No light escapes: The Black Hole in Education and Culture.

                                                       What is it ?


        This is the fundamental question, that sits atop Bela Lugosi's pyramid: and a question (like all other questions) that can produce an infinite set of responses or ideas. In order to understand something clearly we must first ask: what is it? and then attempt to produce the best idea in response. Any effort to attempt to do any of these basic steps of communication is most often greeted with bemusement or derision. It is noticable that the level of derision often increases according to the person's level of "education." Funny that.
 
      
     Traditional public education has always had one basic, yet most often unarticulated, goal: The continuation of the status quo.*  Because of this, there are the usual attempts to encourage children to believe that they live in a magical country handed to them by God, or else born covered in the blood of brave and noble warriors, or maybe forged in the white-hot crucibles of the finest minds who ever lived.  We may find ourselves requesting in song that our deity saves our richest member,** or perhaps we are encouraged to say a morning prayer to our cloth-god:

          The option to.... ***

        If you are to have effective education that continues the policies and mores of the ruling powers, there are two basic ways to achieve this. As all communication is, most basically, Information ---------> Idea, the first way is to control the information. This, historically, has always been the weapon of choice**** for rulers and is still being employed to different degrees in, for example, China and North Korea. In countries where direct control of information by government is largely forbidden by law, ruling powers have to control ideas.
   The simplest way to control ideas is to try to ensure that, if not dead, Bela Lugosi is not roaming at will; that is to say, asking and checking  (fully 50% of communication) must be strictly tempered. How many children are graded on their ability to ask and check? Clearly, if those skills were valued in society, then there would be lessons explaining how asking and checking work and children would be encouraged to ask and check as much as possible. Instead, children and young adults can spend 13-16 years in education without being informed once of just how important asking and checking are to communication. Communication: basically, the only thing that they will ever do.
     Of course, people are not taught how communication works. Let's be clear about this:
            Communication is the only thing we ever do.
            We are not taught how it works, therefore:
            We are not taught how we work.

          We are not taught how we work. Our  lives are hi-jacked by other people's ideas. We sit at the bottom of the gravity well, straining to see, and accepting instructions to keep our eyes cast down from those whose more exalted position depends on that position receiving as little illumination as possible. And that is the pattern of history.

             However, we now live at a time in history when information has been emancipated like never before. Not so very long ago, if you had a question that those around you could not answer, it might require a special trip to the library, by which time you've probably forgotten it (if you are anything like me.) Now, the very real wonder of the age is that answers to our questions are but a keyboard interface away. Of course, there are a range of answers, so it might be a good practical idea to teach people how communication works so that they, (and here comes the dangerous part ) decide things for themselves.  It would be a simple and practical step to acknowledge this.
   The organisation of our societies, however, depends on the inhibition of communication in order to survive , so there is no political will to acknowledge even this basic point. In the same way, an organisation like The Vatican strives to keep its doors closed to new ideas, lest any sliver of light allowed encourages the herd to force its way in and start to inquire as to what might be the nature of things in the flesh?




                               

                                                         What am I?          

Know Thyself- "Man walks through a forest of symbols."

The encouragement to know oneself is the most basic practical step towards knowing others and other things.

If we accept that, as human beings, communication is the only thing we ever do, then we need to ask: what is communication? If I seem to be labouring this point, the reason is that it is very difficult to get people to talk about what communication actually is. I have no problem if people think communication is just information, or if someone thinks communication is such a nebulous term as to be meaningless. People can think communication is a pink banana, a raspberry beret, or a dog's dinner; anything they like. What I would actually like is for someone to explain why my idea about communication is rubbish. Not much to ask is it? Doesn't happen though.

  Overall, Communication theory has been largely dominated by the original ideas of Claude Shannon, who was wrestling with how to achieve transfer of information in machines; the basic system he was trying to design being: information ------> information. Shannon's work laid a lot of the foundations for all the computing systems we have now. A great achievement, of that there can be little doubt, but...

                                      People are not machines.

       And the most basic explanation of the difference is that people communicate according to
                                     Information --------> Idea.

And this is basically why machines don't think that next door's dog is telling them to kill people. 


       All communication works like this. Any information has an idea connected to it. The basic difficulty of communication lies in the simple fact that any information can have any number of ideas connected to it. Take, for example, a guest in someone's kitchen who asks: "Where are your cups?" As all information depends on context, we might assume that the guest is about to prepare some drinks and is looking for the suitable receptacles. But if we receive more information  then the idea may well change: Let's say it's Tiger Woods' kitchen, we might now have the idea that the guest is asking about the whereabouts of the great golfers trophies. This idea, itself information, might then encourage us to form the idea of a friendly chat in the kitchen between Tiger and his mate. If the context changes, if the questioner in the kitchen is there at 2 a.m wearing a balaclava and has just forced Woods from his bed, then a whole new set of ideas are created.+
     In short, the more information you have, the better your idea. Asking and checking helps us to get information. Traditional education cares little for asking and checking. This, of course, has a knock-on effect on the wider culture whereby someone wishing to understand someone's ideas better, by asking and checking to get more information, is often considered to be frightfully rude.
     The basic reason asking and checking is not encouraged by those in charge is that, if it were, more describing and more explaining  would necessarily have to follow. And then people would have a better idea about things. Thus it is that the skills of describing and explaining are also given short shrift in education in general.

                     
                                           But.........
 

          All improvements in human culture are a result of better communication.

　　　　　　　　　　　　What's wrong with saying "Jehovah" ?
 

          It makes sense, then, to have an education system based on communication#. Make sure people know how communication works. Encourage, or rather, don't get in the way of the basic skills of describing, explaining and asking and checking; and let people know that, as communication is the only thing they will ever do, so that they might want to try to get better at it.
         Once all that is established we can all spend the afternoon swimming in the creek.+


         Because there is nothing more important than communication, not only is it the only thing we ever do, it is the only thing that ever happens. ++

       It`s a girl, it's a rhyme,

             It's a hawk, it's a quail,

                  It's the promise of life, it's the joy in your heart,

                       It's a knife, a death, the end of the run,

                         It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun,

         It is you it is me, it is all our lives will ever be,

                      It's the river-banks talking of the waters of March,

                         It's the end of all strain, it's the joy in your heart.

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* Yes, that's why they've had such a long career.

** Clearly more important than anyone else.

*** .....pledge allegiance to The Time is predictably absent.



****......a much better weapon of choice would be:


+ There is, of course, no end to this. Add the information that Tiger's guest, a very good friend,  is a connoisseur of jock-straps, and novel and, possibly interesting ideas begin to form. 

# Unless there is a better idea, of course...

+ A metaphorical creek if you prefer, of course. Although, on a practical level I would caution against swimming in Cripple Creek, because of the Ferry, and if you must venture up Shit Creek then a suitable instrument to propel your vessel is recommended. Also, don't swim in it.

++ Please let me know if you think this idea is no good.