Staff Blog: On the Job with Academics: The Oldest Question

Why?

The question is something of a joke these days, a footnote for philosophy majors and something to mock. The stories about that question in the modern world are frequent and common – the student in class who answers because or why not without ever bothering to really think about the question, the meaning or value or history of it. As a species, it’s the question that has driven us since we first clawed our way out of the primordial muck and looked to the stars, seeking to understand both our universe and our place within it.

It echoed among the youngest of us, an annoying string of why-why-why about everything, a demand for answers that we do not know and sometimes do not have. But we still struggle with the question every day of our lives, confronting the ignorance that we all suspect we share in an effort to shed light on the answers that we feel are just beyond our fingers.

There is nothing harder than admitting to ignorance. In this strange modern world the answers are often just a few keystrokes away, but the meaning those answers contain are often glossed over in favor of the sound-bite, the easily memorized byline that says little and means nothing. We’ve begun to mistake the memorization of lists for knowledge and there’s so very few of us that can define how one differs from the others.

But it wasn’t always like this.

We often look to how things used to be and compare them to how they are now. Oh, we say, Our schools are failing to teach our children. And yet schools offer more detailed and thorough information, a wider breadth of choices when it comes to learning, and offer resources that those generations that came before never had. The problem lies not with the children, not the schools, not the teachers, and not the students. It lies in the world and the system in which we live.

Exams do not test any sort of knowing, as measuring another’s wit and wisdom is a difficult and subjective thing. They measure the ability to remember dates and figures over a short period of time, bits of data that are forgotten by the end of the next semester. Learning for it’s own sake is often reviled, despised, people whining about how things were in the good old days. Nostalgia makes everything look better…

Did you know they used to shoot teachers? It’s true. The modern scholastic system started out by kidnapping children and forcing them into classes, taking them away from trades that had often been passed down from father to son since time immemorial. Teachers were made government employees because shooting a government employee was treason against your country instead of simply murder.

And before anyone suggests that I’m calling for a return to form, I should note that the only reason most people are able to read this, or afford a computer at all, is because of what that early system evolved into. Schools were initially created to produce a literate workforce, but due to the application of widespread knowledge the world has changed with an alacrity that could not have been guessed at even fifty years ago, never mind the two or three hundred years ago that the modern system started to come into being.

We are the children of that system, of that widely spread knowledge, of a world that is constantly in flux. We stop changing – learning and growing – only when we cease to live. Think about that for a moment; learning is quite literally life. An active mind is better able to resist dementia and other thought-destroying diseases and disorders than a mind that sits idle. Life favors thoughts, favors questions, but why should this be so?

What do you think?

Aaron is the principle author and creator of the Triune Legacy mythos and the 8Fold Soul System. Find out more about Aaron and the rest of The Triune Legacy Team. This Staff Blog entry was posted on December 24th, 2009.