So much to see in this image. The person runs through the tangle of life with the question WHY over his head and MEANING and TIME before him, using the LI of religion as crutches while his head was caught in the noose of GOD. God with the knot of infinity – the unsolvable conundrum.
MUST DO THIS – WHY – WRONG
I think we all have those unanswerable questions in our head. We crave to be free to explore and find the answers to our existence, to penetrate the mystery, but we are held back by all the restrictions. Society, convention and the strictures of family, career and life in general clamp us down in their cloying chains.
How we long to be free!
There are no facts. Every moment is new. We experience everything for the first time. No two moments are identical.
I used this cartoon on the front of school documents prepared for Ofsted. As with the previous drawing on the education sausage machine the cartoon was never commented on.
Too often the teaching of science has been the transmission of ‘facts’ and the learning of knowledge. Science should be the investigation of the wonders of the universe to find out how it operates and celebrate it, learn from it and utilise it.
The more we investigate the greater the mysteries we unfurl. We have accumulated a wealth of knowledge but underlying it all is an even greater mystery.
Science progresses by scientists disbelieving the theories they are presented with, challenging them and coming up with superior theories to test.
Science is creative.
Science is thought-provoking.
Science is fun.
Science is illuminating, expansive and exhilarating.
There are no truths.
I used this one on the front cover of some of the documents at school that I prepared for our Ofsted Inspection. It summed up the philosophy of education that I was railing against.
Pete and I had been put through an education system that we felt was a cram system. We were given ‘facts’ to learn and regurgitate for exams.
We both felt that education should be mind-expanding, investigating, exploring, fun and exhilarating. Children needed to be inspired and empowered. Teaching should develop creativity, lateral thinking and questioning.
No new discoveries ever come from mindless regurgitation of ‘facts’.
Pete and I felt that too many teachers presided over a sausage factory churning out mindless drones all knocked into shape by the system.
Tragically, after a period of freedom and wonder in education under Labour, we were back to the 1950s with a vengeance under the dreadful mindlessness of Gove and then the ‘just as bad’ floundering Nicky Morgan. Thankfully they are gone and we’ll reserve judgement on Justine Greening.
Long ago in 1968-70 I shared a flat with the genius that was Pete Smith (and still is). He was a man with a prodigious creativity, a mind that pierced infinity and so many skills that you did not know what was coming next. He was a scientist who played every imaginable instrument, made his own instruments, painted, drew, created many strange inventions, made light-shows, cooked, photographed and designed.
We were both on a Zoology course doing a degree that we were unhappy with. It was one great memory test. We both thought that education should be more than a memory test – it should be illuminating, expanding, mind-blowing, fun, discovery, investigation and wonder. Our course was dull, boring and reductionary. Consequently we did not attend much. We chose to educate ourselves by reading Sci-fi, playing music and generally talking about anything that sparked our interest.
When Liz and I were married in 1971 Pete presented us with a book of cartons. It started as a story book but soon, due to time restrictions, became a mixture of whatever came to mind. The drawings are rudimentary because they were rushed but that book is one of my prized possessions.
I thought I’d share them with you.
Thy all speak lots to me. This is a simple one. It is about compassion. Crying for the whole world in despair at what we were doing to it.