learning

I can't believe someone ELSE finally posted on this blog...I knew it would happen one day!

Following Laura's post, I definitely concur that we have to be very active, discriminating information-gathering folks.

(1) I have some trouble with the passive intake. I love to read and listen and can't stand to eat or shit without taking something else in simultaneously. So at school when I pack my lunch, I eat in the kitchen where typically the only thing to read is the new Wall Street Journal. So I find myself reading about the economic recession and investment banking from libertarian and capitalist minded Americans, which doesn't jive with me particularly well. But I take it in, sometimes in horror and other times forgetting my own perspective or others.

(2) As for information consumption in a more structured environment that I technically choose to put myself in, that's hit or miss, and often miss for true learning ah-ha! moments. Those structured learning environments often take a long time to translate into true knowledge gain because we're rarely asked to critically assess what we're learning and why. It's only after some space and time from those experiences that I can synthesize what came out of it. And if it turns out that the particular learning environment was reinforcing oppressive modes of being, then at least I can learn from those situations and imagine how learning might differ (let's think free schools!). I don't believe that many people ever assess these learning environments though and, unfortunately, take them in without question, which is obviously a huge PROBLEM!

(3) And then I think of my active searches for knowledge and the world gets so much more vibrant and exciting. I've recently been reading many south end press titles, having fantastic conversations about feminism, organizing my neighborhood into a food oasis where we can share gardening knowledge, tools, and land, analyzing sex (doing it) and monogamy, learning how to repair my bicycle organizing with the Corvallis bicycle cooperative, bake bread, & sprout, and listening/dancing to samba, funk, and alt. pop here and there. And these are obviously the things that make me feel alive. But I also think without a smidgeon of the bad passive intake and institutional learning, I might have a hard time relating to those who use these two modes as their only knowledge sources. It's certainly easy to find opportunities for "learning" via pathways (1) and (2). However, we must collectively go towards pathway (3) if we hope to push our understandings and relationships of and with the world.