I forgot to document this really important morning meeting last week. It was based on a quote:

“As a public school teacher, I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all: that we must wait for other people better trained than ourselves to make the meaning of our lives… We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they do not know any other way”.

I saw this quote before (last year in Freshman Experience), and I admit that it was life changing, besides, I saw this same quote with brand new eyes. I love that, going back to what I once learned and just observe it with brand new eyes, a brand new knowledge that hasn't been applied before to that.

On this, I will admit, I had an amazing experience sharing with my peers a moment in conversation, in which we read the quote, and took the wheel of the road of our learning process.

And that is what the whole quote (which is pure irony), is all about. Independent learning. 

First of all, we watched the announcement of this really cool movement that is going on here in Goathemala.

So, I ain't such a nationalist as far as I know, to say everything of this just about Guatemala. I would say, humanity is the best. But alright, maybe the coffee is an exception. The video I really enjoyed was this. I am REALLY INTO this.

This. This is a series of 3 videos: LEARN. MOVE. EAT. What more can be added to these three beautiful experiences? These all can be resumed to learn, but one of the things that I appreciate more is learning and of course, MOVING. MO-VING. THAT. THAT. THAT. Is what I'll do forever.

Ah, Euclid you're like a Guardian Angel watching over us.

Ingrid asked us if we could construct the given triangles in Proposition 4, Book I. It became chaos, believe me. People went crazy, some shut their ears, some didn't understand what was happening. But at the end we decided to divide in groups to make this work.

So, now we're divided in 3 groups. My group is Marce, Kata, Carmen, Grace and I. We decided to accomplish certain standards (these were the core of them):

• Drawings have to be understood in our notebook.
• Logical structure
• Rhetoric and understandable explanation

The name of the chapter caught me from the very beginning.
"Neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths. Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science."
I can't help thinking in how imagination and wonderment is implicit in all scientific or artistic discovery. It isn't like we only have reason in one side to think of science or just emotion when we think on creating music. We're creative, by nature.

Some chapters before, Wilson claimed in how arts and documented work made culture evolve faster. In this chapter, he wrote "gene-culture coevolution is, I believe, the underlying process by which the brain evolved and the arts originated." and there is, culture documented through the years making our artistic works evolve more and more.

Also, the origins of our artistic brain is theorized as a mechanism that started off by putting meaning to things we didn't understand in our surroundings. We have an aesthetic instinct, and I would dare to say that it is also a search for human seal in things. We like to see our genes printed throughout nature. And also, we have idealized beauty characteristics that come from our instinctual search for fertility and powerful genes.

Between instinct and reason, there's tradition. AH, Hayek. I remembered him all throughout this chapter. I'll explain further.

The Social Sciences goes through how complex societies are, and how the researchers in this field haven't acquired a good amount of knowledge, because they separate biology and psychology from human behavior. This is an incredible misunderstanding of human nature. After all, we're part of all this complex system called universe.

But the fact is, that society isn't either a purely deterministic system or a full culture product. It is an interaction of epigenetic rules and an evolving culture. (See Hayek hidden here somewhere?)

And it is amazing, how natural sciences have grown to reach social matters. Biology or psychology for instance, have found characteristics applicable to the society. These are proofs of consilience.

Then, he gets to the prediction topic. For this, he says that math can be made in order to measure certain things in society. Is that something that can be done? I'm of the people that think that society is far too complex... but what if? Would it be helpful?

For this, I'll claim (with help from Wilson) that in order to understand the complexity of society, we have to also understand the environment and our mind. For that, we should claim consilience.

There are some imperatives in our human nature such as categories of choice or rational calculation. Wilson even quoted our friend Daniel Khaneman (Thinking fast and Slow) on how we make irrational choices according to our heuristics and how we tend to make certain decisions according to time and avoiding risk.

Bert shared with us a set of rules for dialogue that his previous students in the U.S. made. The rules were really good and the ones that really we thought of adding to our rubric were:

• Speak to the question
• Do not fear rejection/controversy
• Don't steal the learning experience of others

The latter is of real importance, and we haven't thought as a culture much of it. It is really interesting to question people and let them explore their own understanding and mind. Just answering and telling people what they should think blocks the learning experience of the individual.

And that is one of the things that also a reader and learner should also know when they let Wikipedia steal their own understanding. (I'm not saying that Wikipedia is a bad source, but one must learn when sources are necessary or when they're just telling us the whole answer.)

What is the relation with the different people you see every day or meet?

The words you use, your cultural background, the way you move and pronounce the words... all of it show how you reflect, when talking, so many complex things you're not even aware of.

In the following video, Steven Pinker and Ian McEwan talk about the conversation.

 

CULTURE

"Communication is necessary in all aspects of life. Thus, if people are to cooperate (i.e., literally "to work together") they have to be able to create something in common, something that takes shape in their mutual discussions and actions, rather than something that is conveyed from one person who acts as an authority to the others, who act as passive instruments of this authorities."

This was projected on the board while the group read and discussed. What is this something?

One in the room suddenly believed this something might be goals. But eventually he changed his mind: this something should be culture.

It's amazing how the development and behavior of a group can change if the cultivation of the culture is based in "mutual discussions and actions". In contrast of a based in an authority-centralized culture, which things can't actually get to bloom naturally.

The new culture of learning needs this "something": this cooperative, evolutionary process, in which everyone is responsible in building something beyond a centralized design.