepts are related. Schools and universities focus on particular concepts because the process of relating concepts is difficult to define and measure. It is less certain than most concepts. The perceived problem, this desire for certainty, leads to the problem of avoiding self-directing education while overemphasizing training. P. de Llosa said: If mind is what flows through the mechanism of the brain, does that make neuroplasticity a process or a fact? It (neuroplasticity) is a fact of a process, he (brain researcher Dr. Daniel Siegel) told me: Process is a verb not a noun. Its not a hypothesis, its a fact of science, a real entity, but a processsomething moving, happening, and dynamic. Take running. Its a noun but its about a moving process. He touched on the same subject(when he said): Everything we experience, memory or emotion or thought, is part of a process, not a place in the brain! Information is literally a swirl of energy in a certain pattern that has a symbolic meaning; it stands for something other than itself. Information should be a verb; mind, tooas in minding or informationing. And the mind is an embodied and relational emergent process that regulates the flow of energy and information. The mistake of wanting to be certain can generate numerous other mistakes including the frequent teaching of disconnected concepts and unexpanded contexts (excessive training). Connecting concepts is one way to potentially powerful learning. What do we have when all concepts are connected? When the goals of daily classroom activities are to help students openly inquire, increase their love of learning, and their noticing of what they are doing as they are doing it, students can be more educated. Today, with primarily learning easy to measure, facts, and unconnected concepts as primary goals of classroom instruction, we train while neglecting education for self-direction. We cannot be educated without some training but we can remain uneducated when schools and universities primarily train while avoiding development of student self-direction.

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It is difficult to form higher level concepts without forming hypotheses that may later be tested. The process of forming hypotheses is itself not totally scientific since there are trans-logical elements involved. When remembering content is the primary goal of classroom activity, the process of forming concepts is rarely considered. Heisenberg, Gdel, Einstein and Nicolelis have demonstrated that uncertainty is present in science, mathematics and now neuroscience. The content delivered by teachers (often similar to William Pinars comparing training to a mail carrier delivering mail) is often a clearly known and indisputable segment of content. This content is often trivial and inconsequential until it is connected to another or other concepts. Teachers delivering content often do things to students rather than do things with students. When open inquiry is the primary goal of instruction, involving the process of relating concepts, the teacher or professor often does more things with students than does things to students. When helping the students generate more awareness (raising consciousness) the teacher is even more connected to the student. Great teachers often connect with students. By allowing for more uncertainty, conditions can be provided in which the process of "connecting teacher with student" may be learned. The way to open inquiry is through students openly inquiring. The way to greater awareness is through noticing ones noticing ones noticingwhile one is noticing. To be successful, students often need an aware teacher or professor who openly inquires, and who notices one's noticing while he or she is noticing. Teachers and professors often model their teachers and professors. Their teachers and professors also frequently delivered content (like delivering mail). The content delivered is frequently not original. Schools and universities often teach students to conform rather than be imaginative. As Albert Einstein said: Imagination is more important than knowledge. Later, we will see that kaplearning tends to promote the development of noticeable imaginative insight. The authors of a new book: Teaching What Matters Most state: This is a book about responsibilityabout our responsibility to teach what matters most to the increasingly diverse students who face us in our classrooms. It is a practical book, packed with the tools that can enable us to meet this responsibility. It is a positive book, filled with examples of schools, teachers, and administrators around the country who are helping students achieve high levels of performance on state and national assessments. Notice they state that teachers and citizens responsibility is to achieve high levels of performance on state and national assessments. These tests do not measure the process by which content is related. How unlike Finland which has the number one schools. The author of the above book does not state the student learns to inquire by inquiring, or learns to be self-directing by being self-directing, or learns to make discerning judgments by making discerning judgments. No discerning judgments are required when students have to simply follow others thinking. The teachers themselves do not see themselves

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as following others thinking when they deliver other people's content. Delivering the mail is training. Kaplearning avoids delivering others mail as may later be noticed. Finland's teacher education schools accept only 10% of their applicants. Their teachers are the cream of the crop. Their teachers have much freedom to use professional judgment and that is often not the case in American schools. When delivering others mail, little judgment is needed and that is what corporate leaders want in order to continue corporate profit for the wealthy, often at the expense of the middle class and poor. Finnish teachers trust their students. Seth Godin recently stated:
If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids
who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do. Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of workers who are trained to do 1925 labor.

Brain researcher, David Eagleman stated: In the same way that the cosmos is larger than we ever imagined, we ourselves are something greater than we had intuited by introspection. We are now getting the first glimpses of the vastness of inner space. This internal, hidden, intimate cosmos commands its own goals, imperatives, and logic. The brain is an organ that feels alien and outlandish to us, and yet it's detailed wiring patterns scope the landscape of our inner lives. What a perplexing masterpiece the brain is, and how lucky we are to be in a generation that has the technology and the will to turn our attention to it. This wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us. What the authors of Teaching What Matters Most consider is not so much wrong because they are following goals which are based on the notion, often supported by our culture, that students will not learn unless they are given carrots or sticks (grades or degrees or punishment). This probably implies that the teachers themselves need carrots and sticks plus they often need to be told what to teach and how to teach it. These are the same teachers who want to be told how to keep order in a classroom while they are unaware that they are creating classroom disorder by coercing students to follow an obedience to authority frame which encourages students to be certain and not make mistakes. The Huffington Post, 2/3/12, reported: A study, published in Psychological Science, showed that people who score low on I.Q. tests in childhood are more likely to develop prejudiced beliefs and socially conservative politics in adulthood. Brock University, Ontario. Dr. Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at the University and the study's lead author, said the finding represented evidence of a vicious cycle: People of low intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which stress resistance to change and, in turn, prejudice, he told LiveScience. Why might less intelligent people be drawn to conservative ideologies? Because such ideologies feature structure and order that make it easier to comprehend a complicated world, Dodson said. Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice,
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he added. Dr. Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist, echoed those sentiments. The research they use to support their older Newtonian view is research which seems to claim that we can be certain, and the more certain we are the better off we will be. Their view is based on a Newtonian world rather than a quantum world in which we are now living. While Newton himself was highly imaginative, that older Newtonian view does not help people be imaginative, nor does it help students think something that can't be learned from textbooks. If students were to be educated, schools and universities would provide conditions of freedom and openness for students to study what the students find to be remarkable, interesting, and important. Anything else may approach malpractice unless one choses to be trained in a specific skill. But if a teacher or professor were brought to a civil trial for fraud for only training when the teacher or professor purported to educate, what might a jury decide? What are the elements of malpractice teaching, and how does kaplearning help teachers do the opposite of malpractice. Bordering on malpractice may be using value added to test scores as a means of evaluating teachers. Value-added assessments are imprecise. The margin of error is so wide that in New York City, the average confidence interval around each rating spanned 35 percentiles in math and 53 in English. The New York Times reported that some teachers were judged on as few as 10 students.

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WISDOM AND FREEDOM

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds. GEORGE ELIOT

Eliots idea relates to Seligmans implication that we become wiser when we act wisely. Seligman's research reveals his items 15 through 24 are solidified under the notion of wisdom. The broadness of wisdom is displayed in the fluid universals of self-control, prudence/discretion/caution, humility and modesty, appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope/optimism/futuremindedness, spirituality/sense of purpose/faith, forgiveness and mercy, playfulness and humor, zest/passion/enthusiasm. William James thought human behavior may be more flexibly intelligent than that of other animals because humans possess more instincts than animals. He thought instincts were tools in a toolbox, and the more you have, the more adaptable you can be. We have many tools, and schools and universities are neglecting some important tools to help us decide for ourselves. Most people agree that democracies provide freedom for their citizens. Even democracies have some constraints. What is later said about kaplearning is helpful for removing less-than-useful constraints. To illustrate teacher constraints, in October 2010, a federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of an Ohio high-school teacher who had asked students to report about books that had been banned from schools and libraries. The activity wasnt in the official curriculum, and parents had complained about their children reading some of the banned books. In 2007 the courts allowed an Indiana school board to fire a teacher who told her students that she had honked her car horn in support of a rally against the war in Iraq. The reason was: She had deviated from the approved curriculum. She wasn't following the obedience to authority frame. In order to notice forces that constrain freedom, and to experience a variety of notions to help one notice what will secure or endanger one's freedom, several infrequently considered ideas will be mentioned. It is possible that experiencing some constraints may be helpful in noticing if these constraints may reside in the one restrained, or elsewhere. If the constraints are not created by the one constrained, several ideas may help one better see where the source of these constraints lie. If the constraints arise from within, one can, with additional attention, help remove some blinders which keep the constraints hidden. Emergent education may
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help a student draw out the possibility that some hidden constraints reside in the students mind. I am suggesting that noticing the source of constraints is at the heart of powerful, self-directing learning. Noticing what to ignore (quickly skip over) is a part of noticing a bigger picture. Powerful general present noticing may be at the center of this heart of powerful learning. Powerful learning is designed to liberate the hidden potential of the student's mind. Training alone does not do that. Training alone can result in a condition to constrain. The opposite of training can be found in Martha Becks Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. To educate, schools need to provide conditions whereby a student can clean out and examine accumulated past conditioning. This past conditioning (often unthinking behaviors that others rewarded) leads one to think one must always be obedient to authorities. After a relatively young age, no one knows better than oneself what will secure or endanger one's freedom, yet schools and universities continue to provide the conditioning which often prevent students from seeing they are free even when a variety of attempted external constraints are present. A free person will obey laws such as paying taxes, and stopping at stop signs because the free person chooses to do so knowing that such behavior is best for everyone. Powerful learning/education is not clearly definable partly because education occurs by perceiving the root of what makes one free. The root of experience may be clearer when Chapter 5 elaborates more about kaplearning. Education frees the mind from constraints imposed on it by societal and school conditioning. This open noticing awakens dormant capacities of emergent consciousness. Noticing well is openly perceiving. An example of noticing well, equaling high level consciousness, is Thomas Eisner of Cornell Univ. May Berenbaum mentioned Eisners noticing as Eisnerian power. Berenbaum, is a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois. She called Eisners power to notice nature vision, which is like Supermans X-ray vision, but for the details of nature that most people miss. Gandhi stated: As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world -- that is the myth of the atomic age -- as in being able to remake ourselves. Kaplearning helps one become more open. When one is open, powerful and productive uncertainty arises allowing "remaking" to occur. Kaplearning tends to make each course, and each moment within a course, a potentially capstone event; not for purposes of evaluation, but for purposes of noticing integration of more universal events. The kap part of kaplearning derives from the ideas of the University of Michigan philosopher, Abraham Kaplan, and from the integrative aspects of capstone learning. Ideas about Kaplearning make more sense in the light of some research on wisdom. Wisdom is also highly integrative.

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RESEARCH ON WISDOM

Roman poet Juvenal said: Never does nature say one thing, and wisdom,
another.

My notes reveal a wise person with the name Regina (not sure of entire name) wrote about intelligence that transcends the GRE. The quote is: Was Albert Einstein a wise man because of his intelligence? Did Mother Teresa spirituality make her wise? These are the type of questions that University of California (San Diego) researchers are trying to answer in a new study that attempts to define the abstraction we call wisdom. According to their findings, wisdom is not limited to a high IQ or moral righteousness, but is a form of advanced cognitive and emotional development based on experience that can be learned and increased with age. They found that wisdom is a uniquely human characteristic defined by six prominent qualities: general knowledge of life, emotional regulation, insight, helpfulness to others, decisiveness and tolerance of different values." Wisdom is a powerful word. Wisdom was not frequently studied until relatively recently. Excellent research by Paul D. Baltes and Ursula M. Staudinger, Wisdom: A Metaheuristic [Pragmatic] to Orchestrate Mind and Virtue Toward Excellence, in the January, 2000 issue of the American Psychologist, offers interesting clues to powerful learning. Baltes and Staudinger refer to the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm which is used to analyze wisdom-related products. They believe that wisdom is difficult to achieve yet easily recognized. Wisdom is more than the sum of the parts into which it can be divided in that the arrangement of the parts is itself an element that cannot be viewed apart from seeing the whole of wisdom. Baltes and Staudinger wrote about the general criteria outlining the nature of wisdom. They said: Wisdom addresses important and difficult questions and strategies about the conduct and meaning of life. Wisdom includes knowledge about the limits of knowledge and the uncertainties of the world. Wisdom represents a truly superior level of knowledge, judgment, and advice. Wisdom constitutes knowledge with extraordinary scope, depth, measure, and balance. Wisdom involves a perfect synergy of mind and character, that is, an orchestration of knowledge and virtues. Wisdom represents knowledge used for the good or well-being of oneself and that of others. Dr. Robert Sternberg, student of wisdom and former President of the American Psychological Association, and now Provost at Oklahoma State University, is projected to agree with much of what is said here about wisdom. Baltes and Staudinger report that J.P. Guilford, a former President of the American Psychological Association, wrote anonymously about wisdom in the 1920s. The article was written anonymously because the psychological,

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and the general scientific communities at that time, were not open to difficult to measure notions such as wisdom. Unfortunately, even today, wisdom is not frequently considered in many circles. Much more is written about creativity today but in the mid-1950s, J.P. Guilford then reported that very little work was being done about creativity. There is a projected connection between wisdom and creativity. Many scientists are openly exploring but still too many take baby steps which relate to their excessive need for high degrees of certainty at each step along the way. The rapidity of change in other areas of life demonstrates a need to accelerate the process of moving from baby steps and excessive certainty to larger steps with more openness to uncertainty. In a sense, some scientists are retarding science, perhaps by being scientistic. David Starr Jordan stated: "Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it. "Rabindranath Tagore said: "The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence."
WISDOM AND TRUST Gandhi: "It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err."

Wisdom and good character often go together, as does trust. Sarah Brown Wessling, President of the Iowa Council of Teachers of English, after observing and discussing teaching with Finnish teachers and school administrators concluded that trust is an essential element in student learning. Finland is the best educational systems in the world. She thinks trust is what is missing in our culture and she hopes we are willing to change our culture to trust more. Kaplearning tends to increase trust in students and teachers. Trust implies a degree of uncertainty. That 2+2 = 4 is certain. We do not trust that 2+2 =4 is true. We know with certainty it is true. By itself, without broad connecting, an easy math statement is often trivial. Our culture does not trust students and teachers because our schools are excessively involved in the obedience to authority and the scientistic frames. Political conservatives have been involved in setting school policy and in providing conditions for the military industrial complex to maintain control of all societal institutions. These political conservatives are prone to fear and aggression, are resistant to change, and are intolerant of ambiguity as was reported by Vandercam. The powerful elite fear trust since it will change the status quo. If we trusted more we would not allow the powerful elite to control as much as it does. Perhaps we allow them their continued control because of a general lack of self-direction. Self-directing people are freer than constrained citizens. Powerful learning/education makes one free. Training alone does not. Previously, it was reported by Covey that cooperation is more valued than competition when trust is high. In the culture of low trust organizations, Covey said: Facts are manipulated or distorted. Information and knowledge are withheld and hoarded. People spin the truth to their advantage. Getting the
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credit is very important. New ideas are openly resisted and stifled. Mistakes are covered up and covered over. Traditional American schools reflect a low trust culture whereas Finnish schools and universities and others promoting kaplearning demonstrate increasing trust in students, teachers, and administrators. Students are not frequently trusted in most schools. Covey believes that where trust is lacking, people reciprocate with distrust. Covey remarked: Thats how the vicious cycle of mistrust starts and spirals downward. There is a risk in trusting people, but the greater risk is not trusting people. Trust is often thought to be an important element of one's character. Einstein thought character is more important for scientists than knowledge. Coveys The Speed of Trust states trust is a function of both character (which includes integrity) and competence. If school administrators and teachers trusted students (as they do in free schools and Finnish schools) what is said by Covey about the trust dividends for business, would be true for student learning. An article about Coveys The Speed of Trust by Sakar said: Trust is the one thing that affects everything else youre doing. Its a performance multiplier which takes your trajectory upwards, for every activity you engage in, from strategy to execution If you look at the nature of the world today, a foundational condition in Thomas Friedmans Flat World is the presence of trust. In issue after issue, the data is clear: high trust organizations outperform low-trust organizations. Most schools and universities are low trust organizations. In high trust organizations, Covey reports the following: Information is shared openly. Mistakes are tolerated and encouraged as a way of learning. The culture is innovative and creative. People are loyal to those who are absent. People talk straight and confront real issues. There is real communication and real collaboration. Cooperation is more valued than competition when trust is high. Covey further reports: Berkshire Hathaways, Warren Buffet, often does business with a handshake (192,000 employees with 42 different wholly-owned companies with seventeen people working at corporate headquarters. Buffet employs a seamless web of deserved trust. Charlie Munger says: Its not blind trust, but smart trust. Regarding lack of trust between students and schools, the ASCD recently reported: Schools increasingly have turned to the court system to enforce student behavior during the past two decades, but federal officials and other critics want to scale back the practice. Arrested students are more likely to drop out of school, and dropouts are more likely to be unemployed or incarcerated, research has shown. What would student learning look like if schools used smart trust? The Brooklyn Free School, on which a report will soon be given, demonstrates high trust. The free Sudbury Valley School uses smart trust as indicated in its Mission Statement.

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The Sudbury Valley School, like the Brooklyn Free school states: The fundamental premises of the school are simple: that all people are curious by nature; that the most efficient, long-lasting, and profound learning takes place when started and pursued by the learner; that all people are creative if they are allowed to develop their unique talents; that age-mixing among students promotes growth in all members of the group; and that freedom is essential to the development of personal responsibility. In practice this means that students initiate all their own activities and create their own environments. The physical plant, the staff, and the equipment are there for the students to use as the need arises. The school provides a setting in which students are independent, are trusted, and are treated as responsible people; and a community in which students are exposed to the complexities of life in the framework of a participatory democracy. Lack of freedom promotes overemphasis certainty. This lack of freedom can promote violence. Violence in general, and racial violence in particular, is something we have great difficulty in reconciling with what is an emergent viewpoint of the many are one. Problems arise when events and people are seen to be more separated than unified. Racial injustice has been a problem that should no longer be ignored. Some Tea Party types, who say they want their country back, allude to the notion that they want a white President. The unacknowledged privileges that whites have in our society now needs noticing as do the unacknowledged privileges men have. Some important social concerns are neglected when outdated instruction is used. Seligmans well-being courses and kaplearning may help reduce racism, sexism, homophobia, and other manipulative injustices. The removal of these restraints can more readily move us toward a fuller practice of democracy. Those prone to fear and aggression, those resistant to change, and those intolerant of ambiguity seem to have more problems and are less peaceful. When one is peaceful, as more open people frequently are, it is projected that one is wiser. This view of wisdom is also followed in the notion of the later mentioned kaplearning. When one is peaceful, one often is generous and helpful, as well as patient. Peaceful people often bear and forbear the wrongs of others. Many allow uncertainty. They are also tolerant of ambiguity and they are not resistant to change. Dr. Emilio Duran, Bowling Green State University professor recently stated in a teacher education speech: From The National Training Lab, Bethel Maine. The average retention rates after 24 hours: Teaching others practice by doing group discussion demonstration audio-visual 90% 75% 50% 30% 20%

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reading lecture -

10% 5%

Because kaplearning is so blindingly simple, it is, at first glance, often seen as nonsense. Noticing the origin of mistakes can be useful in making more sense of kaplearning.

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MISTAKES AND THEIR O ORIGIN RIGIN

The most important motive for work in school and in life is the pleasure in work, pleasure in the result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community. Albert Einstein

Learning what to ignore helps one ignore excessive certainty. Imagination contributes to that learning. When we are open to learning to ignore, then being open to approximating and guessing helps one be open to making mistakes while providing a condition for making fewer mistakes. If courage is the power to let go of the familiar as Raymond Lindquist states, then encouraging students alludes to the idea of students tinkering with the unknown. This tinkering with the uncertain and the unknown infrequently occurs because of school and university requirements for knowing isolated content, (avoiding the process by which content is related). Teachers and professors have been trained to want certainty in schools and university classrooms. Teachers and professors want certainty so that the result of lessons may be easily measured with great certainty. It is from this rigid, certain type of environment that students could profitably and kindly rebel. Balancing science, technology, engineering, and math courses would require more emphasis on social science, the humanities, and other more fluid subjects and processes.
ENCOURAGING STUDENTS TO TRANSFORM

Transformation of students may include some rebellion from noticed restraints. One needs to trust oneself in order to rebel against inappropriate events. Perhaps the more students notice, the more likely will be the rebellion from outdated school practices. Paradoxically, by encouraging students to avoid coercive school and university imperfections, students may have a better chance for appreciating their wondrous world by noticing more of what is happening as it is happening. Numerous writings on education and schooling for many years have shown that schooling primarily promotes economic development rather than student self-direction. The American school system has not significantly changed in 125 years. Money and convenience are involved in keeping the schools the way they are. Recent research shows that money does not buy happiness. Jordi Quoidbach, University of Liege, Belgium, said in Psychological Science, he has proven for the first time the counterintuitive finding, that even the thought of money reduces satisfaction in the simple pleasures of life.

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Money as a reward is similar to high grades and degrees. High grades and degrees often bring money from the workplace, but not necessarily peace and well-being. The ASCD EDGE reported, regarding common core standards (content) that 45 Sates, Washington D.C. and the Virgin Islands will implement by 2014: It is critical that teachers structure units and lessons so that all students can access a clear standard. Students who struggle must understand what they need to do to meet expectations and students who are advanced must be challenged to meet a more complex learning goal. What many teachers and professors assume is clearly stated here: "students need to meet expectations." These expectations arise from the obedience to authority frame and are linked to the scientistic frame. Rarely are teachers or professors discussing openness and trust to the point where students explore what students find remarkable, interesting and important. Perhaps a new agency (a Darpa for schools and universities) will explore attempts to go beyond boundaries of common thinking. Some events are easy to know. Some arent. It is easy to know that squares, by definition, are not circles. It is difficult to know what we do not know. We often do not consider that most human action is unconscious (98% is unlike the old enlightenment reason) reports George Lakoff in The Political Mind. Lakoff is a cognitive scientist and linguist from the University of California, Berkeley. He also mentions national political power, under George Bush and Dick Cheney, wanted citizens, first and foremost, to be obedient to authority. Training is easier to notice than education, and it is easier to have students obey via training than through self- directing education. One difficult to notice event is schooling has trained citizens, including many teachers and professors, to avoid noticing that their teaching of certainties often helps those in power stay in power. Security has become more important than growth and development thus keeping our society at a low Maslowian need level. Such a low need level more easily allows us to preemptively attack another country, and allows torture and interference in other countries civil wars. Because of almost no powerful learning/education for self-direction, we maintain the status quo where the rich stay rich and poor stay poor. The "occupy Wall Street" groups had courageously taken steps to counter the top 1% who have taken most of the wealth. Let us consider whether it may be helpful to "occupy" schools and universities. The status quo embraces the notion that schooling primarily helps prepare students for jobs. Training for jobs is helpful except when schooling neglects the development of awareness, self-direction, and open inquiry. The avoidance of open inquiry in classrooms is a failure to develop a students ability to decide for ones self. David Brooks said: When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they cant indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already
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has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries. (My experience with some accountants is that some are highly educated and highly intelligent.) Notice how many of your teachers and professors consulted you and your classmates before they began to tell you what they think you should know. Few teachers or professors consult students before, or during, their teaching. Teachers and professors often tell. Students, at times, listen. That is how teachers and professors are often trained to train. This pattern is so common in schools and universities that it is barely noticed. Exploring this matter may improve emerging consciousness. Intense noticing of differences between being trained and being educated brings about a greater chance of noticing that students aren't becoming educated because of student coercion and the obedience to authority frame. These frames operate in schools and many university classrooms. Peacefully revolting against coercion and becoming one's own authority may facilitate powerful learning. "Occupy" movements seem to help. The lack of consultation is okay for purposes of training. For purposes of developing open inquiry and self-direction, professors lack of consultation with students before they profess is evidence of their training. (Training is similar to the modeling of the professors professors or even the professors professors professors). Training often implies development of narrow skills. The general skill of deciding for oneself, and integrating narrower skills into a general judgment skill, is often neglected. Once one begins to notice that obedience to authority is paramount in schools and in many university classrooms, one can begin to intensify their learning to decide for themselves by deciding for themselves. We learn by doing. Our schools and universities do not often practice helping students become free. Rather, schooling often trains students to think what they are told to think, and to do what they are told to do (obey authority and always be certain). Students could profitably experiment with becoming their own authorities by deciding for themselves. Our founding fathers experimented in a civilly disobedient manner when citizens became aware that something could be done about taxation without representation. Throwing tea in the harbor was civilly disobedient but appropriate for conditions. With Henry David Thoreau, we and our students can thoughtfully involve ourselves in civil disobedience if and when, in the long term, it helps one decide for ones self. It would help if more students, teachers and citizens became somewhat revolutionary. Disobeying false authority, at times, is also needed. Students can learn to be free of classroom coercion and constraints. Because they have been shackled for such a long time, it is difficult for students to notice they are shackled. Students have been programmed to believe that things in schools, are just the way things are and nothing can be done. The programming makes it difficult to notice alternatives. One large

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shackle is lack of awareness that teachers and professors are often excessively coercive. They often do little to help their students decide for themselves. The book, Turning Points: 35 Visionaries in Education by Jerry Mintz and Carlo Ricci, include what Dennis Littky did in his University of Michigan class. It clearly illustrates a powerful point. Littky said:
I entered graduate school at the University of Michigan, studying psychology, and started teaching an undergraduate psychology course. Those who signed up for my class received a room number, the time and days of the week the class would meet, but no instructors name. I arrived to the first class wearing chinos, boots, and a crewneck sweater and sat in the back of the room chatting nervously with the students, many of whom were experiencing their first college class. I was clean-shaven, with neatly trimmed hair, and a consummately boyish appearance; I looked as much a freshman as the real ones sitting around me. In walked a handsome, stern-faced man with a close-cropped beard, wearing a dark blue three-piece suit and carrying a briefcase and an armload of books. The class quieted down. Without smiling, the man turned to the board and wrote his name, Mr. Wolfe. Class, Mr. Wolfe barked, There will be surprise quizzes in this coursea lot of them. The only one youll know about will be tomorrow. I raised my hand. Mr. Wolfe, now that we are in college, do we still need surprise quizzes? Mr. Wolfe set his jaw. I work on bellshaped curve. The same number will get As as fail in this course and most of you will earn grades somewhere in between. Thats the law in this class. I raised my hand. Is this important, young man? Dont you think its kind of discouraging to know that a set number of us will fail regardless of how hard we try? Thats life. What if we all work hard, do well, and deserve As? A bell-shaped curve doesnt work that way. I know, thats exactly my complaint. By now, students turned in their seats, stunned by the aggressive fellow in the back of the room. Mr. Wolfe continued his labored description of the course. My hand shot up. What is it this time? Mr. Wolfe snapped. I thought this course was supposed to get us out into the world and actually work with mental patients.
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Mr. Wolfe slammed his books on the desk, packed his briefcase, and turned on his heel. Young man, if you think you can do a better job, then get up here. He stormed out of the room. Im gettin out of this class, one student said, and got up to leave. Others followed his lead. Hang on one second, I said. Wasnt I speaking for all of you? Yeah, I guess you were, a thin, bespectacled freshman said. That teacher seems real unfair, another student said. The discussion continued. Finally, I stood up, walked to the front of the room, smiling this time. Hi, Im Dennis Littky, your teacher. The students applauded. The first unit of the class was aimed at looking at the way people learn. My antics confronted those issues head-on, engaging the students, getting them involved in the class, and giving them a flash of real learning.

Unfortunately those powerful goals of developing student's ability to openly inquire, to be self-directing, and to develop a love of learning are often only given lip service in school and university classrooms. Littky is an exception. I have heard of no university course syllabus that has the primary goal of developing a students ability to openly inquire and develop a love of learning. If students noticeably increased their open inquiry and love of learning, they would develop, as Einstein suggested, the ability to think something that cant be learned from textbooks. With an increase in open inquiry, the training for jobs would be reduced and growth rather than conformist groupthink could more readily occur. Because of our need for certainty and that which can be easily measured, schools and universities have become training places rather than fountains to promote self-direction and wisdom. Open inquiry, self-direction, and wisdom are difficult to measure and "teach" and as a result, these qualities are not daily classroom goals. They can, however, be learned in environments which allow students to openly and freely explore what they find remarkable, interesting, and important. It would help to notice when trying to think "out-of-the-box" that any box that may exist is created in one's mind. The greater the need one has for certainty, the more limited the minding and larger is one's imaginary box. Allowing oneself not to know be (uncertain) can, paradoxically, improve knowing and finding meaning from experience. The van Rossum and Hamer higher levels of learning and knowing research supports this.
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Research relating to the Berlin wisdom paradigm reveals wisdom can be noticed, but it is difficult to delineate that which comprises the wisdom. The same may be said for self-direction, open inquiry, and love of learning. For those wanting high degrees of certainty, they can only know what can be told. Largely because of the desire for high degrees of certainty, schools and universities do more training for economic gain and jobs than for helping people find and create meaningful self-directing lives. As a result, most institutions are hierarchical with those in power frequently staying in power. Deinstitutionalizing continuously would facilitate the continuous reconstruction of experience; Dewey's idea of powerful learning. If our schools and universities only tend to promote the maintenance of the status quo, we will find them increasingly becoming quaint out-of-the-way places with little relevance. The number of people with advanced degrees that have relatively little wisdom and self-direction may be increasing. Their needs for certainty are often excessive. By reducing one's need for certainty one could more powerfully learn. What is about to be said about self-direction may more easily be understood when we compare it to what Gandhi said about peace. Gandhi said: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." We may say there is no way to selfdirection. Self-direction is the way. There is no way to education. Education is the way. Since we don't have broadly defined agreed-upon notions of education, schools and universities primarily do training about which we are more certain. As a result of the excessive training and lack of education, we are becoming a third rate nation. We have already moved so close to third-rate that we don't even notice that lack of interest in developing wisdom, self-direction, open inquiry and a love of learning. An estimated ninety-nine percent of schooling is for jobs and the economy. Grades and degrees have become much more important than learning. Ask students. This is not the case in Finland where schools are now top-rated, and where teachers choose how to best educate each student within broad guidelines which they have helped to create. They are treated as medical doctors and lawyers are treated. They do not teach to the test. They trust. Excessively high needs for certainty keep us removed from noticing what is happening, as it is happening. Noticing ones present experience is very tentative. It is tentative partly because it is ongoing and partly because we have not been encouraged to guess and be uncertain. Noticing ones present experience is often foreign to students in schools and universities. An unknown author said: "Nothing ever happened in the past and nothing ever will happen in the future. Everything that happens, happens in the present or does not happen." The notion of now has been so fluid that physicist Richard Feynman wrote that science did not pay attention to now since now can't be clearly defined. Albert Einstein thought the present was all that exists. What we think of as the past is no more than a present remembrance, and what we think will happen in the future is no more than present anticipation. Noticing the future is no more than a present anticipation helps us become more aware of what is happening as it is happening. Some unknown

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wise person said, the future may be considered as an infinite succession of presents. Students from kindergarten through graduate school are taught that they are unequal to their teachers and administrators. The teachers and administrators have similarly been taught to think they are -- superior -- to the students in their school or university. This is not so in the Kyrene, Arizona school district. The NY Times 9/4/11 mentions: The class, and the Kyrene School District (Arizona) as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of educations future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies. The digital push here aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom, turning the teacher into a guide instead of a lecturer, wandering among students who learn at their own pace on Internetconnected devices. Hope and enthusiasm are soaring here. But not test scores. White men too often consider themselves superior partly because old fashioned schooling continues older cultural patterns. It is easier for people in the United States to notice that blacks and women were not equal to white men when our Constitution was written. It wasn't until 1920 when women gained the right to vote. Black people could legally vote earlier but because of white manipulations such as poll tests and taxes, Black people couldn't vote equally. Blacks still aren't as free as whites partly because of outdated schooling. Mississippi and other conservative states are now making it harder for poor people to vote through requiring excessive identification, etc. Women still earn 80% of what men earn, and people of color not only earn much less than white people, their healthcare and well-being, as measured by a variety of sources, shows that their power still does not equal the power of white people. For those interested in learning more about unacknowledged white and male privileges, you are highly encouraged to Google Peggy McIntosh, and notice the unacknowledged privileges that whites, and particularly white men have. Our excessive training for jobs and our excessive need for certainty tends to keep equality for all far into the background. Farthest in the background may be equality for students. They are so far back that they are rarely considered as the most oppressed unequal group. According to Todd May and Jacques Ranciere, as mentioned in Todd May's book, Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Ranciere, we do not have a democratic society when there is the degree of inequality that now exists. Unfortunately, he says we will not have more equality until those who are unequal perceive that they are equal. Such perceptions are difficult in any culture which trains us to think from when we were very young; "that's the way things are, and one can't do much about it." Students dont know they can kindly rebel against school and university coercion. Encouraging students to intelligently rebel may enhance their selfdirecting education.

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I know highly intelligent people who think that one is not ones own authority unless and until one is confirmed to be an authority by a higher authority. When a higher authority confirms ones authority, only then does one have a firm basis for being an authority. In our culture, that firm basis is often a position awarded by a higher authority and/or a degree granted by someone or some institution thought to be higher in the hierarchy. One often does not see one is ones own authority. One can become one's own oracle through self-directing, open inquiry. In schools that allow students to explore what students find remarkable, interesting, and important, we find that students are equal to teachers and administrators for most matters of learning and running the school. Students are often their own authority in free schools. The Brooklyn Free School is one of a growing number of free schools which allow students to explore what students find remarkable, interesting and important. The tuition is not free but the manner in which the school is operated is based on equality of students, teachers, and administrators. That equality is what makes it free. The Brooklyn Free School (BFS) states it: Places the highest emphasis on the personal development of each student and seeks to minimize, or if possible eliminate completely, undue influence, pressure and stress that accrue from expectations on students to acquire the accepted wisdom of present day society or meet arbitrary standards, so that each child can become an independent learner and thinker. BFS is a true democratic school for children of all ages. Each child and staff member will have an equal voice in major decisions (and minor ones) affecting the day-to-day running of the school. BFS believes that all children are natural learners and they are fully supported to pursue any interest they have, in the manner they choose, at their own pace, and for as long as they want to, as long as they do not restrict any other person's right to do the same. Admissions to the school are not based on ethnicity, income level or geographic location. The school takes full advantage of the tremendous diversity of individuals, businesses, organizations, and communities that the City of New York, and the entire Metro area has to offer to build on students' interests. Many teachers and administrators find it counterintuitive that the Brooklyn Free School States: No one (students, staff, or visitors) is discouraged from offering a class, event, or activity to the school, provided that it is noncompulsory. The school will spread the news about the effectiveness of democratic/free schooling and promotes the growth of non-coercive education throughout the world. Carlo Ricci's Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, and Jerry Mintzs Education Revolution are two excellent journals giving information about free schooling. In such a school, those more closed mental boxes are removed and as a result, they allow higher degrees of uncertainty in the areas of work and living. Free schools know that the excessive needs for certainty is our original mistake, and as a result of that original mistake, we make other mistakes
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such as making some people unequal to others by creating permanent institutions, creating fixed ideas which must be followed at all times and all places, and by creating many unnecessary rules. Many rules can at times be submerged/ignored when one's judgment is honed to wisely follow the spirit rather than the letter of the law. A need for excessive certainty creates hierarchies which promote police states. The excessively unfair distribution of wealth that arises from these excessive needs for certainty produce as David Geoffrey Smith earlier said: The largest 300 multinational corporations control 25% of all the worlds productive assets, 70% of all international trade, and 99% of all direct foreign investment. Schools and universities have trained us not to notice the events about which Smith has written. Information, while often important when connected to larger wholes, is approaching triviality when disconnected from broader contexts. When we don't know what is happening as it is happening, it is difficult to make connections to broad frameworks. The information Smith speaks about is disillusioning as Smith states. This disillusioning is allied to functional discontinuity, as will later be clarified. Many teachers can't say what Smith has found to be true because they would be fired. Support for spending time for present observation is given in The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley and Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley. They say: Through mindfulness you can stand outside your own mind as if you are watching what is happening to another person rather than experiencing it herself . . . Mindfulness requires direct willful effort, and the ability to forge those practicing it to observe their sensations and thoughts with a calm clarity of an external witness . . . One views his thoughts, feelings, and expectations much as a scientist views experimental datathat is, as a natural phenomenon to be noted, investigated, reflected on and learned from. Viewing ones own inner experience as data allows (one) to become, in essence, his own experimental subject. Meditation might be one way of doing that self-examination. Schwartz and Begley noted that William James did this kind of noticing and he used it to help people powerfully learn. Begley and Schwartz offer new findings in brain research to support this type of learning for selfdirection/education. Brain research is moving ahead rapidly so it is understandable that teachers and professors awareness of what brains and minds can now do is lacking. Begley, neuroscience expert, reports on Steven Pinkers research: Many human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined. If things that affect brain function and therefore behavior also evolve quickly, then we do not have stone-age brains that evolutionary psychologists oppose . . . (then we) may have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over 50,000 years ago. This is especially true considering what Schenk reports about Lamarckian evolution.

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Improving noticing by paying attention to one's present experience can help more citizens see that they are, at times at least, slaves to corrupt oligarchs who do not want people openly thinking and noticing lest the powerful lose their power. Noticing what is happening as it happens prepares us for new possibilities. Possibilities were not given attention because many fail to "look and see for longer than usual periods. Some possibilities could profitably improve ones well-being by paying attention to one's present experience for longer than usual time periods. It may be interesting to note that in the beginning of chaos research, chaos researchers noticed random cloud formations for much longer than usual periods of time (hours) before some sort of order emerged. Schenk's elaboration of Lamarckian evolution supports this.
CHANGE AND RAPIDITY OF CHANGE Before kaplearning is given attention, it is helpful to note how rapidly technological events are changing. Kurzweil is the co-founder of Singularity University, a school (supported by Google) which opened in mid, 2009. The universitys goal is: To assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply focus and guide these tools to address humanitys grand challenges. Rarely do teachers or professors daily plans focus on grand challenges.

The March, 2008, National Geographic article on: God Particle and the Large Particle Collider (CERN) mentioned physicist John Elliss stated: He wouldnt even mind if the Large Hadron Collider) failed to find a Higgs boson, (a main particle the collider was built to discover). Ellis said: Many of us theorists would find that failure much more interesting than if we just find another boring old particle that some theorist (Peter Higgs) predicted 45 years ago. (The Higgs boson) is thought to give other particles mass. (I read on 7/26/11 that the LHC twice found what seems to be the Higgs boson.) In December 2011 it was reported that evidence is mounting for the existence of the Higgs boson. One physicist said that within a year they would find it. This finding could help physicists make more sense out of what they are doing. I sense teachers and professors don't often do that since the sense many of them now make made sense many years ago but not now in this period of super change. A Higgs-like particle has now been found. Calvin Linton, former Dean of Liberal Arts of George Washington University, mentioned that our fund of knowledge doubled between 1 BCE and 1750 CE. It doubled again by 1900, then again by 1950, then by 1960, then by 1963. As was mentioned, one recent candidate for the presidency of the American Psychological Association predicted that by 2024, our fund of knowledge will be doubling every 17 days. The amount of knowledge available now is staggering. Kurzweil stated we are approaching a singularity which, when reached, we will know nothing. Regarding research, Einstein said if we knew what we were doing it wouldnt be called research. Kaplearning, to
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an extent, cherishes not knowing in an intellectual sense implying we know in the present from direct experience uncluttered by preconceptions. To make it easier to accept social change, more interesting and infrequently considered facts are given. Unusual and impermanent events surround us. Georg Cantor found some infinities are bigger than others. Cantors finding is reported in The Infinite Book. Some private non free schools are becoming freer. Jounalist Zimmerman reports each student will be given a portable computer. Rick Ruhl, Principal of Seton High School, Wayne County Indiana, said: "I also love how we are positioning our educational delivery," he said. "The delivery of instruction is going to be so much different. In the past, it was much more teacher-led, a student sitting there passively or actively absorbing the information. Now, it's going to be much more student-driven, student-led, and have much more activity from the student perspective." Schools and universities have trained us to be fearful of making mistakes, and as a result, we keep our mouths shut about a variety of problems and injustices. Our schools remain far behind what they could be in light of the current acceleration of the doubling of our fund of knowledge. It is estimated that a weeks worth of New York Times contains more information than a th person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18 century. There is some evidence to indicate that we are at the dawn of major breakthroughs in consciousness raising/self-directing learning. As a result more open thinking may now be needed in order to perceive nearly unimaginable possibilities. It is projected that kaplearning, being unusually open, better allows each one of us to decide for oneself by allowing oneself to notice what may have been previously unnoticeable. For instance, Western logic holds a thing cannot be, and not be, simultaneously. Kaiping Pengs research with Asian students demonstrated that is not the case for Asian students. Their perceptions seem to be different not as fixed or certain. Kaplearning may help us more easily notice an amalgam of ancient Eastern thinking with modern Western thinking. Kaplearning, in many senses, can't even be talked about since talking about kaplearning, (one writer alluded to) is like looking for fish tracks in a dry riverbed. I do not wish to present kaplearning as something highly confusing, but rather, as a different way of learning to adapt and be peaceful. Kaplearning includes higher degrees of uncertainty because of greater openness. It is projected that allowing for higher degrees of uncertainty and openness will help students better adapt to very rapid technological and social change.
THE (A) MEANING OF LEARNING AND KNOWING

While there may be many meanings to learning and knowing, the van Rossum and Hamer six ways of learning and knowing are characterized by increasing complexity of thinking. The higher levels approach kaplearning. Teachers and professors when "covering content," often ask students to operate at the two
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lowest (least complex) levels of consciousness. The Van Rossum and Hamer fourth level of learning and knowing is called self-authorship. This fourth level is tantamount to John Deweys self-direction. A students inventing higher level of consciousness partly depends on what the student experiences in classrooms. What students experience partly depends on school and teacher goals. Brains Inventing Themselves: Choice and Engaged Learning, Sense Publishers, 2011, elaborates on self-inventing brains and schooling. Van Rossum and Hamer say their epistemological model: Provides clear signposts on the developmental education highway and has proven its worth as an instrument for curriculum design, measurement of epistemological development and as a tool for staff development. The van Rossum and Hamer research includes empirical studies on epistemology, student thinking, teacher thinking, educational policy and staff development (From the book The Meaning of Learning and Knowing, Sense Publishers, 2010). They have developed a six-stage developmental model indicating qualitatively different ways students and teachers view learning and good teaching. They have reviewed research from many disciplines and their study underpins the empirical evidence of over 650 students and teachers. Unique ways of meaning making and brain invention are shown in these six levels of learning and knowing. Van Rossum and Hamer state there is ample evidence to show that higher education is not attaining its own stated goals of education (self-authorship). The same may be said for K-12 schooling. Van Rossum and Hamer say one explanation could be: Many teachers in higher education have not themselves reached the minimum required way of knowing thus preventing those teachers from constructing a path for students to be educated at that self-authorship level, (probably also true for K-12). Patrick Walsh reports that American teachers come from the bottom third of their class, whereas Finnish teachers are at the very top. Van Rossum and Hamer seem to be implying that many teachers and professors could productively raise their level of open inquiry and selfdirection. Canadian scholar, David Geoffrey Smith stated: Why does so much educational research today seem so unenlightening, repetitive and incapable of moving beyond itself? Wisdomly, the answer must be because it is paradigmatically stuck, and cannot see beyond the parameters of its current imaginal space. This lower level teaching and learning may occur because many current professors and teachers were heavily influenced by B.F. Skinner and his emphasis on conditioning/"training." As a result of paying attention only to what can be easily sensed and measured, many professors and teachers do not now pay attention to mindfulness, wonder, eagerness to learn, curiosity, and self-direction. What cannot be directly sensed is difficult to measure and clearly define. Events such as openness, and love of learning also fall into that difficult to measure category. As a result, schooling and much university classroom activity deals primarily with training rather than developing

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higher levels of consciousness. This early excessive training keeps some teachers and some professors at lower levels of consciousness. The van Rossum and Hamer first level of learning relates to increasing knowledge by a teachers imparting clear, well-structured (easily measured) information. The first two levels are now often taught in science, technology, engineering, and math courses because of the relative ease of measurement and higher degrees of certainty. The 2nd level of learning is memorizing, again through a teacher transmitting structured knowledge. Their 3rd level of learning is understanding/application with teaching being rd interactive and shaping (close to Blooms 3 level in the cognitive domain). The third level relates the teacher challenging the student to apply what students comprehend. The 4th level of learning van Rossum and Hamer call learning in the abstraction of meaning where teacher and learner dialogue occurs. What the student wants to know is part of the dialogue. The 5th level relates to an interpretive process of widening student horizons and personal development through dialogue teaching. Nobel laureate Percy Bridgemans "science equaling doing one's damnedest with one's mind, no holds barred" applies here. Also related is Einstein's suggestion that scientists could be more effective by studying philosophy, and helping students learn what can't be learned from textbooks. (See Re-opening Einstein's Thought: About What Can't Be Learned from Textbooks, Sense publishers, 2008. The 6th level includes growing self-awareness with mutual trust, authentic relationship, and caring between teacher and learner. The 6th level is projected to most fully accelerate higher level consciousness/self-awareness. The 6th level includes self-direction and personal development. The 6th is near the highest form of learning often coupled with the highest form of knowing. The highest form of learning is either unknown or cant be said. Learning may be limited by time: otherwise learning can be infinite, as is kaplearning. The 6th level provides conditions whereby students can grow in selfawareness while being their own authorities. Their 6th level goes beyond Bloom and other hierarchies to integrate more than the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains. They do not mention that their 6th level of learning and knowing has many parallels to what Zen learners and Zen teachers do (and do not do)--more later. Most university and K-12 classes do not deal with the van Rossum and Hamer 4-6 levels of learning and knowing. Transforming schools, universities, and society might occur if they did. Grading often inhibits higher level learning and knowing. The van Rossum and Hamer writing about the meaning of learning and knowing helps us see that we can teach and learn at levels 4-6 which include higher orders of consciousness. Teachers and many professors follow a mindset that tends to avoid natural learning for its own sake. Their avoidance prevents self-direction. This avoidance of levels 4-6 is often generated by desire for certainty.

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IGNORING AND LEARNING

Insightfully ignoring standardized tests can transform a school. Unless one pays attention to ones present experience, one may not notice unexamined preconceptions. Alternative Education Resource Organization (9/7//11) reported: Tim Slekar, a professor of education in Pennsylvania, opted his son Luke out of his state's tests last school year to make my community aware and to try and enlighten them of the real issues. This parent and professor's plea is simple and forceful: Stop treating my child as data! He's a great kid who loves to learn. He is not a politician's pawn in a chess game designed to prove the inadequacy of his teachers and school." Research has shown that unchosen distractions can improve memory. As we evolve, I suggest we learn to more consciously ignore distract ourselves from trivia. An evolved superperson may be coming and moving us from ordinary forming to transforming. This transforming may, paradoxically, help us notice that ordinary open forming can be transformative. This new superman will not leap tall buildings in a single jump, but he will know what to ignore through advanced consciousness. As a result, he will be able to notice very large, mostly unnoticed, and difficult to measure, wholes. He may, as Todd May suggested be more imaginative by going beyond looking for a bigger and better category that one thinks may explain more. Going beyond bigger and better categories may imply giving more attention to fluid and fuzzy, difficult to define processes. Mathematicians have invented an infinitesimal; an amount too small to measure. A superperson may find it worthwhile to notice the opposite of an infinitesimal; an amount too large to measure. Such an invention may help us look for and notice a larger context of contexts (the largest perspective presently possible). A very large context implies high degrees of openness and being comfortable with some uncertainty. The canons of scientific investigation discourage one from noticing their noticing while they are noticing. The assemblers of those canons seem to fear the uncertainty of infinite regress. Perhaps those canons need to be re-noticed lest they provide a condition for scientism. Scientism does not as readily allow for exploratory explorations. Newer large-scale explorations (including all noticeable contexts) may be helpful in developing new paradigms which, in turn, may provide us with new ways of noticing. Noticing is awareness of what is and that noticing is at the heart of all learning and knowing. When a student experiences something at variance with his or her expectations, consciousness often heightens. (When riding a bike you dont often notice the tires until a blow-out occurs.) Functional discontinuity facilitates this conscious heightening. This noticing beyond may be perplexing. What is beyond ones expectations is functionally discontinuous. When a student deals with a discontinuity, the student often creates a greater continuity a larger picture, and expanded context of greater order, or the student can more easily accept that particular instance of disorder. An example-psychotherapist James Guinan who noticed he was calmly watching what he

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noticed as his terror. Guinan's example is what Begley and Schwartz were saying about being your own experimental subject when you presently watch yourself watching yourself. Open experiences of paying attention to one's present experience is most often needed to reach the higher levels of consciousness spoken of by van Rossum and Hamer. Many of us do not want to avoid scientific evidence. Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman stated: (9/5/11) So it is now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe even in the teeth of scientific evidence (Rick Perry), or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party's base wants them to believe (Mitt Romney)And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the GOP, extends far beyond the issues of climate.We don't know who will win the 2012 presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years, the world's greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science and, indeed, anti-knowledge. In time of severe challenges environmental, economic, and more that's a terrifying prospect. Students are not frequently trusted in most schools. Covey believes that where trust is lacking people reciprocate with distrust. Covey remarked: Thats how the vicious cycle of mistrust starts and spirals downward. There is a risk in trusting people, but the greater risk is not trusting people. Operating at higher levels of consciousness can help one reduce depression and maximize happiness and well-being. As was mentioned, Martin Seligman reports vast increases in depression and a noticeable decrease in happiness over the last 20 years. His school program, The Penn Resiliency Program, increases well-being and happiness. Seligman notes that a positive mood increases student attention and generates more holistic and creative thinking. Depression, and a negative mood generate narrowed attention which often produces only analytic thinking thus avoiding open, imaginative thinking. His careful research on his Penn Resiliency Program shows amazing gains in well-being and decreased depression. Resiliency and flexibility are very close. An unknown researcher said: The flexibility of learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence. While many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the task at hand. It is for this reason that we can colonize every region on the planet, learn the local language we were born into, and master skills as diverse as playing the violin, high jumping, and operating space shuttle cockpits. Kaplearning holds many elements of the more specific Penn Resiliency Program. Kaplearning is a type of consciousness generating learning which helps move one to the highest levels of learning and knowing, perhaps, even beyond the van Rossum and Hamer level 6. Einstein was noted for his thought experiments. Classrooms at all levels could be places where these occur. It is difficult for a thought experiment to occur when the majority of time is devoted to "covering material." Rutgers

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University researchers are now experimenting with unusual thought experiments. Minds are very powerful and it appears that the limits of mindfulness and the minds power are only beginning to be explored.

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KAPLEARNING AS A WAY

"When you are deluded and full of doubt, even 10,000 books of scripture are still not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is already too much. Fenyang.

Recent books and articles about willpower refer to the power of mindfulness. Schools and universities rarely deal with willpower partly because it is difficult to measure. A new idea referred to as kaplearning provides a verifiable condition for teachers at all levels to focus on students present experience. Focusing on present experience helps a students prefrontal cortex and cerebral cortex moderate the power of the brain's midrange region so that longer-term awareness operates in the interests of reducing disabling habits. Disabling habits tends to prevent generation of long-term well-being of the kind mentioned by Martin EP Seligman in his book Flourish. The brains midrange region, at times, can overpower the prefrontal cortex generating poor judgment. Research by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney in their recent book, Willpower, give support to the notion of kaplearning and mindfulness. Research by Kelly McGonagle and Charles Duhigg also provide support. Mindfulness tends to reduce immediate cravings by student focus on present experience as elaborated below on kaplearning. It is estimated that at least 80% of what goes on in schools is habitual. Focus on kaplearning (developing present awareness of one's present experience) tends to reduce that percentage greatly. Kaplearning arises partly from the writings of Abraham Kaplan, former University of Michigan philosopher. He thinks when talking about what is here called kaplearning, nonsense can't be avoided. He suggests one avoids solemnity in discussing it and he thinks the more one relaxes, the more one will be able to peacefully understand (what kaplearning is about). Kaplearning is not a philosophy in the Western sense of philosophy. Kaplan alludes to the notion that it is a living philosophy that plays an intimate part in the life of some particular people. Kaplan thinks it relates to a particular culture whereas a number of others claim it is universal and for all cultures. Kaplan thinks it is the most vital and significant philosophy known to him. Kaplan says it (what is here called kaplearning) has no books or symbols, and that it bears no special dogmas, performs no characteristic ceremonies or rituals. It does not offer a new logic, a special ethics, or a distinctive metaphysics of man and nature."
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Paradoxically you will see that kaplearning doesn't have much to do with the reasons either. Kaplan says: "Philosophy is inescapably a matter of words. If it isn't entirely occupied with what words mean and how they should be used as is true of much Anglo-American philosophy today at any rate (philosophy) is concerned with finding the right words by which to convey its teaching. What is here called kaplearning, Kaplan said: There just aren't any right words; (and what I call kaplearning) has to say: isn't sayable or at least, it isn't sayable simply. Kaplearning is a way to well-being, peace, and broad understanding. It is similar to a universal skill which generates helpful sub-skills. It facilitates learning to learn. So, in a relaxed manner, notice what is going on in and around you. A way you are passionate about and find meaning in is probably your way to notice well. Your noticing is probably different from others noticings. This does not necessarily mean one notincing is better than another. Lao Tzu noticed: "A good traveler has no destination, and is not intent on arriving." The journey and the destination might be one. Learning to learn advances learning, yet paradoxically, it may be no different from ordinary open learning. Hopefully this chapter will clarify that. As philosopher Joshua Greene remarked: The products of the mind supervene the mechanisms of the brain. The humanities can be informed by the cognitive sciences even as they supervene. It is helpful to notice that words can be used to conceal, as well as reveal. All words are products of mind and words represent states of being that can surpass some common interpretations of those words. At first, kaplearning might seem like gobbledygook. What at first appears to be gobbledygook may be a way of noticing a way to noticing well. Kaplearning uses paradox which reveals that something can be, and not be, simultaneously. The being, and not being, cause some confusion initially, yet the meanings provide an interesting out-of-the-box view. Being and becoming, at times, may be interchangeable.
KAPLEARNING AND WISDOM

The noted psychologist, Rollo May, offers some ideas to help make sense of kaplearning. May said one is not neurotic or psychotic based on deviance from this norm or that norm. Rather, one has unhealthy mental functioning when one fails to act on the basis of one's own condition humane. When one acts in a manner one thinks, believes, and feels one should not act, or when one fails to act in a manner one thinks and feels and believes one should act, (ones condition humane) one has unhealthy mental functioning. One has poor mental functioning to the degree one is removed from how one thinks, believes, and feels one should be thinking and acting. When considering kaplearning, it is helpful to keep Rollo Mays ideas in mind since kaplearning encourages one to follow what one is passionate about in the long term and short term, even though one always can only decide in the present.

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Steven Taylor states: The counter-intuitive nature of quantum physics shows that a tolerance of confusion and uncertainty is a necessary condition for seeing the world as it is at its most fundamental levels. What follows is called kaplearning partly because it uses the ideas of Abraham Kaplan, and partly because each sentence uttered and activity genuinely tried within kapearning, is what may be considered beyond a capstone within a capstone course (a capstone of all capstones). Each sentence (or period of silence) involved in kaplearning would itself be a capstone sentence or capstone silence. Kaplearning is a series of capstone activities and non-activities which would surpass most of what else might be said or done. It deals with the heart of the matter. The "heart of the matter" is similar to what is most essential at any given moment. Noticing well is often at the heart of a matter. Abraham Kaplans ideas do not so much use paradox as help the reader experience paradoxical matters to clarify and help defragment common ways of thinking in order to notice well. While defragmenting common ways of thinking, the products of the mind supervene the mechanisms of the brain. By noticing what is going on in and around one, one may provide some control in our highly uncontrollable universe. Being aware of the limits of ones control is equivalent to having some control which is projected to be a way of becoming freer. It is projected that having more control and accepting the little control one has, helps one be patient, aware, compassionate, free, peaceful, and wise. Dr. Andrew Weil states our brains are not equipped for 21st-century life. He thinks that the more people have, the less likely they are to be content with what they have. He thinks depression is a disease of affluence. He thinks we can be happier by getting in touch with nature and "putting limits on our e-mail and Internet use. His 2011 book is Spontaneous Happiness. He said: "Not only do we suffer from nature deficit (nature deficit disorder) we are experiencing information surfeit Mindfulness training is an excellent way to develop your powers of attention by concentration. Try to bring more of your awareness to the present moment." (Weil implies self-directing education when he said "mindfulness training.") Abraham Kaplan and Zen practitioners recommend that also. Weils and Seligmans recommendations are a part of kaplearning. What makes kaplearning so extraordinary is that it is so ordinary: so natural. The capstone of capstones is, paradoxically, aware, ordinary, open learning/living. As Kahlil Gibran said, if the teacher is indeed wise, he does not bid the student to enter the house of wisdom, but rather, leads the student to the threshold of the students mind. Tangential support for Gibrans idea may be noticed when comparing the thinking of Thomas Jefferson, Martin Seligman, Abraham Kaplan, and Rollo May who seem to agree with Gibran. I do not recall the source of the following five points related to kaplearning, but I believe Gibran, Rollo May, Martin Seligman, and Jefferson would encourage teachers to do the following points when educating. These points do not readily apply when primarily training.

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1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

Talk less so that when the activity is done the students will say, We did it ourselves. Find good students to be good and bad students to also be good. Realize that developing gentleness, awareness, compassion, patience, peacefulness, self-direction, and self-knowledge is the purpose of knowing. Teach for balance between thought and action; between play and work; between thinking and feeling; between accepting ones rights and following ones duties; between seriousness and silliness; between openness to experience and some temporary, necessary protection of self. Know that the final job of the teacher is to free the student of the teacher.

About freeing the student of the teacher, Steven Taylor remarked Antoine de Saint-Exupery said: If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather, let them long for the endless immensity of the sea. Noted psychologist and educator, Carl Rogers, (Freedom To Learn) gave additional ideas about acting wisely in schools and universities. These ideas will make more sense out of what is said about kaplearning. We can move toward kaplearning when Carl Rogers approach is used by schools and universities because facilitation of learning to learn best arises when paying attention to ones present experience. Carl Rogerss notions about freedom to learn have facilitated the high level self-directing learning of thousands of students. Awareness is the key to powerful learning and awareness can only happen in the present. Carl Rogers has promoted education that is the opposite of the present narrow school training which often contributes to the development of rigid, racist, sexist, humorless minds. These rigid, overly certain minds are too often prone to fear and aggression, too often are resistant to change, and too often are intolerant of ambiguity. The implementation of Rogers views keeps us from trapping ourselves. When we trap ourselves we prevent our own growth. Salient views of Carl Rogers notion of self- directing education are as follows: It seemed to Carl Rogers that everything that could be taught (told) to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior. He increasingly believed that he was only interested in learning which significantly influenced behavior. He had come to think that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is the self-discovered, selfappropriated learning. Rogers believed it is such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another. (Similar to Lao Tzus notion that the way that can be said is not the way.) Rogers believed: As soon as an individual tries to communicate such experience directly, often it becomes teaching (telling) and its results are

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inconsequential. He also believed that as a result of his acquired beliefs, he had lost interest before in being a teacher. He did, however, believe in facilitating learning. As a result, Rogers was only interested in being a learner, preferably learning things that matter, and that had some significant influence on his own behavior. Notice how modeling applies. Areas of social justice are matters that seem to be important to many open persons who are not prone to fear and aggression, are not resistant to change, and are not intolerant of ambiguity. Rogers ideas facilitate social justice by placing the community before ones individual self as Einstein did. Closed thinking appears more selfish and often creates injustices such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. Unjust conditions often bring about the need to "occupy Wall Street" types of activity. Kaplearning promotes action to right wrongs. Furthermore, Rogers found that one of the best but most difficult ways to learn is to drop his own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which his experience seems and feels to himself, and the other persons with whom he or she is relating. (What Begley and Schwartz are talking about is asking each person be their own experimental subject by noticing what they are noticing, while they are noticing, as Rogers suggested.) Rogers found that another way of learning is to state his own uncertainties, to try to clarify his own puzzles, and thus to get closer to the meaning that his experience actually seems to have for him. Rogers also believed that letting his experience carry him, in a direction which appeared to be forward, towards goals which he could but dimly define as he tried at least to understand the current meaning of the experience, was the best way for him to learn. Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt psychotherapy, also focused on one's present awareness for optimal learning. Some progress would be noticed if: 1. We would bear with the wrongs of others so that each of us would concentrate and focus attention in order to help everyone become wise, aware, peaceful, and to use that wisdom for the benefit of everyone and everything. 2. We held with Auden that natural goodness arose when an organism reached a state of equilibrium with its environment. In that sense, all healthy animals and plants are naturally good. Note Audens idea of morally good arising when change provides conditions toward which a new equilibrium also arises. (Continuing with the ifs:) We had more freedom for everyone, and we, at times, notice that we cannot be free until everyone is free because we are more connected than disconnected. 3. Each individual is open to freedom at any time yet because of previous experiences, approaching a threshold of ones mind may take decades, and may never be reached because of the power of early constraining experiences.

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Noting of the importance of early experiences, schools and many university classes could produce growth and development by practicing experiential curricula. Experiential in the sense of integrating students thinking and feeling by focusing on the students present experience. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and an experience is worth a thousand pictures, then an experiential curriculum may be powerful and include periods of silence for noticing what is happening as it is happening. Exactly what kind of experience one wants students to have for development of self-knowledge is unclear, and each students curriculum may be different. Each students curriculum probably is not clearly expressible in the sense that the whole of an educational experience is more than the parts that can be stated. The process, however, can be known, yet, like wisdom, cannot be spelled out in great detail. Allowing a student to explore what the student notices as remarkable, interesting, and important is at the heart of a wise teachers teaching. This is best done in an ungraded atmosphere. Human beings could provide conditions whereby they might allow themselves to experience awe, surprise, awareness, humor, freedom, creativity, patience, compassion, wisdom, and kindness. Steven Taylor stated: The notion that these illuminating and ephemeral joys of living could be scaled and scored, measured and evaluated, or captured by rubrics and checklists is ridiculous. Providing surprise, awe, wonder etc. is more easily provided when focusing on mental stem learning one, (increase the tendency to allow events to happen rather than make them happenmore later). Many teachers think it best not to teach to the test, but many also think they will be fired or disfavored if they do not. Kaplearning abhors teaching to the test. Some could interpret ideas of Abraham Kaplan as nonsensical, but kaplearning speaks about quality living in a presently direct manner. Kaplearning, while uncommon, could be a capstone of capstones. Each moment in a kaplearning class increases the chances for a student aha! Kaplearning is projected to be the epitome of high quality learning. It must be experienced rather than only thought about or causally tried.
KAPLEARNING AND ABSTRACTIONS

Philosophy includes many abstractions, but Kaplan thinks what we cant manage with these abstractions is our lives. He said: We imprison ourselves in our own conceptualizations and think we will escape if we can only make the system more subtle and complex. This is much the same as Todd May saying (From his Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction): We need to consider the possibility that the world -- -- or, since the concept of world is too narrow, things or being or what there is -- -- outruns any categories we might seek to use to capture it. Ones imagination must go further than to think another or bigger category would make it clear. Reason helps us make new categories, but so does imagination. We often hear: There is a reason for everything. We have become so accustomed to wearing rationality that we often cannot recognize or even notice what is

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happening. Kaplan reported on many philosophies. He embraced what is here called kaplearning, but he may not agree with everything said here about it. Kaplan said that an almost universal assumption of Western philosophy and some Asian philosophy as well, is that the solution to the great problems of human existence can be had if we carry our rationality far enough, if we try hard enough to make sense of existence, uncover its intrinsic reasonableness. Kaplan, at times, thought exactly the opposite is true of philosophizing (and theologizing which he seemed to hold as an aspect of philosophizing): If we were just to turn our backs to the whole enterprise suddenly nothing would remain for us to strive for. This is similar to Lao Tzus idea: "Doing nothing leaves nothing undone." A number of Western thinkers hold that it is against the canons of scientific investigation to observe one's observing while one is observing. Further, many think that to go against the canons of scientific investigation is irrational. Kaplearning suggests that this matter be further investigated in a variety of ways. Some fuzziness could profitably be cherished and be used. Fuzzy math has been found to be useful in a wide variety of circumstances. Clear fuzziness can move through clearer fuzziness to clearer awareness through noticing some aspects of free, wise, peaceful living. Kaplearning can lead to powerful selfdirection as when one's attention is given to one's present experience when noticing one's noticing, while one is noticing. While kaplearning has nothing to teach, some statements that have been written by Kaplan may help us more easily notice some of these difficult to notice ways to emergent teaching and powerful learning. Through powerful learning we may become clearer about what is happening as it is happening. Many agree that these difficult to define, semi massively fluid qualities enhance our learning, living, and more readily allow events to unfold rather than strive to make them happen. (Mental stem learning 1, increase the tendency to allow events to happen--- given attention later). Intending to notice (consciously being open) can better help one notice what one is noticing while one is noticing. Quality education and kaplearning emphasize the process of living rather than any idea or set of ideas about living. Kaplearning is secular and may be considered as a kind of secular way of living. Books use words. Words most often are intellectual and are interpreted. Kaplearning, however, reduces fixed, preconceived, intellectual interpretations (later given greater attention). One suggestion for increasing awareness and emerging higher levels of consciousness is to pay attention to what goes on in your mind as it is going on. Being open facilitates this process and helps one become more aware. Author Dean Sluyters ideas about awareness, earlier mentioned, are helpful in paying attention to one's present experience. Selective perception may arise. School and university classrooms rarely give attention to awareness (teachers and professors are rarely aware of awareness partly because it is so difficult to define). Awareness is often considered nonsensical yet orders of consciousness are referred to by van

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Rossum and Hamer in their book, The Meaning of Learning and Knowing. Kaplearning is involved with direct and immediate noticing and need not be involved with abstractions. Abstractions, at least at times, can interfere with noticing. We sometimes only find what we are looking for instead of simply looking and being open to what may emerge. Sluyter says: Awareness is in the background of every mind moment. It just needs to be promoted to the foreground. We need to notice now. These words are difficult to understand because Sluyter is talking about the ground on which our understanding arises. The ground of not knowing is often seen as nonsense. The "not knowing" is a discontinuity around which wise people act and from which powerful learning often arises. Kaplearning, often arises as ordered and "not yet ordered" aspects of consciousness when one's present experience is given attention. This paying attention to ones present experience (to what, at times, may seem like nonsense) is somewhat similar to ones understanding that one does not understand. Within all this not knowing and not understanding is a kind of knowing and understanding in that there is nothing to know or understand in a manner that can be clearly said. It is not fully conceptualizeable, but when one can know more than one can tell, it may be said that one comes down from a level of mental functioning to place what one knows into words. The words are different from the experience one is attempting to communicate. The map is not the territory. Schools and universities lack this focus and much more time could profitably be given to considering these matters, especially in a time of unusual rapidity of change. Demystifying some mysteries occurs by accepting what is that cant be known empirically such as answering; What is good and what is not good?
WHAT CANT BE SAID?

When talking about the van Rossum and Hamer higher levels of learning and knowing, noticing physicist Brian Greenes notion that learning to know what to ignore is important for broader learning. Learning what to ignore is an aspect of kaplearning. Some of the wisest people, such as Aldous Huxley, after studying and writing many years, has concluded: "It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than, 'Try to be a little kinder.'" One reason for including the topic of kaplearning is because it follows Huxley's conclusion. When one is kind (compassionate) one is wise. The first item on Sheldon Kopps eschatological laundry list is: This is it. The last item is: "Learn to forgive yourself again, and again, and again. Kaplearning helps one notice what is and helps one learn to forgive oneself again, and again, and again. It also, in a secular manner, fosters kindness, patience, and the wisdom to acquire and/or generate skills one thinks one should develop. It is helpful to know that what is available to learn is infinite; that learning is infinite; that the limits of brain neural plasticity are not known, and that you
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can often invent your own brain to accomplish what you set out to a accomplish. Kaplearning has no boundaries, but must be experienced to be more fully understood. Reducing desire for great accomplishing may be a worthwhile to accomplish. Huxley and other wise people, after living and learning much, seem to mainly want to be kinder. Paradoxically, a way to achieve kindness and compassion is to reduce desire, and preferences of all types. Expecting less can at times get one more. Kaplan said some nonsense cant be avoided when talking about his ideas mentioned here. Kaplearning is not being used as an example of nonsense. Kaplearning is a way of moving from unawareness to awareness, allowing for more ahas! to arise (increasing levels of consciousness). Some words about kaplearning may function to illustrate how paying attention to what may be considered nonsense can lead to more sense. More sense is similar to a bigger, more open picture of what is (a larger chunk of reality) as well as more peaceful, kind living. When someone asks, What is kaplearning? It is helpful to notice Inayat Khans story of a young fish going to the Queen fish and saying: I hear there is a sea. What is it and where is it? A Spanish proverb may also give a clue: It is not the same to talk of bulls as to be in a bull ring. Talking about the process is not the same as experiencing the process. Kaplearning can be silently understood, though when one attempts to clearly delineate all of its elements, it can't be clearly said. When strenuously looking for kaplearning, one often quickly passes it. Kaplan cautions us when looking (for what I am calling kaplearning) that it is helpful not to look too hard for it. The more relaxed one is, the more one is able to notice what is that may be noticed. Looking too hard increases beta brainwave activity. (Research has shown that brain waves functioning lower than beta often tend to increase creativity.) Beta brainwave activity often occurs during an analysis rather than during a synthesis. As Yuan Wu said: As soon as you chase and try to grab it, you have already stumbled past it. Allowing events to happen rather than making them happen is connected to noticing the process of kaplearning. Kaplearning has much to do with behavior patterns whereas many philosophies do not. Because kaplearning influences behavior patterns, Kaplan believes what I call kaplearning may be one of the most vital and significant philosophies known. Paradoxically, kaplearning doesn't deal much with reasons or philosophy. As far as kaplearning goes, there are no right words because what kaplearning is, isn't directly say-able but it can be noticed. Instruction in kaplearning or mind-opening occurs, Kaplan says: not in any discursive exposition of doctrine but in recounting -- or even a matter of re-creating -- of interpersonal situations between teacher and student in which words may or may not play a part. It may be a situation in which the student or teacher asks a question and receives a reply, or one in which the teacher reports an encounter between another teacher and student, perhaps adding his own

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comment (where van Rossum and Hamer level 6 learning and knowing can occur). Kaplan says: Such encounters are question and answer encounters; we might say a dialogue, anecdote, or vignette. Such encounters may be something like the teacher providing the stuckness/functional discontinuity, the purpose of which is to notice a larger continuity (larger chunk of what is-broader, more open awareness, an aha!). Some very large continuities cannot be expressed since it would sound like nonsense as in saying emptiness is fullness. Larger chunks of reality may be noticed when learning what to ignore. Kaplan said: So far as concerns the actual living of our lives there is little to choose among the various constructions. They are all metaphors, as it were, and while a change of metaphor may satisfy the critics, it will never lift us from literature into life. We become so accustomed to particular conventions of civilization that we forgot altogether that we are dealing with symbols and mistake convention for nature itself. Many teachers and professors make this mistake. What is said of the results of kaplearning can primarily be noticed by what one does and experiences rather than what one says. What Kaplan is telling us is: We cannot escape the confrontation of our own natural self. We cannot help trying to find meaning in life. We cannot hide from ourselves. So instead of telling us what the problem is, (kaplearning) insists that the whole trouble is just our failure to realize that there is no problem, and of course, this means that there is no solution either. But dont stop reading. In short, Kaplan alludes to kaplearning regarding a: solution to the great problem of life, is not solving it all: the not solving is really the solving. The wise man does not pursue wisdom but lives his life and therein precisely does his wisdom lie. The wisdom that Faust comes to in the end, (kaplearning) starts with it. That is similar to what has been said before, namely, that when an ordinary person becomes enlightened, he or she is a sage. When a sage is enlightened, he or she is an ordinary person. Thomas Merton stated: Enlightenment (wisely informed brain functioning-my note) is not a matter of trifling with the facticity of ordinary life and spiriting it all away Nirvana is found in the midst of the world around us, and truth is not somewhere else. To be here and now, where we are in our suchness is to be in nirvana, but unfortunately as long as we have thirst (desire or craving) we falsify our own situation and cannot realize it as nirvana. As long as we are inauthentic, as long as we block and obscure the presence of what truly is, we are in delusion and we are in pain. Were we capable of a moment of perfect authenticity, of complete openness, we would see at once that nirvana and samsara (ordinary living-my note) are the same. This, I submit, implies not a flight from the world, denigration of the world, repudiation of the world, but a real understanding of the value that is in the world. However, such an understanding is impossible as long as one desires what the world craves and accepts, the Avidya of the world as the source of ultimate answers. (Avidya is an un-emancipated state of mindignorance.)

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Einstein said: There are two ways to look of life: one is to see that nothing is a miracle, the other is to see that everything is." As Kaplan said: Miracles surround us and we often miss them because we are waiting to hear the sound of a trumpet to announce them. Noticing the miracles all around us every day, and all the time in the present, is heavily involved in kaplearning. Kaplearning is a way of liberating a separate self. Einstein said: "The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self." Kaplan says: Im living. No wordy discussion is necessary, nor any explanation. I do not know why, and there is no need of explaining, but when the sun rises, the whole world dances with joy and everybodys heart is filled with bliss About the mysterious, which may be considered an element of not knowing (nonsense), Stephen Batchelor commented: The questioning that emerges from unknowing differs from conventional inquiry in that it has no interest in finding an answer. Questioning starts at the point where descriptions and explanations end. It has already let go of the constraints and limitations of conceptual categories. It recognizes that mysteries are not solved as though they were problems and then forgotten. The deeper we penetrate in mystery, the more mysterious it becomes. This perplexed questioning is the central path itself. Kaplan said: In refusing to be drawn into the answers of yes and no, it is this, and it is not that, it lets go of the extremes of affirmation and negation, something and nothing. Like life itself, it just keeps going, free from the need to hold any fixed positions (including any fixed ideas that one thinks are included in kaplearning). Batchelor agrees with John Keats who said: The only means of strengthening ones intellect is to make up ones mind about nothing - -to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. This writing is wrongheaded for preferring education over training for everyone. More accurately the preference is mine. It appears to be un-kaplearning-like to say education is better than training for everyone, but I don't know. I am guessing. What is your experience? There is a strong temptation in following kaplearning to imitate what Kaplan said. Kaplan said an imitator of his statements (regarding kaplearning) believes: Its not too hard to get the hang of it; we might be able to do it ourselves. And Kaplan cannot resist asking: What is the it that we can so easily learn to do? Kaplan was well aware of this temptation just to imitate and address oneself to the task of making one realize that the outcome of imitating would be only a substitute life. Parroting Kaplans wisdom may prevent one from practicing ones own. Simply copying someone else's behavior is more like following train tracks, than like moving down an unknown river to become the sea. Kaplearning often leads one to be kind. Psychotherapist, Sheldon Kopp, author of several books including Guru, said: I only get to keep that which I am prepared to give up. In Western terms, virtue is its own reward. There is no

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hope of redemption in doing good in order to be saved. Only by doing good for its own sake, without seeking reward, can we attain salvation (powerful learning). About this Albert Camus said: Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present. Camus held we should work against absurd living. Living mainly in the past or future is absurd because that is not living. Living can only happen in the present. Hugh Prathers (Notes To Myself) fluidly demonstrates openness when he expresses a truth about himself: My questions are statements. My statements are requests, and my trivia is an invitation to be friends. Like every other set of statements about kaplearning, Kaplan implies kaplearning: imposes a discipline which is meant to enhance our capacity for answering living without bothering ourselves with the artificialities by which we complicate it. Doing a kind act because someone is watching you to give you credit is not kindness but rather an artificiality by which one complicates ones life as may be true of some intellectualizing. Kaplearning is difficult to write about since kaplearning is not so much considered about wisdom but is closer to the practice of wisdom some of which is silent and some of which cannot be said. As some Sage said, more is learned from what a teacher is than from what a teacher says. As Kaplan says: It would be better if that could be understood without words but for now at least, words seem to be the vehicle through which we bring about understanding in ourselves and others. Kaplearning, he says, can help us see the limitation of words, and at times, the inappropriateness of using words to allow wisdom to arise. That too is an example of something that cannot be learned from textbooks. It is trans-empirical (like stem learning oneincrease the tendency to allow events to happen rather than make them happen). Even though wisdom cant be created, a paradoxical possible method to increase the chances for wisdom to arise may be called functional discontinuity. It is an artificiality that may temporarily complicate living so that living is less complicated (a sort of Gladwellian structured disadvantage which may extend the effort to move toward effortless living.) This term, functional discontinuity, refers to the process of making what is ordered or continuous, somewhat disordered or discontinuous, so that a broader order or larger continuity may be noticed. Noticing larger continuities are often ahas! Accepting disorder may be viewed as potentially and actually noticing a different order. Neuroscience author, Jonah Lehrer stated: The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. And this is why constraints (tools for ignoring narrow frames-my note) are so important: Its not until we encounter an unexpected hindrance a challenge we cant easily resolve (functional discontinuity-my note) that the chains of cognition are loosened, giving us newfound access to the weird connections simmering in the unconscious. Here are the scientists: Consistently, these studies show that

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encountering an obstacle in one task can elicit a more global, Gestalt-like processing style that automatically carries over to unrelated tasks, leading people to broaden their perception, open up mental categories, and improve at integrating seemingly unrelated concepts. Kaplearning is a secular practice. As Batchelor says: The task of (what I call kaplearning) practice, is to sustain this perplexity within the context of calm, clear, and centered awareness (which psychotherapist Guinan was in when he noticed he was terrorizedmy note). Such perplexity is neither frustrated nor merely curious about a specific detail of experience. It is an intense, focused questioning into the totality of what is unfolding at any given moment. It is the engine that drives awareness into the heart of what is unknown. Anything that puzzles or perplexes, if focused on, may be considered functionally discontinuous which, of course, is temporary. When one allows oneself to be puzzled, one can use the discontinuity to understand a greater continuity, or to better accept a presently unchangeable discontinuity. Mystery is a common human experience. Einstein advocated giving much attention to mystery. Through functional discontinuity and reducing preconceptions, one may come to notice one's noticing while one is noticing. Here again we see Kaplans notion of enlightenment is no different from ordinary living. Noticing in kaplearning is noticing what is. When one notices what is one often notices one is more connected than disconnected to everyone and everything. Functional discontinuity for generating awareness is promoted by an unknown sage when he said:
It is easy to live according to principles, rules and regulations. Then you need not worry about being more alert and aware; you can follow the principles. Then you are just like a railway train running on the tracks. Those tracks are your principles. You are not afraid because you cannot miss the pathLife is like a river. There is no pre-charted way; there are no maps to be given to you which are to be followed. Just be alive and alert, and then, wherever life leads, you go with full confidence in it. Trust in the life force. Allow it to lead you towards the sea. Just be alert, that is all. While life leads you towards the sea, just be alert so that you don't miss anything. If you are alert, this life will be bliss. The very movement of the river is bliss in itself. Passing through the valleys, through the rocks, falling down from the hills, moving into the unknown is itself bliss. The river is not simply going to meet the sea, it is growing to be the sea, and this is possible only through rich experience, alert experiences, moving, trusting. This is the human search. Of course, it is dangerous. If rivers could be run through predetermined paths, there would be less danger, fewer errors. But the whole beauty of aliveness would be lost.

This same sage is implying the journey and the destination are one. The human search can turn that which is functionally nonsensical, into an advantage, or sense. Sense implies greater clarity and a greater continuity as one notices and accepts more of what is. The obedience to authority frame, which many teachers and professors often foster, has many rules to follow (more like straight railroad tracks than a meandering river).

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An aspect of this noticing may be noticing everything is impermanent and uncertain. What one is certain about may be delusion. This noticing helps one be more tentative and open to not knowing. David Geoffrey Smith's ideas about disillusionment apply here in that one needs to be disillusioned before one can get rid of the illusion of knowing something that is not so. Students feelings are part of what is especially in an atmosphere designed for learning. The ASCD reports on a social and emotional learning program as follows: The value of getting students to understand and deal with their own emotions cannot be overstated. Studies show that students in SEL programs (social/emotional learning) not only perform better on achievement tests, but also have significantly fewer suspensions and expulsions, better school attendance, higher grades, and decreased prevalence of high-risk behaviors such as violence and drug and alcohol use. Additionally, multiple studies show that students who develop emotional bonds with their classmates and with teachers who have high expectations adopt a positive attitude toward academic achievement, learning, and school in general. Students in SEL training also exhibit less disruptive behavior and a greater ability to concentrate in the classroom. A high expectation for a teacher or professor is to expect that a student will self-direct and will be more deeply involved in self-determination; selforganization; a requisite for living. Seligman's well-being program is an advanced form of social/emotional programs. Reiter reports that the SEL program, which has also included lessons in managing emotions for teachers, is having a major, major impact on them, as well. During the day now, theyre using a lot of the stress reduction strategies that they learned. Tools that can save a teachers sanity in a situation where the possibility of burning out is just gigantic. Some Toledo, Ohio Public Schools were reported to have success with social and emotional programs. Some programs are highly open and allow for the continuous reconstruction of experience. As you have heard, one who is his own medical doctor has a fool for patient, but one who is ones own educator is on the road to wisdom. As Kaplan said: "It is possible to make a rationale even out of unreason." If we do not notice what is happening, Kaplan said: "It is because we look through a veil of words." What is, is direct and immediate and words are mediators. Kaplan said: "We relate to life as if it were a government we have not officially recognized and with whom we communicate, therefore, only through the good offices of the third-party. We want to understand life, so that only means we want to put it into words we are groping for the intermediary.Religion and philosophy try to fit us with gloves with which we can safely take hold. What Kaplan is writing about does not offer us assurance that there is no danger, asking us to have faith. He said: It simply declares that you cannot take hold in fear and trembling, and gloves will not help you one bit. Of course reflection has a part to play, and words, as instruments of reflective action, are by no means expendable."

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What Kaplan is getting at he said is: "So often we treat the words not as the instruments of life but as its very substance. We confuse the words with the realities they stand for. It is especially in the area where philosophy and religion border on one another that words get out of hand. We worship an image, work magic with symbols, and conquer in sign. And all these mark out for us so we suppose a special realm, the realm of the spirit, the holy. Nothing is more inimical to the life of the spirit than to encapsulate it from life in this way. Notice again the value of silence and of increasing the tendency to allow events to happen rather than making them happen (mental stem learning one-- later mentioned). Kaplan also said: "The instruments for the attainment of spiritual value so easily usurp intrinsic value themselves that the latter can kill it is a commonplace of all religious experience. The point is that religious symbols can draw sustenance only from a religious life; and such a life cannot consist only in the use of the symbols, or does no more than close an empty circle.
MORE KAPLAN

Kaplan also said: The fatality in words is that they are for themselves as material with which to construct another world than God's, a fantasy world, a world empty. Kaplan thinks his ideas, paradoxically, are distrustful of words and thoughts because words can so easily seduce one by illusion. That is why David Geoffrey Smith speaks about the importance of disillusionment which I have likened to functional discontinuity. Disillusionment helps rid one of illusions and delusions. What is being called for said Kaplan: is not a passive submission to things as they are, but an inactive even joyous acceptance of what we in the West call the existential constraints on the human condition, the facts of life, so to say, as distinct from the particular circumstances in which we might happen to find ourselves. However advanced as technology and medicine, live by the sweat of his brow, still come to terms with the prospect of death. The garden of Eden is behind us forever, and those who dwell on the memory and live with the curse still ringing in their ears." What Kaplan is talking about, the the round of summer and winter becomes a blessing the moment we give up the fantasy of eternal spring. Kaplan remarked: "Once out of Eden, we may see God everywhere or we will not see him at all. Kaplan's statements are most often secular. Gandhi's probably were not. Kaplan's idea is similar to Gandhi's who said: "If you don't see God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further." What Kaplan is talking about "is to be found in the ordinary affairs of everyday life or nowhere. Correspondingly, there is as much spiritual truth in the simplest matter of fact observation as in the most profound metaphysical propositions indeed, more. This applies to what occurs in classrooms at all levels. Kaplan's view is close to Albert Einstein's view that the universe may be called God. Einstein was secular and he noticed it was natural for humans to

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cooperate with each other. This kind cooperation may, at times, be called secular spirituality. The whole of it may be noticed ( as we notice wisdom) by delineating it in to parts is not permit the whole to be seen because the arrangement of the parts is not seen when looking at only the parts. The whole is more than the sum of the parts does a flying airplane is more than the sum of its parts. If we intellectualize it Kaplan says: "It has almost become a metaphysical doctrine and the whole point is lost." What Kaplan is talking about he said: is nothing at all special, and this, of course, is what makes it seem so extraordinary. Kaplan does not want life to be metaphysical exercise. He wants people to avoid living "like those amateur musicians who were always practicing the piano but never playing. Kaplan thought we want to learn how to better live. Many educators also do and kaplearning is a less contaminated way of learning how to live a better life. When one is certain about what is going to happen next, one is closed to what else might happen. Next, like tomorrow, is never here now. Kaplan states: "This is the point, is it not, if I may venture to make it so explicit that there are miracles all around us, and we miss them only because we are straining to hear the sound of the ram's horn by which we imagine so special an event must be announced. How simple and genuine and moving is one account of the matter: there's nothing extraordinary or mysterious about it. I hear the boys playing ball outside my window, I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring woods: in all of these I am living in a quality way. No wordy discussion is necessary, nor any explanation. There is no need of explaining, but when the sun rises the whole world dances with joy and everybody's heart is filled with bliss The insight of the prophet is codified in law, inspiration becomes institutionalized, and the outcome is often scarcely recognizable as embodying the original teaching. Kaplearning helps us avoid various forms of institutionalizing which tend to "fix" thought and events. Avoiding institutionalizing requires focusing on one's present experience. Many school and University practices would be less habitual were teachers and professors more open. Notice the openness of the University of Michigan professor Littkys activity ( mentioned earlier). Kaplan asks if the question must be faced of how to live a good life if it is so simple and ordinary: "How can we live our lives so straightforwardly, so free of intellectualized complications, that the meaning of life no longer puzzles us? If we have learned not to look for a secret, we have yet to learn, that it is we ourselves who must consciously do the not looking. The last and greatest obstacle is to free ourselves from a dependency on a source of what we still imagine to be spiritual instruction: master, the prophet, the priest, philosopher, or psychoanalyst. We think the teacher etc. will take us by the hand and lead us to our goal, play us a tune with the stringless harp. But what I'm talking about insists that salvation cannot be sought outside the self, and to obtain quality living we must give up our attachment even to quality living. That is difficult to understand for in learning to let go, paradoxically, we

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must even learn to let go of letting go. (This is similar to mental stem learning one. It is later given attention.) About being uncertain (doubtful), one meditates and questions. Robert Buswell, UCLA scholar, said: Questioning thus opens the possibility of an entirely new way of perceiving the things of this world, a new way of thinking in which clinging to our own views alone does not hold sway. To truly have certitude one must first have doubt (uncertainty). Those who master what Kaplan is talking about, Kaplan said: are quite well aware of this temptation to just imitate and dress themselves to the task of making one realize that merely copying would lead to disaster. There are some obvious intellectualization's we might go into: it means that you must discipline yourself with firmnessWhen the little girl puts on mommys high heels, she neither walks nor runs in them, but only stands and admires herself in the mirror and therein lies her childishness." What Kaplan is talking about "imposes discipline which is meant to enhance our capacity for answering when we are calledin our capacity for living life without bothering ourselves with the artificialities by which we complicate it. Furthermore, Kaplan is talking about, "the goal is to arrive at a condition in which dilemmas in which life no longer is a problem to be solved but is just to be lived." About this quality living Kaplan states: What has been achieved when this highest grade is attained? We in the West speak of salvation, as the Hindu does of moksha, or the Buddhist of Nirvana, or in Zen is called Satori. Translations are dangerous, especially here for we are accustomed to think of the goal of the religious life (or unexamined secular life-my note) as having its focus beyond the world of the senses. But Satori, we are told over and over again, is in no way in conflict with the world of sense. When we have made a little progress, we think the river is no river and the mountain, no mountain; but after Satori, the river is a river and the mountain is a mountain. We do not enter another world or view the one world from another perspective or if it is another, it is only in the sense in which, as Wittgenstein remarked, the world of the happy is quite another from the world of the unhappy. What Kaplan is talking about Kaplan said brings about, a Copernican transformation: where we no longer experience ourselves as the fixed center about which the world revolves. It all depends on the adjustment of the hinge whether the door opens in or out. This is not the experience of a transcendental object but a transcendence of the perpetual bifurcation of experience into subject and object. We must not think of heaven in which we arrived in the bosom of Abraham; it is on this Earth that we stand face to face with the living God. The antithesis of the earthly and the divine, the sacred and profane, time and eternity all these belong to just that apparatus of pernicious intellectualization. Kaplan is saying something similar to Einstein who said that the true value of one may be seen in the degree to which one liberates oneself from one's self.

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Psychotherapist, David Doane, has elsewhere spoken about institutionalizing of thoughts and events. Doane concludes: Learning, government, medicine, psychology, marriage, and religion started as being a here and now experience. Schooling/training has over organized ones experience into static institutionalization. Institutionalizing is an event to avoid. Institutionalizing fixes what is more appropriately left unfixed/open. Doane states that as a result of excessive school training we have a reduced awareness/present noticing, and some effects are: grades and degrees and schooling usually get in the way of learning, institutional church gets in the way of the spiritual experience, institutional medicine gets in the way of healing. He earlier mentioned that organized politics gets in the way of healthy governing. After thinking about it, he said: "I'm thinking now that politics can be organized and organized politics could promote healthy governing, and not organized politics probably wouldn't result in healthy governing. Maybe the problem isn't that politics is organized but how it's organized? Maybe the problem is not when politics are organized, but when politics are institutionalized. Institutionalized events often become fixed and habitual. Doane is referring to the out-dated, content-centered (process neglected) mindsets which often prevent us from accomplishing important goals such as developing open, inquisitive, self-directing lovers of learning who have much gratitude for who they are, and for what they have and do. Doane said: The institutionalization of any activity may be a way to avoid what could productively be done. Schools and universities are often institutionalized; perhaps even more than most other institutions. Doanes statements and student responses to his first day of his teaching an introduction to psychology class appears in: Re-opening Einsteins Thought: About What Cant Be Learned from Textbooks, Sense Publishers, 2008. Doanes classroom activity was creative and clearly not institutionalized or habitual. Doane agrees with W.B. Yeats who said Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. Lighting those mental fires often occurs in a freer, responsive environment where open inquiry, and noticing one's present experience are encouraged.
ATTEMPTS TO EXPLAIN KAPLEARNING

Kaplan goes on to say: "Yet I hope I have said enough This for you to anticipate that (what I have said) does not make much of a fuss about Satori (enlightenment); there's not much to it, after all. Achieving Satori is at bottom not an achievement the marksman rejoices when he examines the target, but it is neither the examination nor the shot that gives cause for rejoicing. Kaplan thinks the arrow stood in the bull's-eye from the very beginning. He said: "Man is not in bondage, struggling for freedom; he is already free. If there is a bondage here, it is the Spinozistic human bondage which consists only in ignorance. Our Western religions begin with man seeking of the fruit of the

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tree of knowledge; for (what Kaplan is talking about) the story begins rather with ignorance. (Rohr said seeking the tree of knowledge was the seeking of certainty which plagues us today.) Ignoring some certainty can broaden one's focus and increase ahas! And well-being. The enlightenment (learning) about which Kaplan is talking, "consists in the realization that there is nothing to aspire to, that we already have everything for which we are struggling. What is all this talk of returning home when not for one moment have you been away? Satori is not entertainment, in short, but it is a realization of what one has had all along. In that case, of course there is no secret, no esoteric teaching in the custody of the master, no special path which only the devotee can learn to walk. The Confucian poet came to the master and wanted to be initiated into (what Kaplan is talking about). The master quoted him a passage in the Confucian Analects in which Confucius said to his disciples, do you think I am hiding something from you? Indeed, I have nothing to hide! Kaplan thinks there is no more of a secret to what he is talking about "and no less of one! than the difference between a gentle rain falling on the just and the unjust alike. In what Kaplan is talking about, enlightenment is present by the opening of the third eye, in much the sense in which we speak of listening with the third year. The third eye does not open the hidden world, somewhere beyond; it only represents really seeing what is in this one. That is why it is wrong to think of (what Kaplan is talking about) as totally incomprehensible. Kaplan remarks: "To put the meaning of life somewhere outside it is to make life itself empty. But it is just this sense of emptiness of life that we are trying to overcome when we turn to religion or philosophy. Just the way things are is quite enough to evoke all in wonder. With Aristotle, the Western world finds the beginning of philosophy in this awe and wonder. What Kaplan is talking about, (what I state as kaplearning) ends with awe and wonder. Does not awe and wonder start everything else? Using awe and wonder creates wonderful learning in and out of classrooms at all levels. Student awe and wonder are often missing in today's classrooms at all levels. Kaplearning helps bring it back. The solving by not solving Kaplan stated is supported by Carl Jung, who stated: The greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally unsolvable. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. Kaplearning helps one outgrow what needs to be outgrown. It is helpful to note that all science arose from philosophy which arose from awe and wonder. Scholars have said that in very early times, events were explained on the basis of what the gods did. As more conscious minds emerged, partly to get away from it all, events began to be explained on the basis of cause and effect. Kaplearning implies we may want to notice it useful to add to getting away from it all by being open to the possibility of multiple causation. Holding multiple causation may help one consider all causes and all events (a very large unnamed context as possibly the opposite of an infinitesimal-- an event too large to measure).

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As we learn more of what to ignore and what to include, we can notice the possibility of all causes and all effects may, in some very large context, include everything causing everything simultaneously as implied by Einstein's notion of everything occurring simultaneously, when only the present exists. Simultaneously implies the "now" of which Einstein spoke and which Nobel laureate Richard Feynman could not use because he could not break it into parts and define it. Further exploring now may be useful. On the other hand, it may be something a wise person could quickly ignore. On the third hand, we may have overly ignored this possibility, so we may wish to ponder it for longer than usual in order to possibly notice a potential long-range benefit from noticing present multiple causation on a very large scale. Is anything more unbound than freedom. As has been alluded to, Zen is the essence of Buddhism and freedom is the essence of Zen. Kaplearning speaks around some possible Zen practices, but as Kaplan alluded to, talking much about Zen is like looking for fish tracks in a dry riverbed. Might the search be the finding? Kaplearning is a term that has been used so as to help avoid prejudging. Anything that can be said about Zen is not Zen. Prejudice may now enter by noting kaplearning is what Kaplan stated about this Zen; what Zen practitioners often do and do not do. Zen is Buddhism, and there seems to be many preconceived notions of Buddhism and Zen, so the term kaplearning was used to help avoid premature judgments about open, self-directing learning which relates to Zen.
STEVE JOBS AND KAPLEARNING/ZEN

Steve Jobs sister said his last words were: "Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow. Walter Issacsons biography of Jobs mentioned he was raised a Lutheran but he rejected religious dogmas. While he was no saint, he seems to have been open to the point where he did not hold many fixed ideas. Jobs also rejected materialism even though he earned many millions at a very young age. When he practiced Zen, he calmed his mind. About that Jobs said: "That's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since." I am suggesting that Job's ability to notice a tremendous expanse arose from his ability to ignore less consequential events. Zen practice seems to facilitate noticing tremendous expanses yet as Kaplan said, we too often wait for a ram's horn to announce them before they are noticed. Jobs practiced Zen Buddhism from his teenage years until his death. One source stated that something to be learned from Jobs was his ability to pause. I interpret that as Job's ability to practice mental stem learning one: "Increase the tendency to allow events to happen rather than make them happen." Job said his consciousness was raised by Zen.

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Jobs seemed to be more interested in creating events rather than in making money. Jobs told Isaacson that he made a promise to himself that he was not going to let money rule in his life when he saw some of his wealthy young cohorts, who also made much money when they were young, overly indulge themselves in plastic surgery, mansions, servants, and luxury cars. Jobs blazed his own trail seemingly in all or most areas of his life and that was helped by his practice of Zen, which I have called "kaplearning" and which each of us can learn as we become open. The word kaplearning was used to delay prejudgments from interfering with understanding a powerful kind of learning that has been shown by Professor Davidson, University of Wisconsin, to physically change brains. Because of the presumed variety of prejudices about Zen and Buddhism, only now is it mentioned that kaplearning is Zen learning and Zen living. Zen learning need not be religious. It is secular and simple in the sense that one learns best from one's own experience without the need to be told what one is experiencing. Kaplearning can be helpful for one holding a religion (or not holding one) in that additional meaning from experience may be derived with kaplearning regardless of one's other beliefs. There is no intent to deceive by using the term "kapearning", but rather, to delay operation of prejudging. The aim of Zen, said Alan Watts, is to focus the attention on reality itself, instead of our intellectual and emotional reactions to reality reality being the ever-changing, ever growing, indefinable something known as "life," which will never stop for a moment for us to fit it satisfactorily into any rigid system of pigeonholes and ideas. What is not to be avoided, noted Anne Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk, is: In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you dropped with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil is power for evil, the unified Field: a complex and inexplicable caring for each other, for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned. R.H. Blyth says the word Zen it is sometimes employed by the Zen sect with a mystical meaning, sometimes as a universal culture, sometimes as particular enlightenment of an individual: "In any case, Zen is not something that changes and grows; it is the changing and growing itself, and if anybody (or any thousand million bodies) thinks Zen is something to be gained by doing zazen (meditation) and receiving Zen diplomas, he is mistaken. Susan Piver said about Zen Buddhism: In Buddhist thought, compassion is synonymous with skillful action, action that is rooted in seeing reality from the largest perspective possible. When you are able to pay attention to the reality that exists beyond your thoughts about reality, you know what the next right action is. To do this, you have to put aside your assumptions, judgments, and projections...and simply look. You have to open. Without agenda. You give up what makes you feel safe, secure, right in order to do this. That's why it's an act of extreme courage. Trust is needed. Buddhism is an emergent system as is

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trust. What is not part of an emergent system? Allowing oneself to be uncertain helps. Thomas Merton said: "Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a transcultural, transreligious, transformed consciousness. Some training is needed to form a transformation. The transformation has been here called education and forming alone by teachers will not do it. The self is responsible for doing it partly by getting rid of the separate self. Enlightenment appears when, instead of realizing that one has "come home", one realizes that one has never been away.

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KAPLEARNING AND AWAR AWARENESS ENESS

Thoreau wrote: "Only that day dawns to which we are awake." An unknown author added: "the Art of awareness is the art of learning how to wake up to the eternal miracle of life with its limitless possibilities."

The need for worldwide kaplearning and well-being programs becomes more evident when we notice what Daniel Goody reported: If we reduce the 6.5 billion people on earth proportionately to a village of 100:
45 are hungry some or all of the time; 30 suffer from malnutrition; 40 without adequate sanitation; 26 are homeless, or have substandard housing; 33 have no electricity; 15 have no access to safe drinking water; 16 have access to the Internet; 12 have an automobile; 2 have a college education; 66 live in poverty; the 1 richest man in the village has as much as the 57 poorest taken together.

As Pinker earlier mentioned: "We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their constituent parts. But emergent problems cant be understood this way. Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements. Emergent systems are bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. They have to be studied differently, as wholes and as nested networks of relationships. Powerful self-directing, learning/education is an emergent system as is kaplearning. If you feel deceived by my earlier not identifying kaplearning as Zen, I deeply apologize. At the heart of kaplearning is wisdom. Martha Beck states: Real wisdom is so different from what is drilled into us by most authority figures that we tend to go functionally blind to it. But even if you can't recognize your own wisdom, you can notice what it isn't. Wisdom is sensory not verbal, calm not fearful, chosen not forced.Wisdom, will never be loud. It will never shout down its opposition or barge in uninvited. About wisdom being sensory, not verbal, Beck States: "In other words, the voice of social conditioning manifests itself as a stream of thoughts in the head, wisdom often appears as emotions or physical sensations in the body.The emotional centers of the brain, along with the elaborate bundle of nerves in your belly (the so-called gut brain) have been evolving far longer than language. In that system, more than logic, is exquisitely attuned to helping you navigate your way through life. Beck thinks wisdom is far stronger than fear. She states: "While fear gladly forces itself upon you, wisdom will do nothing of the kind. We can't be victims of wisdom: it must be chosen.So if you're wondering whether it chooses
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wisely or not, don't search your mind for a rational argument. Instead, hold each option in your attention, then feel its effect on your body and emotions. When something is wrong for you, you'll feel constriction and tightness. The wise choice leads to feelings of liberation, even exhilaration. These feelings can only be felt in a "present" moment. A teacher or professor following Kaplan's ideas would fall into the category of working with students rather than doing to students. Alfie Kohn has an interesting comment about that: Traditional practices (with respect to teaching students but also to raising children and managing employees) often consist of what might be called a doing to -- as opposed to a working with -approach, the point being to act on people to achieve a specific goal. These strategies sometimes succeed in producing an effect in the short term. Research -- which itself is often limited in duration or design -- may certify the effort as successful. But when you watch what happens later on, or you look more carefully at the impact of these interventions, the initial findings have a way of going up in smoke. Regarding working with students, Carlo Ricci thinks: Adults could be thinking about what they think is important, and what they care about, and then figuring out how to give young people access to that, and let young people join in. Ricci reports John Holts classic answer to people who would say, I want to work with kids, was, Find some work you think is worth doing, and then put your mind to figuring out ways for young people to join you. Implied here is the teacher is also inquisitive and a lover of learning, not a carrier of others mail. Gandhi indirectly promoted kaplearning when he said: As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves. As Nobel laureate Richard Feynman said in Value of Science: What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the mystery of experience? If we take everything into account, not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know, then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know. But in admitting this, we have probably found the open channel. Kaplearning helps the open channel emerge. The open channel is one's being generally open and often avoiding prejudgments. The general skill of being open may be the skill that helps one focus broadly and acquire other skills. To paraphrase Gandhi, there is no way to openness. Openness is the way. Openness is unbound. Freedom is unbound. Not knowing is unbound. We can only know what is bound (has boundaries). Emptiness is like unboundedness as is freedom. Certainty often binds, closes, and constrains. Being free helps one notice what to ignore while knowing everything needed at that moment. Noticing everything has the same effect as noticing nothing. (Just notice what you notice.) If it is defined, it is contained (bound). There is no uncontained container. As Lao Tzu said, the way that can be said is not the way. We need not dispel mystery, but cherish it. Learning what to
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ignore helps promote peace and wisdom. We too often see what others see. We need more heretics. "A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes," said Gotthold Lessing. Schools, to promote kaplearning, could allow students to be silent at times as well as allow students to explore what students find remarkable, interesting, and important in a non-graded atmosphere. Doing so would help students learn much even to the point of learning one does not know much. As a Sage said, there's nothing to know, nothing to attain, and nothing to realize. Nothing is unbounded and mysterious. Knowing nothing, at least in an intellectual sense, may open one to the root of wisdom and freedom by ignoring prejudging. When we are free, we have more of a chance of being compassionate and kind. When we are free, we are free of a separate self/ego as Einstein suggested. One then sees oneself as more connected than disconnected to everyone and everything. We can then be no one, going nowhere, knowing nothing while knowing everything needed to know to be wise. As Lao Tzu said: "Doing nothing leaves nothing undone." Some consider doing nothing/just sitting as a possible form of meditation. "Doing nothing" often helps one notice mind/body connection. Bernie Wong reports: Dancers are assumed to be in touch with their bodies, but this study suggests meditators may have them beat. Experienced Vipassana meditators were compared with either active modern or ballet dancers, along with participants who didnt have training in any of these techniques. All participants watched emotional film clips while their heart rates were measured. After each clip was over, they gave their perception of what their heart rate had been while viewing the clip. Meditators made the most accurate assessments of their heart rates, while dancers were only moderately correct and non-experienced participants were the least. Though the researchers agree that physical activities like these promote mind-body awareness, they note that meditation seems to encourage the strongest conscious awareness of ones body. From "Coherence Between Emotional Experience and Physiology: Does Body Awareness Training Have an Impact?" Sze, J.A., Gyurak, A., Yuan, J.W., Levenson, R.W. Emotion, Vol. 10 (6), December 2010, 803-814. Researcher Massie states: Neuroscientists now understand that brains grow and evolve throughout life, but especially in childhood Brain maturation involves growing and then pruning back dendrite and synaptic formations. Some neuronal connections are enhanced through the formation of lipid sheaths around the axons that speed and strengthen neural transmissions. This process is known as myelination, the conversion of gray-matter neurons into white-matter neuronsThis pruning and myelination process, as we now understand it, continues into our 20s, and myelinated neuronal connections play an important role in learned mental processes. It is now believed that once our brain matures and its nerve fibers become myelinated, we become less receptive to learning new concepts. Earlier we were unaware of this process. Now that we are aware of it we can consciously take steps to ignore its consequences when its consequences may tend to lead to a variety of fixed ideas.

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There are some ancient sayings that help one become more deeply involved in kaplearning. Kaplearning, (and its subset, regular learning) is a lifelong affair if we are aware of our experience including the experience of myelination. As Seligman said: When one gets to know oneself, one flourishes. A Sage said flourishing; has no form, no appearance, no root, no basis, no abode but is lively and buoyant. It responds with versatile facility but its function cannot be located. As happiness is a byproduct rather than something one could profitably seek, so is flourishing. Kaplearning facilitates flourishing and need not so much be sought as noticed through being open. Connected to what Seligman is doing, and indirectly connected to kaplearning, the University of California, Berkeley, has a Greater Good Science Center. They study neuroscience, psychology, and sociology of wellbeing, translating cutting-edge research into actionable articles, short podcasts, and easy to digest tips that people can apply to their personal and professional lives. Their resources help foster a thriving resilient and compassionate society. They believe that the fruits of science can nurture a happy and deeply rewarding life the life that contributes to the greater good and personal meaningfulness. Also connected is an anonymous Internet writers statement: (circa 2007) "Positive psychology class called science of well-being essentially a class in how to make yourself happier at George Mason University in Virginia is a challenge for positive psychologists. It is one of the 15 unhappiest campuses in America, at least per the Princeton Review. The classes taught by Todd Kashdan, the 32-year-old psychology professor whose area of research is "curiosity and well-being." Kashdan takes his students, a few of them older than he, through the various building blocks of positive psychology: optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, hope, and spirituality. Malcolm Gladwells Blink is an examination of the mental processes and social factors that inform our snap decisions. A good flourisher often makes good snap decisions which are often made partly on the basis of ignoring inconsequential events. Some mental processes first hit us at the visceral level and as one unknown expert said: (The visceral) tells us what we need to know well before our consciousness catches up." The visceral is involved in intuitive deciding. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics defines wisdom as "intuitive reason combined with scientific knowledge. An example of modeling is seen when we notice Nichomachus was Aristotle's father. In an ungraded freer environment, a student can get to know oneself better when learner facilitators provide conditions which encourage a student to examine his or her present experience. Notice ones present experience is a condition for flourishing, wisdom and peaceful living. Kaplearning strongly promotes such an environment and such encouragement. Noticing one's noticing, while one is noticing, is a facet of meditation. Jason Marsh reports in the Greater Good Magazine: "Effects of Mindfulness Meditation Training on Anticipatory Alpha Modulation in Primary Somatosensory Cortex,Kerr, C.E., et. al. Brain Research Bulletin, Vol. 85

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(3-4), May 2011, 96-103. Jason Marsh states: Mindfulness meditation involves focusing attention on our thoughts, breathing, and bodily sensations. This study suggests how it can also help us IGNORE unwanted distractions. After non-meditators went through an eight-week mindfulness meditation training, researches looked at their brain activity, comparing it with their brain activity before the training and the brain activity of people who hadnt completed the training. They found that the meditators showed a significantly improved abilityand a much stronger ability than non-meditatorsto regulate a brain wave crucial to helping the mind screen out (IGNORE my note) unwanted or distracting information. The results suggest how meditation may affect the brain to improve focus. Focusing on one's present experience is an aspect of kaplearning and meditation. Meditation helps one optimally ignore. Improving focus often broadens focus (possibly as far as an opposite of an infinitesimal; an amount too large to measure). Arizona State University now has a consciousness conference each year. Deepak Chopra and many interdisciplinary neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, and sociologists participate. Trying to explain well-being and kaplearning, and/or the way to them, is like trying to explain quality in thought and statement. We can know quality; we can notice wisdom, but we cannot describe or explain the whole of wisdom or quality in detail. Explaining differences between training and education, may now be better considered in terms of what has been said. Explaining is a process. Explaining quality would be like explaining everything. What, except for excess, does not have quality? Such an explanation would need to include ones explaining one's explaining while one is explaining. Since it is an ongoing process, any stage of it must be incomplete as in Kurt Gdel's mathematics incompleteness theorem. That too has a connection to the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty in physics, and the Nicolelis uncertainty principle in neuroscience. Uncertainty surrounds us as does impermanence. Learning what to ignore might help us feel more satisfied about uncertainty. An aspect of learning what to ignore is to notice wholes are often more than the sum of their parts. Words and explanations are often parts of larger wholes. As was mentioned earlier, each part of an airplane does not fly by itself, but rather, when the parts are placed together in an organized manner, an airplane flies under proper conditions. Searching for what makes a plane fly is not found when looking only at parts. Rather, the whole must be noticed. Such a search of separate parts is often futile. When the search is the finding: when the journey and the destination are one, there is a whole, which can't be explained in terms of separate parts. Silence, at times, is most powerful, especially when coupled with one's nonverbal activity (what one does). Silence is often nondual. Ignoring trivial isolated parts can help broaden ones focus to notice larger wholes. David Geoffrey Smith remarked: As was the case until recently, in the U.S. questioning the official narrative of 9/11 in university classrooms could be cause for losing ones position on the charge of treason. There are also other

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reasons of a deeply curricular nature lying at the heart of a seeming reluctance on the part of academics to seriously engage the auspices of surface curricular narratives. Here I will briefly suggest two, before examining the phenomenon of disillusionment and fear of it. One involves the knowledge/information explosion itself, whereby increasingly scholarship has given up any pretense of being able think the full body of available knowledge into a single unified field of any sort, even through the action of reason. With few exceptions, the day seems to have passed when scholars like Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century, and T.S. Eliot and Harold Bloom in this argued for a curriculum and manner of education that would provide students with a sense of the Whole. Learning what to ignore increases the chance of integrating disciplines. Kaplan thinks abstractions, including abstract beliefs, often tend to create problems which otherwise do not exist. The "not solving" is the solving when there are no abstractions and nothing to solve. Richard Rohr states: Nondual seeing is the ability to stand back and calmly observe our inner dramas, without rushing to judgment. He says it is foundational to our seeing, and: It is the primary form of dying to the self. (From The Naked Now.) Dying to the self, is a transformation. Einstein's idea of noticing the true value of a human being can be seen when we notice the degree to which one has liberated oneself from one's ego. One own writer has a book titled Being No One Going Nowhere. The title implies that it is the same as everyone going everywhere which further implies a unity of everyone and everything (nonduality). Robert Buswell, UCLA scholar, states: In Buddhism, by abandoning the personal point of view that is the self (atman), the Buddhist experiences a state that transcends dichotomies such as enemy and friend, orthodox and heretical, and thus clings to nothing from this conditioned world. Even attachment to Buddhism itself, the Buddha says, must ultimately be abandoned to truly understand Buddhism. Attachment to views is considered to be the root source of the disputes that separate one group from another and lead to conflict. Will Richardson quoted Clay Shirkey who said: Institutions will always try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution, and that is certainly the case right now in education. John Merrow wrote a summary piece about Ed Nation that cant escape that lets do what weve been doing better lens, but one of his commentors, Ken Bernstein, gets it right: Bernstein said:
Our schools are now, and have been for more than a century, largely been structured for the convenience of the adults involved with them than for the real benefit and learning of the students whom somehow we seem to want to treat as interchangeable parts.

Is it a stretch to suggest that much of what were struggling with right now is because of the education system weve built and the emphasis weve placed on the test? Weve been taught to hate ambiguity, that only one answer exists, that if we have enough money, we can game the test. Weve been taught that learning ends once the test is mastered, that our

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passions dont matter, and that numbers rather than goods tell our educational story. Yet, this is what we perpetuate because for the adults, its the easiest path. Its easier to define success in numbers, easier to manage kids as groups, and easier to tweak than to reimagine, none of which serves our students as well as they deserve. If schools were good, we would not need to be concerned about what Mark Bittman said: One problem is that too often we let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Kaplearning is open to a variety of degrees. Kaplearning accepts imperfection and cherishes mistakes as that from which one learns. Schools can provide conditions for students to notice what they are noticing while they are noticing, and for students to explore what they find remarkable, interesting, and important. When this occurs schooling will be less for job training, and more to help one notice that we are all in this together, and that no one knows until we all know. No one understands, until we all understand. Knowing you know nothing is an unending beginning through which you may continually have an un-prejudging beginners mind.

The obedience to authority frame as well as the scientistic frame have been stifling teachers and professors for over a century. Delivering others mail dulls minds. The openness and success of Finnish schools give high-quality teachers much freedom and granting freedom to their students. When one is free, one can use appropriate tools of constraint- functional discontinuity Gladwellian structured disadvantage, and David Geoffrey Smith's disillusionment, to facilitate creative learning and living. These, paradoxically, may be considered as temporary obstacles designed to remove obstacles. Deepak and Gotham Chopra stated: Obstacles are mere opportunities for creativity. This means not losing sight of the intended outcome, while being comfortable with uncertainty. Along the way. Superheroes don't have to solve all of life's mysteries, because they are life's mysteries. With this knowledge, superheroes learn to do less and accomplish more and ultimately do nothing and accomplish everything. About Finnish schooling Diane Ravitch said:
Teachers and principals repeatedly told me that the secret of Finnish success is trust. Parents trust teachers because they are professionals. Teachers trust one another and collaborate to solve mutual problems because they are professionals. Teachers and principals trust one another because all the principals have been teachers and have deep experience. When I asked about teacher attrition, I was told that teachers seldom leave teaching; it's a great job, and they are highly respected.

I was asked about current trends in U.S. education, and Finnish educators were astonished by the idea that our governments intend to evaluate teachers by their students' test scores; that made no sense to them. Here's
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an interesting contrast: We claim to be preparing students for global competitiveness, and we reward mastery of basic skills. Our guiding principles: Competition, accountability, and choice. Finland has this singular goal: to develop the humanity of each child. Isn't that a shocking goal? Their guiding principles: equity, creativity, and prosperity. Finland rightly deserves attention today as a nation that treats its children as a precious resource and that honors the adults who make education their passion and their career. Someday, I hope, we will recognize the failure of the behaviorist approach now in vogue; someday we will see that our current "reforms" are appropriate for the industrial era of the early 20th century, not for the needs of the 21st century. When that day arrives, we will understand the deep wisdom of Finland, with its love for children and its respect for educators, and we will be grateful that there is a successful alternative to our own failed model.

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PREPRE-EPILOGUE
INVENTING SELF-DIRECTION

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught. -- Luc de Clapiers

Epstein (2007) wrote: One would think that military personnelobligated to follow orders without questionand prisonersstripped of most of their rights by the criminal justice systemwould be far more encumbered than non-institutionalized teens. But thats not what I found In other words, teens appear to be subjected to about twice as many restrictions as are prisoners and soldiers and to more than ten times as many restrictions as are everyday adults. The following bulletin from the ASCD, Aug. 2011, indicates increased restrictions even for children in kindergarten: Many Florida districts will introduce a more rigorous curriculum for kindergarten students this year as they begin phasing in Common Core State Standards. Rather than learning to count to 20 and practicing some basic math, the state's kindergarten students now will be expected to count to 100 -- by tens and ones -- and be proficient in addition and subtraction up to five. Expectations for reading also will be higher under the new standards, which are being implemented in most states. It seems like the state of Florida standards originators did not read Readicide. They seem to be committing mindicide. Standardized tests often measure lower level thinking. To illustrate the lower-level thinking required even of graduate and postgraduate students, please note a PhD psychologist advertising his professional workshops (MidAugust 2011) related to participants (educators and psychologists) learning more about the human brain. His course description states: Participants completing the program should be able to do five things. I mention this here to demonstrate requests for lower level thinking often arising from a Skinnerian base (stated above as negative by Diane Ravitch) which continues to influence many teachers and professors at all levels. The first goal asks participants to name characteristics. The second goal deals with identifying strategies. The third calls for describing. The fourth calls for listing of more strategies. The fifth talks about identifying principles.
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It seems an intelligent fifth-grader could accomplish the goals mentioned above. One could be certain of the identifying, describing, listing without improving one's ability to be an educator or a psychologist. Also notice that the outcomes can be more certain when one is asked to name, list, describe, and identify. When one is asked to understand larger wholes and connections of integrations at the heart of various disciplines, one will find themselves being less certain, but often noticeably more educated/self-directing. Paradoxically, with kaplearning, the journeys and destinations can often be the same. Many want to become peaceful and curious lovers of learning. Similarly, one need not know extensive details in order to be a peaceful, curious, lover of learning. Forced excessive accumulation of trivia (much of schooling) can prevent one from being a peaceful, curious, lover of learning. It is difficult to become a peaceful, curious, lover of learning when the accumulation of trivia is required by a professor or teacher. Matt Damon recently (Aug. 2011) said: "As I look at my life today, the things that I value about myself, my imagination, my love of acting, my passion for writing, my love of learning, my curiosity, came from the way that I was parented and taught. And none of these qualities that I just mentioned, none of these qualities that I prize so deeply, none of these qualities that have brought me so much joy, that have made me so successful professionally, none of these qualities that make me who I am can be tested. Damon said he achieved his successes in large part because his teachers were not forced to focus on silly test prep and instead could work to educate. Dr. J.B. King, New York State Education Commissioner said: We want to ensure that the tests give us a better read on progress toward college and career readiness. Note the (standardized) tests are not designed to help students be more curious and increase love of learning. The tests are for others to be more certain (the original mistake). What can more easily be measured (and therefore be more certain about) continues to be what schools and universities attempt to achieve. Some few universities and schools, however, do develop love of learning, curiosity, imagination and their students enjoy finding out who one is and what one can become. Neal Gabler gives a result of wanting too much certainty when he said: If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, its not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just dont care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that cant instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost pass. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Greshams law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Greshams law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas. We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. No doubt there will be those who say that the big ideas have migrated to the marketplace, but there is a vast difference between profitmaking inventions and intellectually challenging thoughts. Entrepreneurs have

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plenty of ideas, and some, like deceased Steven P. Jobs of Apple, have come up with some brilliant ideas in the inventional sense of the wordWhat the future portends is more and more information Everests of it. There wont be anything we wont know. But there will be no one thinking about it. Think about that. Is that a result of not learning what to ignore? The focus away from broad noticing is a condition which keeps wealthy people wealthy, poor people poor, and the need to form occupy Wall Street" groups. David Geoffrey Smith also reports: A new genre of inquiry called Deep Politics has emerged from the shadows of the luminous surface of things. Deep Politics attempts to challenge dominant interpretations by revealing their largely unreported underside. Because of its threat to standing orders of power, Deep Politics is sometimes labeled Conspiracy Theory, but this charge may more often operate as a form of denial, based on a deep fear of the truth of things. Deep Politics is a term originally coined by Peter Dale Scott, a Canadian academic, writer and poet, now emeritus professor of the University of California at Berkeley. He uses the term to argue that under the surface procedures of daily life there is an organized set of operations serving political and financial elites through a systematic repression of information regarding such events and direct provision of misleading information to keep the repression alive. Knowing seems to give one more certainty than does imagining, wondering, and thinking. Letting go of static ideas brings about some uncertainty. As Dave Doane said: "To get to the temple, one must take the road. But to enter the temple, one must leave the road." Letting go (intelligent ignoring) is leaving the road. Are we sure of where we came from? As philosopher Alan Watts stated: "We do not really come into the world, we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean waves, the universe peoples. While also mentioning some disagreement with what was said, a recent Gary Gutting article stated: Corey Robins new book presents conservatives as fundamentally committed to stopping subordinate classes from taking power from the ruling elite. Conservatism, Robin says, holds that the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, to govern themselves or the polity. The article also said: We legitimately govern ourselves. There is no sovereignty no king, no social or economic elite, apart from the people themselves that has ultimate political power. We all, in principle, share in the power to govern ourselves. Conservatives think this is a radical idea. The article also mentioned: Conservatism derived from the fear that the liberal project of democracy would destroy all the traditional privileges of men over women, employers over workers, rich over poor, educated over uneducated, whites over other races, and the like. While conservatives would disagree, an intelligent anonymous responder to this article stated what I think is more true than untrue: The obvious, indisputable point is that learning, intellectual curiosity, serious thought in

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general are anathema to the conservative mind. An example reported by Newsweek is George W. Bush would accept scientific research only if it agreed with his foregone conclusions arising from his conservative values. Research has shown differences in areas of the brain that deal with fear, including the amygdala, are structured differently in those who hold conservative positions than those who hold more open and liberal positions. Research also reports that liberals brains have a different structure than conservative brains in brain areas that deal with tolerating ambiguity. It seems that the brains of liberals and conservatives are different. I don't know which type brain is more evolved, but I notice that I am glad that my brain tolerates ambiguity and is less fearful than that of a fearing brain. As I see events, research is tending to show that reducing fear and aggression, tolerating ambiguity, and not resisting change are very helpful for growth and development, especially in times of exceedingly rapid change. An article about technology, education consultant, in Edutopia.org. Ben Johnson stated: Educators should integrate an element of uncertainty into their daily lessons. Uncertainty prompts students to think about what they know, and requires them to make decisions about what to do next -- important components for studying many subjects, such as statistics, math and science. Kaplan remarked: The dominant style of Western philosophy - -style of thought, I mean, not just of writing - -has been ponderous and even grim. It is suggestive that we speak of a man as being in dead earnest, while lively connotes playfulness. Is it, as Santayana has suggested, only the approach of death that makes us philosophers? Can we so lightly assume - -paradox indeed - -that gravity of demeanor is essential to the philosopher? Philosophy, after all, is the love of wisdom; and what is to be said of a lover who behaves always as though he were in a church? An amount too large to measure may be similar to an infining. Defining is a limiting. Infining is an opening. What is refining and redefining and how do they relate to infining? How does all of this relate to what goes on in classrooms and learning what to ignore? Listening helps us notice, and as Rachel Naomi Remen said: "In the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you. When looking at all long-range convenient thought and behavior, one may conclude that the largest perspective possible, and the purpose of thought, feeling, and noticing is to make one free. That is kaplearning/Zen. Aldous Huxley and many Zen Buddhists would agree that when one is free, one has a greater tendency to practice kindness. Developing curricula by corporations primarily promotes training for jobs. When done excessively as is now the case, freedom to powerfully learn is constrained. Freedom is subservient to nothing. It is unbounded. All events are defined and therefore bound. Temporary convenience is subservient to longrange supervenience (self-directing noticing). While training is for jobs, education is for self-direction, and for more education as freedom is for more freedom. (Licentiousness will not be dealt with here.) Excessive training often

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prevents one from becoming educated thus enabling one to more easily develop what Carlo Ricci reports educator Norm Diamond calls Compliance Acquiescence Disorder (CAD-- described later). Because teaching and professing, at almost all levels, are often designed for job training, education for self-direction and learning what to ignore have been sadly neglected. Many teachers would like to accomplish the goals of increased student selfdirectedness, curiosity, open inquiry and increased student love of learning. Because of required tests, teachers must prepare (train) students for what amounts to subvenient pixels instead of a broad view. Training (what the teacher often says and does) generates low level properties. During training students too often need to remember for tests, or to do relatively simple tasks. Passing a required test and being obedient to authority are temporarily convenient, often for school administrators and corporations even though good citizenship is neglected. Kaplearning tends to promote what Mohammed Yunis did. We do not yet seem to be ready for what Muhamed Yunis, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, revealed, The Power of a Business Model that Combines Business Discipline with Compasion. SUMMARY: When a crippling disease shattered his lifelong ambition, Dr. G. Venkataswamy (known to many as Dr. V) chose an impossible new dream: to cure the world of blindness. The tiny clinic he founded in India defied conventional business logic and is now the largest provider of eye care on the planet. At Aravind, patients choose whether to pay or not. Millions are treated for free, yet the organization remains stunningly self-reliant. Treating everyone from penniless farmers to the president, it delivers world-class outcomes at less than a hundredth of what similar services cost providers in advanced nations. Its baffling business model is now being emulated in hundreds of organizations everywhere from Rwanda to San Francisco. Infinite Vision, by Pavithra Metha and Suchitra Shenoy is the first book to probe Aravinds history for the distinctive practices and values that unleashed its improbable success. It reveals the power of a model that integrates innovation with empathy, service with business principles, and inner change with outer transformation. It shows how choices that seem nave or unworkable, can, when executed with wisdom and integrity, yield powerful results results that light the eyes of millions. Kaplearning/Zen practice facilitates this kind of model. Besides noting powerful self-directed learning as the continuous reconstruction of experience, we may also note self-directing education is the process of forming a fundamental disposition, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow-men. What implication does this conclusion have for teachers and learners who deal with content, process, and complex beings, each of whom has 100 trillion cells, many of which may be under used partly by failure to ignore trivia? What we are doing in schools and universities today, according to Lamarckian evolution, promotes more obedience to authority and more scientism. By noting what we are doing and by making some changes, we can

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change a set of principles which apply to other sectors of society and culture. As Shenk says: "It's how the government should treat its poorest citizens and how the legal system should treat its transgressors. It's how our bosses should treat employees and how businesses should treat customers. It's how the media should treat its audience. By using Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative (the effect of which is treating other people the way one would like to be treated) we can have win-win situations in all areas of global living. We have enough to feed all the hungry in the world as expressed by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Kaplearning implies that when we notice well, we will notice we are more connected than separated with everyone and everything. We may soon notice the power pyramid is being turned upside down, which implies the power of responsibility for learning will be shifting more to the learner as it does in free schools and some college projects and like the Bard College Senior project which states: Viewed by the College as the capstone of the student's education in the liberal arts and sciences, the Senior Project is an original, individual, focused project growing out of the student's cumulative academic experiences. Students have great flexibility in choosing the form of their project. Kaplearning provides conditions for learning much like Bard's senior project. About this, Steven Taylor said: "I think it's interesting to apply these ideas to the notion of learning as living, rather than as a scientific process that must be guided by others or by institutions (enlightenment and ordinary living are not different). If the way that can be said is not the way, then the way cannot be prescribed. What cannot be spoken cannot be dictated. That learning is ineffable, intuitive and even spiritual is a possibility which firmly precludes curricula (maybe even Carlo's {Ricci} willed curriculum!).The interesting thing to me about Buddhism is that, unlike other religions that people might look into, it has no real institutional dogma or doctrines to obey other than the emancipation of your own mind or the guiding of others towards awareness of their self-imposed oppression, which sounds like a lot like Freires conscientization. If you look into Buddhism you will never be finished looking. It is a way, not an end. And isn't that how we ought to see learning? Some research on altruism reports that it is natural for people to be altruistic to each other without needing to think conceptually. When someone is hungry, they are fed by those with food without the need for anyone conceptualizing. The feeders do so with no hope for reward. The reward is already present in the giving to an individual in need. An individual is part of the whole of everyone and everything. "All giving" in this sense is for the giver as well as the receiver. Noticing the shifting pyramid of power helps one treat others as one treats oneself. At the highest form of kaplearning we may even notice that we can ignore our separate egos so as to notice our unity with everyone and everything. This may be the highest form of ignoring which may simultaneously be the highest form of learning, knowing, and understanding. This knowing helps one know that one doesn't know. Knowing that one doesn't know may be the equivalent to understanding that one does not understand.

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This unity including the unity of knowing with not knowing carried farther could imply an evolution to removing national boundaries as Einstein suggested. As the process of kaplearning cannot be directly expressed, and like love of learning, wisdom, and curiosity, not easily measured, we may need to notice our students nonviolently rebelling against trivia disseminated in many school and university classes before students cause a power shift. Hopefully, the rebellion will take the form of a peaceful rebellion such as Gandhi's. Erica Goldson, January, 2010 high school valedictorian address stated: "The majority of students are put through the same brainwashing techniques in order to create a complacent labor force working in the interests of large corporations and secretive government, and worst of all, they are completely unaware of it." Her entire valedictorian address can be found in the book:

Brains Inventing Themselves: Choice and Engaged Learning.

Willpower research by Baumeister and Tierney shows that willpower is more than a metaphor. It can, at times, be temporarily depleted with use as well as temporarily strengthened with glucose. Increasing the tendency to allow events to happen rather than make events happen can strengthen willpower. Mental stem learnings are an aspect of kaplearning. Kaplearning/Zen practice helps one learn to maximize the use of willpower to generate what the Berlin wisdom paradigm calls, aspects of wise behavior. Research supports the merit of the idea: "don't push the river; it flows by itself. Neuroscientist David Eagleman (Incognito) states: "You are not consciously aware of the vast majority of your brain's ongoing activities, nor would you want to be it would interfere with the brains well-oiled processes. The best way to mess up your piano piece is to concentrate on your fingers; the best way to get out of breath is to think about your breathing; the best way to miss the golf ball is to analyze your swing. This wisdom is apparent even to children. You execute these actions easily like riding a bicycle but without knowing the details of how you do it. It would be totally unable to describe the perfectly timed choreography with which your muscles contract and relax as you navigate around other people in the cafeteria while holding a tray, yet you have no trouble doing it. This is the gap between what your brain can do and what you can tap into consciously. A way to miss a "big picture" is to excessively pay attention to too many inconsequential pictures. Trivia needs to often be ignored even when some semi-calculated uncertainty goes with that avoiding. Eagleman thinks we intuitively activate muscles when hitting a baseball, riding a bike, etc. He says we do not want to be consciously aware of the intricacies of our intuitive muscle movements. But this can be less intuitive when applied to your perceptions, thoughts, and beliefs, which are also final products of the activity of billions of nerve cells. When we are natural, we naturally ignore inconsequential events. Learning involves paying attention to consequential events and ignoring what is not of little consequence. We use the term, "heart of the matter depending upon the matter under consideration.
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Kaplearning facilitates getting to hearts of matters" (broadly focusing to notice universals from which a variety of skills and ways of being are often derived). What may be said about the process of being open? My dictionary defines "open" with 93 lines of words and symbols. It may be said that kaplearning is left undefined since kaplearning/Zen may be at the heart of all defining (a possible opposite of an infinitesimalan event too large to measure). What Schenk reported about Lamarckian evolution may help learners notice that evolution may accelerate even more quickly than previously thought. Thought also evolves. If one holds to the notion that thought evolves, might it be said that evolved thought often goes beyond present thought? Einstein held that if a thought did not at first appear absurd, there was no hope for it. About values and scientific research, Cordelia Fine is accurate in thinking scientists think scientific reasoning calls for pure, dispassionate curiosity. She is a senior research associate at the Melbourne Business School and is the author of A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives. She reports: In a much discussed article this year in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that our reasoning skills are really not as dismal as they seem. They dont deny that irrationalities like the confirmation bias are common. Instead, they suggest that we stop thinking of the primary function of reasoning as being to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Reasoning, they claim, is for winning arguments. Unnecessary intellectualizing (failure to ignore) can generate desire as can many other events. When desire is ignored, distrust, pride, and greed are often also ignored. The Seligman Penn Resiliency Program generates well-being. Well-being often co-arises with trust, humility, and generosity. Ignoring desire may be at the heart of one's well-being, and may arise with the highest learning and knowing. The certainty of logic and math are frequently linear. Much of one's life is nonlinear. Excessive intellectualizing, as some scientists are prone to follow, seems to prevent them from noticing the value of Chomsky's statement: "There are many simple descriptive facts about language that just aren't understood: how sentences get their meaning, how they get their sound, how other people comprehend them. Why don't languages use linear order in computation?"
MENTAL STEMS

Psychotherapist James Guinans 12 events are here named mental stem ways of being. They are mental cells similar to physical stem cells. These mental ways of being have the power to enable one to ignore less consequential events so that broader (multidiscipline) connections can more readily be made and practiced. These events, mentioned below, are often practiced by those who know what to ignore, and know what to do (quality, wise living) without being told.

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One definition a highly educated person can be seen in the behavior of those who practice these twelve ways of well- being. These behaviors and accompanying attitudes have the quality of generating quality behavior needed at almost any time and place. These ways of well-being are projected to align with what has earlier been mentioned about wise behavior and Seligmans well-being. Each of us can promote schools and universities to give their primary attention to the development of well-being through Seligman's program and kaplearning, both of which help provide conditions for the development of the following 12 points. 1. Increase the tendency to let things happen rather than make things happen. 2. Have frequent attacks of smiling. 3. Have feelings of being connected with others and nature. 4. Have frequent, almost overwhelming, episodes of appreciation. 5. Have the tendency to think and act spontaneously, rather than from fears based on past experiences. 6. Have an unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment, and to make the best out of each experience. 7. Lose the ability to worry. 8. Lose interest in conflict. 9. Lose interest in interpreting the actions of others. . 10. Lose interest in judging others. 11. Lose interest in judging self. 12. Be compassionate to self and others without expecting anything in return.

An example of a Zen educated person who practices stem ways of well-being is clinical psychologist Dave Doane. He stated: I am convinced, as others much wiser than I have said, that hate only begets more hate, war begets more war, killing only begets more killing. As was said in the 60s, killing for peace is like fu_ing_for virginity. I think we as a people have acquiesced to the evil of believing in war and killing as the answer, and it's not. You're right that our anger won't solve it. We've got to leave the framework of war and killing. We need another playing field, one that is about listening and working with and accepting and learning to live together. We need to look across the room and see us. That may sound like pie in the sky or naive or crazy -- to me it's less crazy than thinking we can kill what we call evil. That, I think, is the challenge of our age. Doanes response is evidence of his evolved self-directing education and involvement with a Zen way of being. He does the 12 mental stem ways of being to a high degree. Cara Buckley recently said: "All of which sets Occupy-related student protests apart from much of the campus activism that has come before. A good chunk of student protest has focused on single issues: nukes in the 70s, apartheid and Contras in the 80s, sweatshops in the 90s. She mentioned Angus Johnston who said: What you have with the Occupy movement is a

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criticism of global capitalism and the American financial system, but also a critique of policing on campus, tuition policy, the way universities are run Buckley quoted Ms. Hoffman who said: Youve got an entire generation of people that realize something is wrong and something has to change because the system is wrong. That is where kaplearning and transformation step in. Many books and authors are not to be avoided. One of them is Finding Your Way In A Wild New World by Martha Beck.

The Farther Reaches of Kaplearning.

Kaplearning enhances evolution of consciousness. Lemarckian evolution tends to greatly accelerate evolution. Physicist Gary Zukov refers to our mental evolution. As you recall Einstein saying: "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that, behind all discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. An intangible concatenation arises when one notices one's present experience. One then often sees that the past is no more than a present remembrance and that the future is no more than a present anticipation. One also often sees, while noticing ones present experience, that experiencing one's present is beyond one's conceptualizing. One also notices that one's present experience is not fully conceptualizable since it is ongoing and continuous. Nobel laureate Richard Feynman spoke of physicists not using now because now cannot be adequately defined. Definitions relate to conceptualizing (and too often for the need for certainty) and when one moves beyond conceptualizing, one can notice one can know more than one can tell as Polanyi has demonstrated. One can know more about ones "now" then one can tell. Physicists, doing physics, can only tell what they know. This moves our culture closer to scientism and a desire for certainty. Problems most often relate to past and future can bring one's noticing one's present, one may notice situations that come and go. They are often not problems unless one wants something other than what one notices in the present moment was. That wanting or craving is at the heart of problems and when the craving for something other than what is is no longer present, problems also are no longer present. Another implication of kaplearning is that we are already fine as we are when we accept what is, including oneself, as one is. Kaplearning helps one notice one is more connected than disconnected to everyone and everything. One then notices the difference between "apart and a part. A part is noticed as being connected to a larger whole. Apart is a separation and therein does the problem lie. Eckhart Tolle in his book, The Power of Now, elaborates in detail about how one's being present is a type of stillness which brings peace. From a kaplearning point of view, being peaceful is more basic and more realistic than being happy. My darling wife found the following anonymous quote which fits with kaplearning. It is called The Virtue of Flexibility.

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Trees look strong compared with the wild reeds in the field. But when the storm comes the trees are uprooted, whereas the wild reeds, while moved back and forth by the wind, remain rooted and are standing up again when the storm has calmed down. Flexibility is a great virtue. When we cling to our own positions and are not willing to let our hearts be moved back and forth a little by the ideas or actions of others, we may easily be broken. Being like wild reeds does not mean being wishywashy. It means moving a little with the winds of the time while remaining solidly anchored in the ground. A humorless, intense, opinionated rigidity about current issues might cause these issues to break our spirits and make us bitter people. Let's be flexible while being deeply rooted. Seligmans Penn resiliency program and kaplearning provide a condition for increasing student flexibility while being deeply rooted. When one is flexible and deeply rooted one has a greater chance of seeing the connection between everyone and everything and connecting multidisciplinary content and process. Such seeing tends tends to help one be more cooperative than competitive with everyone and everything. As Seligman pointed out the different value orientation of his Penn resiliency program, kaplearning simultaneously has acceptance of what is Perez a route to well-being. Once again, because well-being is so difficult to measure and be certain about, is often rejected it as a goal. We have been conditioned through our schooling and culture to be competitive and uncooperative unless cooperation promotes our group's interests. The expansion of the value system of well-being helps us see that for general wellbeing, there are no separate groups. Einstein saw this when he promoted the reduction of national boundaries. In that sense, Einstein was a kaplearner. As Seligman said: When one gets to know oneself, one flourishes. A Sage said flourishing; has no form, no appearance, no root, no basis, no abode but is lively and buoyant. It responds with versatile facility but its function cannot be located. As happiness is a byproduct rather than something one could profitably seek, so is flourishing. Yet flourishing, well-being, like love of learning, self-directedness and openness can be powerful goals for which teachers can provide conditions so that those goals may be achieved. Earlier it was suggested that training is to formation as transformation is to education. Now consider unformation as an element of kaplearning and transformation to openness, flourishing and well-being. We have been conditioned/formed by our society and schools to think and behave in certain ways. To be open to one's present experience, one needs to be open to changing the programming/conditioning so that one freely chooses to be and become what they are. As in Milan Kunderas novel: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," kaplearning in part deals with the bearable heaviness of unbecoming of one's previous conditioning. This can only be done when one notices that one has been, and is being, conditioned. Notice all of your

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resistances to openness. When you notice those resistances you often resist them less and can then use them to flourish and be more self-directing.

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ENDINGS AS BEGINNINGS

"We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger. And we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man ... far too little. His psyche should be studied -- because we are the origin of all coming evil." --C.G. Jung

Concerning what to ignore Steven Taylor reminds us: One of the most widely quoted sentences of Sir Francis Bacon (it comes from his essay Of Studies) concerns the reading of books: Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. This is usually taken as a wise or sententious general comment about the worthiness of various texts, but Ann Blair shows that Bacon was making a very practical recommendation to people who were overwhelmed by the availability of books and couldn't imagine how they were going to read them all. Bacon tells such worried folks that they can't read them all, and so should develop strategies of discernment that enable them to make wise decisions about how to invest their time. I think Bacon would have applauded Clay Shirky's comment that we suffer not from information overload but from filter failure. Bacon's famous sentence is really a strategy for filtering. Wise filtering is a form of wise ignoring. What should not be a ignored is The New York Times report stating that standards for the common core curriculum, already promoted by over 45 states, has been developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers. The Times writer also recently reported that a number of Chief State school officers have gone on very expensive international trips to view schools. These trips were paid for by the Pearson organization whose website states: Only Pearson offers complete and cohesive support to implement the new common core State standards. The Times writer reports that the Pearson Company is seeking to own that new market. But Jack Jennings, President of the Center on Education Policy, a centrist group, compared the practice to pharmaceutical companies that run junkets for doctors or lobbyists who fly members of Congress to vacation getaways. If we want that kind of corruption in education, were fools, he said. Concerning Rohrs idea of desire for certainty as our first mistake, David Geoffrey Smith stated:
This is the true vocation of lifelong work, namely to learn to live freely yet without certainty, except the certainty that clinging to concepts beyond their functional ability to serve the human prospect well, will result in ever-deepening

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forms of estrangement as the concepts fail to address the new realities confronting them.

This may be the situation in which we find ourselves as a global community. The Western tradition embodied in the Anglo-AmericanIsraeli nexus finds itself confronting refusals to accept its self-defined universalistic presuppositions. Or even where there is growing acceptance of those presuppositions, so also is there naivete regarding their underbelly, namely that the rhetorics of freedom mask new forms of enslavement to the tentacles of monetary dependency. The human world is changing in paradigmatic ways, with new forms of alliance designed to resist the domination of only one version of a better ground of being. The War on Terror may be the last war of an older regime of truth, with Deep Politics of assistance in illuminating why such a regime change may be necessary. An ability to face the necessary disillusionment points paradoxically to the source of our hope. Regarding ignoring, Martha Beck stated: I noticed long time ago fear often comes packaged with enthronement. We don't look away from accidents or guidance. We give them our rapt attention. This tendency has obvious evolutionary advantages it's safer to keep deadly objects in front of the mind than to ignore them. As a result, our brains seem to be hardwired so that scary experiences contain fascination, and fascinating experiences are often scary. Think of something that both intrigues you and scare you. Such thinking may be functionally discontinuous from which there often is a better chance of noticing a more comprehensive whole. About the quality of university student learning, Gary Gutting, University of Notre Dame philosopher, stated in December of 2011: "In particular, the University curriculum leaves students disengaged from the material they are supposed to be learning. They see most of their courses as intrinsically boring, a value only if they provide training relevant to future employment or if the teacher has a pleasing (amusing, exciting, relevant) way of presenting the material. As a result, students spend only as much time as they need to get what they see as acceptable grades (on average, about 12 to 14 hours a week for all courses combined). Professors have ceased to expect genuine engagement from students and often give good grades (B or better) to work that is at best minimally adequate." We frequently do not pay attention to something unless we open to pay attention. Openness to receive precedes the attention stage in the affective domain. What Begley and Schwartz are saying about paying attention to one's paying attention as one is paying attention crisply fits with Seigels notion of an awareness wheel. Gil Fronsdal stated: Our intentions noticed or unnoticed, gross or subtle contribute either to our suffering or to our happiness. Intentions are sometimes called seeds. The garden you grow depends on the seeds you plant and water. Long after a deed is done, the trace or momentum of the intention behind it remains as a seed, conditioning our future happiness or unhappiness.
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Learning fosters intentions that generate well-being seeds promoting peace and happiness. So much of what we learn relates to memory. Learning what to ignore is related to learning what to forget. Jonah Lehrers Wired article, March 2012, about The Forgetting Pill, is partly about how a new drug can target your worst memories and erase them forever. He stated:
So many of our assumptions about the human mind what is it, why it breaks, how it can be healed are rooted in the mistaken belief about how experience is stored in the brain according to a recent survey, 63% of Americans believe that human memory works like a video camera, accurately recording the events we see and hear so that we can review and inspect them later

Consider the study of flashbulb memories, extremely vivid, detailed recollections. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, a team of psychologists led by William Hearst and Elizabeth Phelps surveyed several hundred subjects about their memories of that awful day. The scientists then repeated the surveys, tracking how the stories steadily decayed. At one year out, 37% of the details had changed. By 2004 that number was approaching 50%. Some changes were innocuous the stories got tighter and the narratives more coherent but other adjustments involved all wholesale retrofit some people even altered where they were when the towers fell. Over and over, the act of repeating the narrative seemed to corrupt its content The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has repeatedly demonstrated that nearly a third of subjects can be tricked into claiming a made-up memory as their own. It takes only a single exposure to a new fiction for it to be re-consolidated as a fact Every memory is actually kept in many different parts of the brain. Memories of negative emotions, for instance, are stored in the amygdala, and almond-shaped area in the center of the brain. Patients who have suffered damage to the amygdala are incapable of remembering fear. About freedom to learn, Carlo Ricci reports on an interview with Professor Kellie Rolstad (Arizona State University) who said: I tell people that its living and learning without a script. Just the way any adult would live their life, what they do on a daily basis or what they do with any kind of long term plan is completely their own. Jerome Bruner who said in the 60s that instruction is all about making a person self-sufficient and I think that babies are born self-sufficient, cognitively self-sufficient. We help their bodies, we help them eat and live physically, but I think they are cognitively selfsufficient. They know what they need to do to learn what they need to learn. I think its important to trust children to do what they are already capable and competent to do. As was mentioned, perhaps 98% of what we are doing results from subconscious brain activity. If we let go (an aspect of ignoring) our excessive controlling need for certainty, we can be more "natural" and trust that we will do what needs doing for ourselves and others in schools and out. Rolstads quote is from a Ricci's excellent book about Unschooling and the Willed Curriculum: (Trust, Respect, Compassion and Learning. (A 2012 publication).
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Carlo Ricci in Unschooling and the Willed Curriculum, reports: Norm Diamond, an Oregon educator and labor activist, was trying to capture when he invented a syndrome called Compliance Acquiescent Disorder (CAD). He intended it as a spoof of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), for which countless children are referred for treatment. A local newspaper ran an advertisement that itemized symptoms of ODD (argues with adults, actively defies rules) and invited parents who thought they had such a children to allow them to be given an experimental medication. In response, Diamond placed a counter-ad about CAD in the paper. An individual with this disorder, it explained, defers to authority, actively obeys rules, fails to argue back, knuckles under instead of mobilizing others in support, stays restrained when outrage is warranted, and so on. Fronto-temporal dementia is a disorder to be given attention but CAD may arise from excessive fear of not conforming sufficiently to societal pressure. Society now needs pressure to revoke some serious legal mistakes such as such as making corporations into people. Society needs more of the 99% to occupy evils created by the 1%. When students are our most oppressed group, we need to encourage them to amicably argue with adults and actively defy some unfair rules. The Seligman well-being program can be helpful for citizens to reduce excessive fear from which societal change may arise. Learned helplessness may have been, at one time, considered preposterous. Today, learned helplessness is avoided with well-being programs and by learning what to ignore. Learning to improve ones well-being in schools and universities, while general, may now be considered the opposite of preposterous. Kaplearning and Seligmans wellbeing program helps one to know oneself, and free oneself from one's ego. Boston College researcher, Prof. Gray reported: "Unschoolers do not send their children to school and they do not do at home the kinds of things that are done at school They do not require their children to do particular assignments for the purpose of education, and they do not test their children to measure progress. Instead, they allow their children freedom to pursue their own interests and to learn, in their own ways, what they need to know to follow those interests. They also, in various ways, provide an environmental context and environmental support for the child's learning. Life and learning do not occur in a vacuum; they occur in the context of a cultural environment, and unschooling parents help define and bring the child into contact with that environment." Regarding learning advantages for the student, Winerip reported the majority who responded to his survey said: Their children were learning more, or learning more efficiently, or learning more relevant material, or learning more eagerly in the unschooling situation than they would if they were in school or being schooled at home. Many in this category said that because their children were in charge of their own learning, their curiosity and eagerness to learn remained intact. Socrates urged know thyself. Philosopher Gordon Marino stated: Selfknowledge requires more than intellectual self-examination. It demands knowing something about your feelings. Though it may come as a surprise to some philosophers, self-knowledge requires more than intellectual self-

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examination. It demands knowing something about your feelings. In my experience philosophers are, in general, not the most emotionally attuned individuals. Many are prone to treat the ebb and flow of feelings as though our passions were nothing but impediments to reason. Freud, more than the sage of Athens grasped the moral importance of emotional self-transparency. Like the Greek tragedians but in language that did not require an ear for poetry, he reminded us of how difficult it is to own kinship with a whole range of emotions.If there were one wisp of wisdom that we could pluck from the mind of Freud it might be this: those who are unaware of their feelings risk becoming puppets of those feelings. As Nipun and Viral Mehta said of not being preposterous: It could just mean starting from where you want to get to. It could just mean Living the Dream instead of Dreaming a Life. This supports the idea that one learns to be self-directing by being self-directing. Thank you Nipun and Viral (awaken.org.). In the January 9, 2012 issue of Newsweek, Begley's excellent article states: "read stuff, learn new languages, master chess, zone out. Getting a bigger brain is easier and more fun than you think." She elaborates on 31 ways of getting smarter. To select open teachers and professors, an open interview could profitably include the Don Conable procedure. The procedure is an activity to be used with other procedures in hiring quality people, especially teachers and professors. This procedure shows something about people that we otherwise would not readily notice. Those prone to fear and aggression, those resistant to change, and those intolerant of ambiguity would not score high on this Conable procedure. They would not be considered a high quality teachers and professors. I dont want to demean any group, although I do believe that it was useful for one to often say what one thinks. I believe that many who want to be overly certain are narrow, closed people who are attempting to promote more fear than hope, joy, and cooperation. The closed mind may simply be misguided because of their need for fixed ideas and certainty. Different brain shapes, however, may generate these differences. The Conable procedure includes ideas such as asking the interviewee to attempt to steal the interviewer's pen, and to catch some flies, during the interview. The procedure is designed to show some spontaneity and willingness to be open to new experience. Points are taken off for no attempts to steal the pen, and no attempts to catch some flies. If some flies were caught more points would be added. Because of my reverence for all life, killing flies is something I do not recommend, but other procedures showing spontaneity and a willingness to be open to new experience can be devised. I believe that quality teachers could be hired with the use of such a procedure. Other procedures of course, would also be needed to determine quality teachers.

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Instead of catching flies, the interviewer might tell the following story and then note the response of the interviewee: "An elegantly dressed female is sitting across from a distinguished looking man at a formal dinner party. Shortly after they sat to eat a seven-course dinner, the woman sitting across from the elegantly dressed man notices that this regal chap is placing sliced carrots neatly on his head. He continues to neatly pile these carrots, and while the pile grows higher and higher and higher, the sauce begins to drip in his hair and down his face. Finally, after the drippings are all over his clothes, she cannot stand it any longer so she leans over and says, pardon me sir, but why in the world are you piling those carrots on your head? My God! He said, are they carrots? I thought they were sweet potatoes!" The interviewer might also wish to ask the prospective teacher or professor to tell or create a similar story. Kaplearning can be facilitated by meditation but meditation is not necessary. About meditation Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times, 11/22/11, said: The brains of experienced meditators appear to be fitter, more disciplined and more "on task" than do the brains of those trying out meditation for the first time. And the differences between the two groups are evident not only during meditation, when brain scans detect a pattern of better control over the wandering mind among experienced meditators, but when the mind is allowed to wander freely.Why would mental control over our daydreams make us more healthy? It turns out that having a well-functioning default mode network--one that lets us explore ourselves and our lives but doesn't intrude into our efforts to concentrate when that's what's needed--is critical to mental health. Those insights emerge from a study to be published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which looked at two groups: highly experienced meditators and meditation novices, and compared the operations of the Default Mode Network -- a newly identified cluster of brain regions that go to work when our brains appear to be offline People who suffer from attention deficit disorder also have difficulty keeping mind-wandering at bay, which may be why many studies have found that meditation helps those with attention deficit disorder. Kaplearners and Zen Buddhists act and often refrain from acting on the basis of what they sense and perceive in the present. What one may then notice when being highly uncertain is an openness to tentative conclusions or making conclusions. Conclusions are often about what one senses, and perceives. These conclusions are often abstractions (more like the map of a territory rather than the territory itself). Some abstractions may be useful at times. Excessive abstracting leads to certainty which in turn leads to competition, greed, and sometimes violence. Peace and kindness arise from accepting what is, while noticing one is more connected to everyone than disconnected. As Thomas Merton stated: "The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as

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madmen or innocents, we are already there. It might be good to open our eyes and see." One may conclude that the heart of the matter is often being at ease. Being at ease may be considered the epitome of quality doing and not doing. Many would agree that a mind at ease is evidence of one having "right values." When one has right values, one is not prone to fear and aggression, nor resistant to change, nor is intolerant of ambiguity. When one observes one's observing while one is observing, it is projected that one has a greater chance of being open and at ease. One might notice terror but one may be simultaneously peaceful even with what normally would be terrorizing. It is further projected that kindness helps bring about being at ease, as was the case with psychotherapist James Guinan being very calm while being terrorized. Kindness, peacefulness, and openness may be seen as the heart of the matter (what all learning is for). Aldous Huxley seemed to come to that conclusion. Paradoxically, one may be simultaneously non-dual whole) and dual (part). About this David Geoffrey Smith writes in Pedagon: "What is the silence that comes over an audience after a fine poetry reading, a well-played piece of music or a superb dramatization? If we described the performance as brilliant, we indicate our sense of something shining through the ordinary routine of things. But even more important is the effect of the performance on us what it calls forth in our deep experience. The silence which reigns after the playing of the last note may be understood as a sign of our being taken up by that which has just been given into a new way of self- understanding, and a new way of being together." Smith is writing about of recombining of what had been thought to have been separated. Openness facilitates the development of skills which have the tendency to generate that silence which, at times, comes over an audience. I assume Aldous Huxley would say the greatest skill is what he talked about in one of his latest quotes: " "It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'" Perhaps it is time to once again ask as Kenneth Tynan did: "How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself. Can we allow ourselves to grow by ignoring some certainty? Soren Kierkegaard said: "To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself."

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NOTES

1. A series of quotes supporting what is said here has been provided by highly regarded educator, Steven Taylor. Where no name is given in note 1, the quote is Taylor's. Content" is a convenient construction that, while being derived from a larger whole, does not exactly represent it and, through time, will increasingly become isolated and irrelevant. Mastery of content soon becomes a futile and retrograde pursuit. When concepts are recognized in relation to others, that integrated pattern can allow us to "jump" to a higher order, level or dimension. Some mathematical conundrums in physics have been reconciled and solved by adding extra dimensional models to the equations. Electricity and magnetism were understood to be two separate forces until Maxwell imagined a higher reality--that positive and negative charges were interactions regulated by one force. Electromagnetic physics and the nature of light would eventually take us even higher, into the quantum realm! I think the difference between training and education can be expressed by the use of the term "course" in our schools and universities. A course involves moving in a path from point to point. It is a definite, projected path of activity. It is always an ordered process or succession, such as a series of lectures to make up a course, or a series of courses to constitute a curriculum. Like a course of medicine which administers set doses over a designated time period, courses are designed toward some definite end. A course is treatment, it is training, and does not compare to the open-ended and infinite nature of education. Seems to me that true awareness is a condition of refusal--refusal to allow the mind to become absorbed by one thing or monopolized by one particular perspective. It is writing with one hand and erasing with the other. It is hovering rather than landing. It is a roundhouse, rather than a train of thought. Flexibility is not position of the muscles, but the muscles' readiness to change. It is not brute strength, but suppleness and finesse. 2. By Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management: Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility are healthy responses to absurd work. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/schools-would-be-great-if-it-w.html. 3. More and more, our life has been governed by specialists who know too little about what lies outside their province to be able to know enough about what takes place within it.--Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) US historian and philosopher. 4. "We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others." -Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662). 5. A response to a NY Times article by an unknown author stated: There are two ways to interpret the concept of nothing in this context - and I think we often confuse them in the West. Nothing can mean the absence of anything or it can be read as no thing - i.e., a phenomenon that cannot be limited, narrowed down to, or identified with any particular subset. As applied to the self, I like the latter interpretation because its expansive, opening up a range of greater possibility. I dislike the former because it basically negates ones own existence. And there is a mathematical precedent for the above! One formal definition the number zero is not the absence of anything but the sum of all positive and negative integers. In other words, zero is not nothing or a particular thing, but essentially everything. The notion of no thing is crucial here. When a Zen master responds mu to his student who asked a question, as Robert Pirsig remarked, it implies that the question should be unasked for the answer is too big for the question. As the responder above said, zero is not nothing, or a particular thing, but essentially everything. Zen too is everything (or perhaps more 117

NOTES accurately, everything can be seen as including Buddha nature) so looking for it is like looking for fish tracks in a dry riverbed. As was said, when one looks for it, one often stumbles past it because one already has it (is already here, now). It has been said that noticing that there's nothing to know, nothing to realize, and nothing to attain may take much effort to get to this effortless state. 6. From JUAL (Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning) Fall, 2011. A QUALITATIVE LOOK AT THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL STUDENTS Building Bridges SPANS Grant West Valley Schools, Spokane Washington Research Overview for Qualitative Study of Spokane Valley Alternative Students Lived Experiences with School Drop-Out Risk and Protective Factors Dr. Michael I. POUTIATINE & Heather L. VEEDER Abstract In recent years, research has begun to focus on identifying and understanding those factors that contribute to the likelihood of a students not completing high school (risk factors) and those factors that contribute to keeping a student in school (protective factors). This paper details the qualitative findings from a survey study of 145 students and in-depth interviews with 12 alternative high school students. Data was analyzed using a Rapid Assessment team analysis approach (Beebe, 2001). This paper provides a description of the qualitative interview data, with support from the survey data. The study also identifies strategic approaches that students claim are effective in keeping them engaged in school and the factors that hinder their abilities to complete high school. Benedict Carey 6/6/11, said: Yet recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules: gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem theyre up against. Like the ballplayer who can read pitches early, or the chess master who sees the best move, theyve developed a great eye. Isaac Graves states: Recent research has shown that external rewards work for lower level, more easily achieved, types of learning. Researchers also show that intrinsic rewards work best for a higher level learning. Some school districts consider the attendance would be greatly improved if they allowed students to study what students find remarkable, interesting, and important. IDEC supports this freedom for students. Isaac reports: The 2012 International Democratic Education Conference team Stay in touch with IDEC and follow my work by joining the weekly newsletter: http://bit.ly/o7t6UQ. "And those who were dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche. Don't be afraid to take a big step when one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps." Buckminster Fuller The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own." Eric Hoffer "Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good." Berthold Brecht "The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet. James Oppenheim Robert Oppenheimer said: There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.

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NOTES Jeff Foster stated: "Quantum physicist David Bohm postulated that the ultimate nature of physical reality is not a collection of separate objects (as it appears), but rather it is an undivided whole that is in perpetual dynamic flux. Bohm was reinterpreting ancient knowledge and translating it into a modern quantum vocabulary. This was his remembrance: "at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven... Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one." "We seek Oneness not the abstract concept Oneness, but the actual sense of Home-WithNo-Opposite that we all knew in the womb. Of course, we didnt know it, we WERE it. Thats the point! You were not IN the womb. You ARE the womb. Womb Home One. Its so primal, thought cannot grasp it thought came later. You are what you seek, not in some mystical shmystical way, but in actual, grounded, earthy reality." From the Sand 12 conference announcement. Is this the same Pearson that took the writers of the national standards on expensive trips? This was advertised in the American Association for Curriculum Development newsletter, November, 2011: Virtual Institutes by Pearson,Words Their Way, RtI, and SIOP Institutes have gone virtual! These are a cost-effective training option that offers educators the opportunity to experience professional development with leading authors and experts with no travel required. Visit pearsonpd.com/institutes for dates and registration information. Michael Winerip ( NY Times 1/2/12) wrote: For several weeks, New York States attorney general has been investigating similar trips involving two dozen education officials from around the country who traveled to Singapore; London; Helsinki, Finland; China and Rio de Janeiro as guests of the Pearson Foundation. The trips, and the fact that most of these officials come from states that have multimillion contracts with Pearson, were the subject of two of my columns this fallLast month, the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, issued subpoenas to the Manhattan offices of the Pearson Foundation and Pearson Education. Mr. Schneiderman is looking into whether the nonprofit, tax-exempt foundation, which is prohibited by state law from undisclosed lobbying, was used to benefit Pearson Education, a profit-making company that publishes standardized tests, curriculums and textbooks, according to people familiar with the inquiry. John Stanley and David Loy state: "The Buddha said little about evil per se but he had a lot to say about the three "roots of evil": greed, ill will, and delusion. Today they have become institutionalized: our economic system institutionalizes greed, militarism has institutionalized ill will and our powerful media mega-corporations institutionalize delusion. They are the main ways our collective shadow operates todayWe have choices to make. High-tech social manipulation is failing humanity. It restricts us to an economic model based on perpetual growth -- essentially a global Ponzi scheme that robs our children and grandchildren in order to feed its pathological greed. To look clearly and deeply at this collective shadow requires the inner focus, courage and strength of sustained meditation. It is a spiritual task that Buddhists and others can no longer avoid.. Compassion for all life, human and non-human, is the only thing left that can make a human future possible. Such love is not a mere luxury. It is fundamental to the continued survival of our species. National Opt Out Day: January 7th, 2012: United Opt Out National has declared January 7th as National Opt Out Day. On this day we are encouraging Occupy movements everywhere to endorse this action. We are asking parents, students and community everywhere to endorse this action. We are asking parents, students and community members to write letters/postcards to their school districts stating how they will OPT OUT. We have created a postcard that allows for multiple ways to opt out and it can be purchased in bulk to share. Of course, the slam dunk is opting out of the state test as this will shut down corporate education reform. If everyone opts out in mass they will have NO test data to punish students, teachers and communities. Our postcards can be found at http://www.zazzle.com/unitedoptout.

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NOTES Rutgers University professor Maurice Elias serves as director of the Social-Emotional Learning Lab. He said: New Year's resolutions are often about our own personal wellbeing: diet, exercise, curbing bad habits, maybe being nicer. For 2012, try something a little different; resolve to be a champion for children. ..Simply, it means putting the needs and rights of children first in your professional life. It means being less hesitant to speak up when you see policies that treat children unfairly or that result in inequality and intervening when they do not. I am not talking only about promoting kids' social-emotional and character development. I am talking about the SECD needed by adults to speak out against injustice, to point out subtle and not so subtle instances of harassment. We need to put first and foremost the dignity of the children who walk into our schools. As heady as our progress [in the sciences of the mind] has been, we need to stay completely honest with ourselves and acknowledge that we have only discovered a tiny fraction of what there is to know about the human brain. But the modest amount that we have discovered makes for a story more exciting than any Sherlock Holmes novel. I feel certain that as progress continues through the coming decades, the conceptual twists and technological turns we are in for are going to be at least as mind bending, at last as intuition shaking, and as simultaneously humbling and exalting to the human spirit as the conceptual revolutions that upended physics a century ago. The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain. ~ V. S. Ramachandran, The TellTell-Tale Brain. In Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us, researchers David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo explore this curious disconnect through the rigorous lens of science. Drawing on their research at the Social Emotions Lab at Northeastern University, the authors offer a fascinating yet highly readable perspective on the psychology of the hero/villain spectrum of human character, inviting us to reconceive personality, both our own and that of others, with a more balanced moral view that reflects the fluidity of human psychology. The derivation of the word character comes from an ancient Greek term referring to the indelible marks stamped on coins. Once character was pressed into your mind or soul, people assumed it was fixed. But what modern science repeatedly shows is that this just isnt the case. As we discuss in our book, everyones moral behavior is much more variable than any of us would have initially predicted. The dichotomy of good and evil is as old as the story of the world, and timeless in its relevance to just about everything we do in life, from our political and spiritual views to our taste in music, art and literature to how we think about our simple dietary choices. But while most of us recognize that these concepts of good and bad arent always black-and-white categories, we never cease to be surprised when someone or something weve perceived as good does or becomes something we perceive as bad, from an esteemed politicians transgression to a beloved celebritys slip into addiction or scientology or otherwise socially undesirable behavior. 7. The Texas Tribune 1/13/12/ stated: "Efforts Are Under Way to Tie College to Job Needs. This continued extension of primarily training is increasing and is evidence of not having learned what to ignore. Narrow specialization from which one does not generalize tends to keep power in the hands of the powerful, while keeping the middle class and poor unempowered. 8. By John Cloud Friday, Feb. 26, 2010 Researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has just written a paper that is set to be published in March by the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. The paper investigates not only whether conservatives are dumber than liberals but also why that might be so. The short answer: Kanazawa's paper shows that moreintelligent people are more likely to say they are liberal. They are also less likely to say they go to religious services. These aren't entirely new findings; last year, for example, a British team

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1968042,00.html#ixzz1lLsylieD

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NOTES found that kids with higher intelligence scores were more likely to grow into adults who vote for Liberal Democrats, even after the researchers controlled for socioeconomics. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology was fire. 9. Boston College researcher, Prof. Gray, reported in March 2012, Psychology Today: "Unschoolers do not send their children to school and they do not do at home the kinds of things that are done at school They do not require their children to do particular assignments for the purpose of education, and they do not test their children to measure progress. Instead, they allow their children freedom to pursue their own interests and to learn, in their own ways, what they need to know to follow those interests. They also, in various ways, provide an environmental context and environmental support for the child's learning. Life and learning do not occur in a vacuum; they occur in the context of a cultural environment, and unschooling parents help define and bring the child into contact with that environment." Regarding learning advantages for the student, he reported the majority you responded to his survey said: Their children were learning more, or learning more efficiently, or learning more relevant material, or learning more eagerly in the unschooling situation than they would if they were in school or being schooled at home. Many in this category said that because their children were in charge of their own learning, their curiosity and eagerness to learn remained intact. 10. Recently published by Sense: MIRACLE OF EDUCATIONThe Principles and Practices of Teaching and Learning in Finnish Schools 21. On Feb. 10, 2012, it was reported that ten states were given waivers from the No Child Left Behind Law and 28 other states will seek waivers. Those states will have agreed to adopt standards for college and career readiness equal to or greater than the present NCLB law. 11. (From ASCD) Responses of Readers of ASCD Web communications to the question:

What do you feel is the primary mission of public education?

To prepare students to fully participate in the 44.12% social, economic and educational opportunities of our nation. To prepare students to participate in today's global society. To challenge students to meet their full educational potential. 15.15% 24.47%

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To foster the growth of civically engaged citizens. To master skills, such as analytical thinking and comprehensive reading and literacy. To help learners develop the skills necessary to keep our nation economically competitive. Other.

7.02%

5.05%

2.68%

1.50%

To prepare students 0.00% for the demands of a 4-year or 2-year college experience. To prepare students 0.00% for vocational training.

12. Einstein said: It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerman, D. (2004). An Alchemy of Mind. New York: Scribner. Ayers, R., & Ayers, W. (2011). Teaching the Taboo. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University. Ayers, W. (2001). To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University. Ayers, W. (2004). Teaching Toward Freedom. Boston: Beacon Press. Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. M. (2000, January). Wisdom: Metaheuristic pragmatic orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence. American Psycholologist, 55(1), 122136. Baumeister, R. F., & Tierney, J. (2011). Willpower: Rediscovering The Greatest Human Strength. New York: Penguin. Beck, M. (2012). Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. New York: Simon & Schuster. Begley, S. (2007). Train Your Mind: Change Your Brain. New York: Ballantine Books. Batchelor, S. (1997). Buddhism Without Beliefs. New York: Riverhead Books. Blyth, R. H. (1962). Zen and Zen Classics (Vol. 7). Rutland, Vermont: Hokuseido Press, Japan Trading Company. Clark, A. C. (1964). Profiles of the Future. New York: Bantam. Chopra, D., & Chopra, G. (2011). The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes. New York: HarperCollins. Cleary, T. (1995). Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom. Boston: Shambala. Cole, K. C. (2001). The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered Over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything. New York: Harcourt. DeBono, E. (1968). New Think: The Use of Lateral Thinking in the Generation of New Ideas. New York: Basic Books. Deleuze, G. (1983). On the Line. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1976). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Viking Press. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education. New York: The Macmillan Company. Dewey, J. (1920). Reconstruction in Philosophy. New York: H. Holt and Company. Eagleman, D. (2011). Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. New York: Pantheon-Random House. Eddington, A. (1958). The Nature of the Physical World. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Friedman, T. L. (2005). The World is Flat. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Gleick, J. (1987). Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: The Viking Press. Goleman, D. (1997). Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam. Goleman, D. (2006). Social Intelligence. New York: Bantam. Goodlad, J. I. (1984). A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. Gregory, R. L. (Ed.). (1987). The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grene, M. (1966). The Knower and the Known. New York: Basic Books. Hesse, H. (1969). Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game). New York: Bantam. Hofstadter, D. (2007). I Am A Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books. Hofstadter, D. (1979). Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books. Illich, I. (1970). Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row. Johnson, S. (2005). Mind Wide Open. New York: Scribner, New York. Kaplan, A. (1961). The New World of Philosophy. New York: Random House. 123

BIBLIOGRAPHY Kaplan, R. S. (2000). The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. London: Penguin. Kopp, S. (1971). Guru. Palo Alto, California: Science and Behavior Books. Kozol, J. (2005). The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York: Crown. Kurzweil, R. (1999). The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Viking. Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity is Near. New York: Penguin. Lao Tzu. (1990). Tao Te Ching (V. H. Mair, Trans.). New York: Bantam. Lehrer, J. (2009). How We Decide. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Maslow, A. (1968). Toward a Psychology of Being. Princeton: Van Nostrand Company. May, R. (1958). Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. New York: Basic Books. May, T. (1997). Reconsidering Difference. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. May, T. (1997). Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc. May, T. (2004). Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merton, T. (1965). The Way of Chuang Tzu. New York: New Directions Press. Mintz, J., & Ricci, C. (2011). Turning Points. 35 Visionaries Tell Their Own Stories. Education Revolution. Jerryaero@aol.com. Nicolelis, M. (2011). Beyond Boundaries. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Peng, K., & Nisbett, R. E. (1999, September). Culture dialectics and reasoning about contradiction. American Psychologist, 54(9), 741754. Pinar, W. (Ed.). (1998). The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene. London: Falmer Press. Pink, D. H. (2005). A Whole New Mind. New York: Riverhead Books, Penguin Group. Polanyi, M. (1966). Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Postman, N. (1971). Teaching as A Subversive Activity. New York: Delta Books. Pritscher, C. P. (2001). Quantum Learning: Beyond Duality. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B. V. Pritscher, C. P. (2008). Re-opening Einsteins Thought: About What Cant Be Learned from Textbooks. Boston: Sense Publishers. Pritscher, C. P. (2010). Einstein and Zen: Learning to Learn. New York: Peter Lang. Pritscher, C. P. (2011). Brains Inventing Themselves: Choice and Engaged Learning. Boston: Sense Publishers. Ricci, C. (2012). The Willed Curriculum, Unschooling, and Self-Direction. Toronto: Ricci Publishing. Rogers, C. R. (1969). Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company. Rohr, R. (2011). Falling Upward. San Francisco: Josey-Bass-Wiley. Schulz, K. (2010). Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. New York: Harper Collins. Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish. New York: Free Press. Schenk, D. (2010). The Genius in All of Us. New York: Doubleday. Seigel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The Whole-Brain Child. New York: Delacorte Press. Sizer, T. R. (1984). Horaces Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Tavris, C., & Aronson, E. (2007). Mistakes were Made (but not by me). Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Inc. Tolle, E. (1997). The Power of Now. Vancouver, BC: Namaste Publishing. Tugend, A. (2011). Better by Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong. New York: Penguin. Van Rossum, E. J., & Hamer, R. (2010). The Meaning of Learning and Knowing. Boston: Sense Publishers. Whitehead, A. N. (1957). The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Wiener, N. (1954). The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Publishing Company. Wright, R. (2000). Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Pantheon Books.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author is Professor Emeritus, Philosophy of Education, Bowling Green State University. He is the author of Brains Inventing Themselves: Choice and Engaged Learning, 2011, Sense Publishers: Einstein and Zen: Learning to Learn, Peter Lang Publishing, 2010; Re-opening Einsteins Thought: About What Cant Be Learned from Textbooks, Sense Publishers 2008, and Quantum Learning: Beyond Duality. Rodopi, nl, 2001. He is member of the editorial board of the Journal Un-schooling and Alternative Learning (JUAL), and a former President of the Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society. The University of Pennsylvania, Faculty Development Center, chose his article on Paying Attention as one of the ten best articles on learning.

127

INDEX

A Accountability, 12, 22, 96 Ahas!, 75, 78, 85 Albuquerque, New Mexico, 9 American Psychological Association, 2, 12, 21, 22, 45, 60 Ancient Chinese, 19, 20, 30 Anglo-American Israeli nexus, 110 Annenberg, 3 Anticipatory alpha modulation, 92 APA monitor, 21 Apple, 99 Arizona State University, 93, 111 Artificial constraints, 6 Arum, R., 20 Association for Curriculum Development (ASCD), 12, 119 Awareness, 13, 24, 37, 38, 40, 52, 54, 59, 63, 64, 67, 6976, 79, 84, 8996, 102, 110, 117 Ayers, W., vi, 123 B Bacon, F., 109 Baltes, P.D., 45 Bamucci, R., 35 Bard College, 102 Batchelor, S., 77 Baumeister, R., 67 Beck, M., 44, 89, 106, 110 Begley, S., 7, 59 Belgium, 51 Berkshire Hathaway, 47 Berlin wisdom paradigm, 45, 56, 103 Bernstein, R.R., 14 Beyond boundaries, 2, 52 Bohm, D., 36, 119 Bohr, N., 32 Boson, H., 60 Boston College, 112, 121 Boston University, 29
129

Brain Research Bulletin, 92 Brains Inventing Themselves, 21,

62, 103 Brecht, B., 118 Bridgeman, P., 38, 63 Bronman, J., 1 Brooklyn Free School (BFS), 47, 48, 58 Brooks, D., 13, 14, 26, 52 Brown, G., 102 Bruner, J., 111 Buckley, C., 105 Buffett, W., 47 Bush, G.M., 100 Buswell, R., 19, 83, 94

Bowling Green State University, 48

C CAD. See Compliance Acquiescent Disorder (CAD) California Psychological Association, 34 Camus, A., 78 Cannot be learned from textbooks, 78, 122 Canons of scientific investigation, 64, 73 Cantor, G., 61 Carey, B., 118 Catching flies, 114 Certitude, 3, 19, 83 Charityfocus.com, 113 Charter schools, 35 Cheating scandals, 35 Cheney, D., 52 China, 6, 8, 19, 34, 119 Chomsky, N., 17 Chopra, D., 93 Chopra, G., 95 Clemson University, 19 Cloud, J., 120

INDEX

CNN, 9, 24 Cognitive toolkit, 13, 16 Columbia University, 1, 2 Common Core State Standards, 97, 109 Compliance Acquiescent Disorder (CAD), 101, 112 Conable, D., 113 Conable procedure, 113 Concept formation, 3942 Conceptualizable, 38, 106 Condition of refusal, 117 Consciousness emergence, 13 Constraints, 6, 7, 12, 43, 44, 53, 77, 78, 81, 95 57 Content centered, 84 Convenience, 33, 51, 94, 100 Copernican transformation, 83 Cornell model, 21 Costa Rica, 33 Council of Chief State School Officers, 109 Covey, 46, 47, 65 Crescendo, 35 Critical to mental health, 114

Discernible concatenations, 29, 106 Discover Magazine, 3 Disintegration used to integrate, 35 Duke University, 1 Duran, E., 48 E Eagleman, D., 24, 41, 103 Earbuds, 36 Eastwood, C., 2 Eddington, A., 18, 31 Education Week, 22 Edutopia.org, 100 Einstein, A., 1214, 29, 40, 45, 51, 56, 81 Einstellung effect, 17 Eisner, T., 44 Eisnerian power, 44 Electoral reform, 18 Eliot, G., 43 Emergent systems, 14, 1820, 89 Epi-genetic, 34 Exhaustion of resources, 6 Expanding contexts, 32 F Faust, 76 Feynman, R., 38, 56, 86, 90, 106 Fine, C., 104 Finland, 33, 40, 41, 46, 56, 96, 119 Finlands teacher education, 41 Finnish schooling, 95 Fisch, K., 1 Fixed positions, 77 Flourish, 8, 21, 22, 67, 92, 107, 108 Fluidity, 2, 3, 16, 27, 120 Fluidity of concepts, 27 Foster, J., 119 Foucault, M., 31 Freud, S., 15, 113 Friedman, T., 13, 47 Fronsdal, G., 110 Fuller, B., 36, 118 Fuzzy math, 73

Contemporary Political Movements,

D Damon, M., 98 DARPA, 52 Davidson, C.N., 1 de Llosa, P., 39 Deep Politics, 3, 99, 110 Defamiliarizes, 16 Default mode network, 114 Deleuze, G., 19, 72 Desire for certainty, 3, 6, 2426, 29, 30, 33, 39, 63, 106, 109 Develop the humanity of each child, 96 Dewey, J., 11, 15, 31, 38, 62 Diego, S., 45 Dillard, A., 87

130

INDEX

G Gabler, N., 3, 98 Gallagher, K., 11 Gatto, J.T., xvii

The Genius in All of Us, 34

George Washington University, 60 Gibran, K., 69 Gladwell, M., 92 Gladwellian, 78, 95 Global Footprint Network, 6 Global Ponzi scheme, 119 Globe, B., 9 The Globe and Mail, 18 Goldson, E., 23, 103 Goldstein, R., 15 Graves, I., 118 Gray, P., 29 Great Pirate, 36, 37 Greene, B., 1, 74 Guinan, J., 64, 104, 115 Guinans 12 events, 104 Gut brain, 25, 89 Gutting, G., 99, 110 Gyurak, A., 91 H Hamer, R., 13, 21, 22, 55, 6163, 65, 74, 76 Haseltine, E., 34 Healy, M., 114 Heffernan, V., 1 Heisenberg, W., 37 Hentoff, N., 13, 22 Herzberg, F., 117 Hirschberg, J., 2 Holt, J., 90 Huxley, A., 74, 100, 115 Hypothesis formation, 38 I Ignore unwarranted and excessive authority, 93 Industrial capitalism, 4 Infining, 100 Infinite Vision, 101

Informationing, 39 Institutional church, 84 Institutional medicine, 84 Institutional politics, 84 Institutional schooling, 84 International Democratic Education Conference, 118 Intolerant of ambiguity, 12, 15, 22, 46, 48, 70, 71, 113, 115 Investigate discord, 30 Isaacson, W., 86 J Jackson, Mississippi Public School District, 8 James, W., 25, 43, 59 Jefferson, T., 12, 69 Jeffrey, M.S., 59 Johnson, B., 100 Jordan, D.S., 46 Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning (JUAL), 58, 118 Jung, C., 85 Juvenal, 45 K Kanazawa, S., 120 Kaplan, A., 44, 67, 69, 72 Kaplearning, 6, 8, 11, 18, 2123, 25, 26, 32, 33, 35, 36, 3944, 4649, 60, 61, 63, 65, 6796, 98, 100107, 112, 114 Kashdan, T., 92 Kepler telescope, 24 Kerr, C.E., 92 Khan, A., 34 Kierkegaard, S., 115 King, J.B., 98 Kitano, 26 Know thyself, 112 Kohn, A., 90 Kraus, K., 1 Krugman, P., 65 Kundera, M., 107
131

INDEX

Kurzweil, R., 1, 13, 24 Kyrene, Arizona, 57 L Lakoff, G., 52 Lamarck, J.B., 34 Lamarckian, 34, 35, 59, 60, 101, 104 Lehrer, J., 78, 111 Leonardo da Vinci, 14 Letting go, 3, 83, 99 Linton, C., 60 Littky, D., 54, 55 Loftus, E., 111 Loy, D., 119 M MacArthur Foundation, 1 Madenberg, J., 36 Manhattan project, 37 Marino, G., 112 Marsh, J., 5 Maslowian need level, 52 May, R., 68, 69 May, T., 19, 31, 57, 64, 72 McGill University, 34 McLeod, S., 1 Mehta, N., 4 Mehta, V., 113 Melbourne Business School, 104 Menand, L., 14 Mental interruption, 36 Mercier, H., 104 Merton, T., 76, 88, 114 Metaheuristic, 45 Michigan State University, 14 Mighton, J., 35 Milner, H., 18 Mindicide, 1127, 97 Mintz, J., 54, 58 Mis-evolved, 5 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 4, 44, 46, 56, 81, 90, 103 Monthly Review Press, 5 Morozov, E., 17 M theory, 5
132

Multiple causation, 85, 86 Mumford, L., 117 N Natural learning, 1820, 63 Newton, L., 5 Newtonian system, 34 New York State Education Commissioner, 98 Nichomachean ethics, 92 Nicolelis, M., 2, 3 Nipissing University, xv No Child Left Behind, 121 Norman Lear Center, 3 Norm Diamond, 101, 112 Norvig, P., 9 Notes to Myself, 78 O Obedience to authority, 7, 9, 23, 33, 37, 41, 43, 46, 52, 53, 79, 95, 101 Occupy wall street, 52, 71, 99 Okita, S., xiii Oklahoma State University, 45 Open consciousness, 16 Open inquiry, 6, 12, 13, 2124, 40, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 62, 84, 101 Oppenheimer, J., 37, 118 Oppenheimer, R., 37, 118 P Pascal, B., 117 Paul, A.M., 24 Pavithra Mehta, 101 Pedagon, 115 Peng, K., 19, 61 Penn Resiliency Program, 6, 65, 104, 107 Perls, F., 31, 71 Perplexed questioning, 77 Personal responsibility, 48 Peterson, C., 21 Phelps, E., 111 Piercarlo Valdesolo, Northeastern University, 120

INDEX

Pinar, W., 40 Pinker, S., 13, 14, 59 Pirsig, R., 117 Piver, S., 87 Plato, 30 Plutarch, 30 Polanyi, M., 16, 38 Post, H., 41 Poutiatine, M.I., 118 Powell, S.C., 3 Practically preposterous, 4 Prather, H., 78 Present experience, 56, 60, 64, 65, 67, 70, 7274, 82, 84, 92, 106, 107 Principles of scientific management, 4 Process centered, 84 Process is a verb, 39 Prone to fear and aggression, 12, 15, 22, 23, 46, 48, 70, 71, 113, 115 Psychology Today, 121 Q

Rolstad, K., 111 Rosenkrans, N., 22 Ruhl, R., 61 Rutgers University, 120 S Scandinavian austerity and secularism, 15 Schenk, D., 29 Schiller, F., 15 Schneiderman, E.T., 119 Schrodinger, I., 38 Scientistic, 16, 18, 26, 37, 38, 46, 52, 95 Self-knowledge, 70, 72, 112 Self-structuring, 38 Seligman, M.E.P., 6, 8 SEL program, 80 Seton High School, 61 Siegel, D., 39 Skinner, B.F., 62 Skinnerian universe, 32 Slekar, T., 64 Sluyter, D., 37, 73 Smith, D.G., 3, 30, 59, 62, 80, 81, 93, 95, 99, 109, 115 Smith, R., 27 Smoot, B., 23 Social-Emotional Learning Lab, 120 Social Psychology Quarterly, 120 Socrates, 112 Some infinities are bigger than others, 61 Southern Poverty Law Clinic, 8, 9 Sperber, D., 104 Spinozistic human bondage, 84 Standardized tests, 64, 97, 98, 119 Stanford University, 9 Stanley, J., 119 Staudinger, U.M., 45 STEAM, 14 STEM, 3, 14 Sternberg, R., 45 Steve Jobs, 8688 String theory, 5
133

Quantum Learning: Beyond Duality,

124, 127 Quoidbach, J., 51 R Rabindranath Tagore, 46 Race to the top, 12 Ramachandran, V.S., 120 Ranciere, J., 57 Ravitch, D., 12, 95, 97 Readicide, 11, 97 Rees, M., 37 Remen, R.N., 100

Reopening Einsteins Thought, 63

Resistant to change, 12, 15, 16, 22, 46, 48, 70, 71, 113, 115 Rhee, M., 35 Ricci, C., 5, 54, 58, 90, 101, 111, 112 Ritz, M., 34 Robin, C., 99 Rogers, C., 70 Rohr, R, 2, 17, 25, 29, 94 Roksa, J., 20

INDEX

Structured disadvantage, 78, 95 Stuckness, 16, 76 Studenting, unschooling, 38, 39, 58, 111, 112, 118, 121 Student structuring, 38 Suchitra Shenoy, 101 Sudbury Valley School, 47, 48 Supermans x-ray vision, 44 Supervenience, 18, 100 Sze, J.A., 91 Szyf, M., 34 T Tacit dimension, 16, 38 Taylor, F., 4 Taylor, S., 15, 18, 19, 26, 69, 70, 72, 102, 109, 117 Teachers College Columbia University, 123 Teaching a Stone, 87 Tea party, 48 Technological change, 1, 8, 13, 24 Thoreau, H.D., 19, 53, 89 Thrun, S., 9 Tierney, J., 67 Times, L.A., 25, 34, 45 Tolle, E., 106 Too big to know, 26 Toppo, G., 35 Turning Points, 54 Tynan, K., 1, 115 Tzu, L., 68, 70, 73, 90, 91 U UCLA, 19, 83, 94 UCLA, certitude, 19, 83 Unacknowledged privileges, 48, 57 Underlying all perceptions is pure awareness, 38 The universals, 26 University of Alberta, 3 University of California Berkeley, 52, 92 University of Illinois, 44 University of Liege, 51
134

University of Michigan, 21, 44, 54, 67, 82 University of Montreal, 18 University of Southern California (USC). 3 Unnecessary intellectualizing, 104 V Value of Science, 90 Vanderkam, L., 12 Van Rossum, E.J., 13, 21, 22, 55, 6163, 65, 74, 76 Variety of orders, 33 Veeder, H.L., 118 Venkataswamy, G., 101 Violate expectations, 24 W Walden, 19 Weil, A., 69 Weinberger, D., 26 Wessling, S.B., 46 Western philosophy, 15, 38, 73, 100 Wigner, E., 36 Wilbanks, J., 26 Willed Curriculum, 102, 111, 112 William James, 25, 47, 59 Winerip, M., 13, 119 Wired, 111 Wittgenstein, L., 83 Wong, B., 91 World of potentialitie, 37 Wu, Y., 75 Wyden, S.R., 22 Y Yemen, S., 6 Yuan, J.W., 91 Yunis, M., 101 Yutang, L., 11 Z Zettabytes, 1, 2 Zimmerman, J., 61 Zukov, G., 10