Tapestry Spirit Introduction…
It all begins with an idea! This is how knowledge is created, critiqued, and changed, and has been throughout human history. The only difference today is that knowledge is disseminated at warp speed thanks to the internet. Our minds were not trained during the whole of human history to adapt to such a speed of dissemination. With this in mind, we MUST reevaluate our educational processes with different methods, goals, and objectives to learn the skills required to evaluate this massive amount of knowledge. We must create new methods of teaching these skills, have fun while doing so, and, most importantly, evaluate these skills and knowledge with a moral mindset to make this knowledge and skill useful, productive, and honorable for our world.
The creation of new methods of teaching must take advantage of more than just the simple model of lecture, recitation, and assessment. This has been the standard pedagogical model since antiquity. While the standard model has altered its form with the advent of technology, it is still practiced today with little or no fundamental change. This model worked well in the past when the general populace was not allowed to be educated in the same way of those of the wealthy and privileged of that day. As education became available to the general citizen, they were unprepared for what to do with this new-found knowledge. It was decided for the general citizen that “reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic” was enough to allow them to live their lives and make a positive contribution to society.
As time passed and general citizens were bombarded by the age of technology, simple methods were not enough to try to keep the citizen abreast of the knowledge of the day. It was decided that children should have the classical knowledge of art, science, philosophy, vocation, mathematics, and other basic fields. While the acquisition of additional knowledge was a laudible goal, different methods of teaching would be needed to assure that rigorous knowledge was taught in ways that would allow for the analysis of this knowledge. These new methods never materialized for the typical public school teacher. The instructional models remained the purview of university educators and took the form of books, lectures, and graduate-level education. The same antiquated instructional models were still used in the public school classroom and remained this way until the 1980’s with the advent of computer-based instruction.
Fast-forward to the early 2000’s with nearly 40 years of modern educational instructional methodologies that could have been developed in order to take us into this brave new world. What do we have instead? We have a fragmented world in which people forget the knowledge of the past and have no real stake in how this knowledge is used and integrated into our society. We have a system of education based entirely on the acquisition of test scores as a measure of success. More and more generations of students are simply being given knowledge with no real education in how to process this knowledge. We also have generations of people who have no moral basis for the production and use of this knowledge. Society simply says “If it can be done, it should be done.”
Having a background in science, I was brought up to ignore my emotions and focus entirely on the facts of an experiment. I understood what they meant back then when they were teaching these skills to us. The entire point of the emotionless exercise is to not be swayed by your feelings when evaluating a set of data and drawing conclusions based on it. This is a very important skill for anyone working in the sciences. However, this skill has also been used throughout the history of science to justify some very dubious and dangerous events. The creation of the atomic bomb was certainly one such event. Was the bomb necessary? Historians would say yes in terms of American lives. This is a valid point. But, look at what the invention of the atomic bomb resulted in. A cold war that had everyone fearing for their lives of who would destroy our civilization first. There were many who provided a thought about whether the atomic bomb should have been invented in the first place. It is certainly a moot point now that the atomic bomb was invented, we lived through the shock and awe of its utilization against Japan, and we survived the constant threat of its uses over a 40 year span. We have other such inventions that have caused us to question our morals in relation to science as well. We will likely never be free of these questions and events until we all achieve a true spirituality.
Tapestry Spirit is an organization whose purpose is to create an educational experience dedicated to answering these very questions in a technical manner and with a moral or philosophical view that will force us to evaluate our decisions about the knowledge we produce and its effects on society. Our school system, in general, does not do this with any degree of rational thought. The better educators in this system who do examine these beliefs and design methods of teaching along these lines are to be applauded and supported in their efforts. However, many educators simply follow the path that is being led by those in charge and propagate a base of knowledge that has little guidance through values and philosophy. We would challenge the school systems, as well as the colleges and universities, to have a curriculum guided by not just knowledge but by its usefulness and its value to society as a whole.
