The Human Right to Curiosity

Miscellany

Posted August 31, 2020

The Human Right to Curiosity

The damage done to the young by the education system is mostly unrepairable

We all know that old dogs do not learn new tricks, but are mostly unaware that we are much that way, too. The time has come to become aware of what is happening and recognize that it is we who mutilate our inquisitiveness thereby denying ourselves the rich benefits agile minds would bring.

Curiosity is the force that activates our innate traits and prods us to learn tricks and trades with which to live better. We habitually wash out of the young heads the innate inquisitiveness to make room for induced “Education”. Lest curiosity cuts through the “conventional wisdom” formed by successive generations similarly “educated” populace. We do it to our offspring for “their own good”, we firmly believe.

To make a long story short, humans are born knowing only how to access our mother’s breasts. The bulk space of our crania is loaded with question marks, figuratively speaking. When the children’s eyes open to life they ooze curiosity. Similarly their ears tap the soundscape and by the time their tongue becomes operational they have plenty of questions to pose. Then what do we do? We treat them to lies, such as that they were delivered to us hanging from the beak of a crane, having voyaged all the way from Heaven, where they were “manufactured” by God.

After having thus started them, we deliver our children to “specialists” to stuff more “education” into their crania. The priests, the school-teachers, the commercial advertisers, the journalists, the army drill sergeants and many others take turns in educating our young. The skills taught run the whole gamut from “elbows off the table” though the conditioning to risk the “ultimate sacrifice” in the “noble” calling of killing “enemies”. And of course, overall we teach them “obedience”.

The answers we give the kidds tend to solidify aspects of the overall conventional “curriculum”. Questions about status quo shortcomings are dissuaded, but when happen are cleverly mis-responded to, or brutally suppressed. Marks to pass the school grade are given for repeating that which the teacher teaches, while the rest, irrespective of what they may be yield negative marks, affecting the opposite result.

I do not advocate leaving to newborn to re-invent the wheel. In engineering school they teach students not to attempt slanted dry-stone-wall. This because Nature will react with a bang to that. Such things must be taught. But basing a society’s economy on communist or capitalist pseudo economic “theories”, instead of on plain “economics” also invites the ire of Nature. Its reaction is as strong as in the instance of the drywall albeit unfolds at a slower pace.

The facility of unleashing the police to enforce the dicta of economists, judges, theologists and other “soft-scientists” ensures the “triumph” of the status quo over Reason. At a high cost to us all.

Nature is omnipotent. Innate traits often overtake “education”, usually partially, sometimes summarily. However, the price “heretics” suffer is paradigmatic. Galileo Galilei at the Inquisition and Charlie Chaplin at the Joseph McCarthy Committee exemplify the reaction of the establishments to its “heretics” and cement the teachings of obedience.

Cut now to the current Covid19 Pandemic. It happened unexpectedly and the reaction has been resolute, am pleased to say. The cost and the pain is widespread and harsh on all of us but it presents opportunities as well. One of them has gained substantial attention, this being the “cabin fever” caused by curfew. People find it hard to take the unavailability of arena sports, theaters, churches and other such “leisure” opportunities.

Peoples’ reaction to isolation manifests to the suppression of innate human traits which is done to make space for the ”education” they have in store for us. They suppress the innate trait to live leisurely and to work only as much as we need to. This symptom of the pandemic reveals how incapable of enjoying living without our noses to the grindstone we have been rendered.

In plain words, we do not know what to do with ourselves when liberated from the cogs of industry to which we are made part. For leisure they have educated us to “attend service”; to fill up sports arenas; to “shop till we drop” in the malls; to attend concerts in arenas; and so on. You know what I mean. The pandemic has caused most of those “leisure” time dissipaters to close down which in turn, makes us bored.

Sadly, many of us become lost when we find “time” on our hands and look for ways and means to waste it, to “kill time” we say. I have seen people freaking at the prospect of retirement. I have seen people who have hated “every moment on the job” every working day through life fearing retirement.

Look at the “Cruising industry stashing on barges “jail cells” 10 stories high above the waterline and filling them with paying inmates seeking “adventure”, floating about the oceans, escapees from boredom.

As the economy becomes increasingly “robot-inized”, it increasingly by-produces leisure. This, as if masochists, we deny it to ourselves and cope with “unemployment” by diverting people to slave in the burgeoning “fake utility” industries, (which include over-production of useful goods).

This is an opportunity we have to recognize the Human Right to Curiosity. There are unlimited things to learn, and a plethora of things we can learn to do, certainly more than sufficient to overcome temporary boredom. It is unlikely that we would be suffering boredom if our curiosity lode had not been stolen from us.

I shall return to that. For I am lazy – I was born like that, as we all are.

The Human Right to Curiosity - Alcyonenews