Tag Archive for 'studiare'

What’s the use of studying?

I still remember the question the philosophy teacher asked on the first day of high school, “What’s the use of studying? Who can answer that?” Someone dared polite answers, “to grow well,” “to become good people.” But the unsatisfied professor shook his head. Until finally he said, “It’s for escaping from prison.”

We looked at each other in amazement. “Ignorance is a prison. Because in there you don’t understand and you don’t know what to do. We have to organize the biggest jailbreak of the century. It will not be easy, they want you stupid, but if you climb over the wall of ignorance then you will understand without having to ask for help. And it will be hard to fool you. Who’s in?”

I was reminded of that indelible episode reading that only one boy in twenty understands a text. And I think of the other nineteen, who struggle to escape and risk a life sentence of ignorance. A democratic state must save them because it is right. And because the risk then is immense: weak minds demand the strong man.

Corrado Augias

Ignorance is a prison

Corrado Augias through a recollection of him thus describing his first day of high school when the professor asked the students : who can say what is the purpose of studying? Some answered : to become adults, to grow up well and become good people..
The professor was not convinced of the answers until he said “to escape from prison.”
We were amazed.
The professor said : ignorance is a prison, because in there you don’t understand and you don’t know what to do!
Studying is to break out of prison from those who want you stupid and gullible and to climb over the wall of ignorance so that you can understand without asking for help. And it will be hard to fool you!

Nelson Mandela said: “Education is the gateway to freedom, democracy and development.”

In the digital age we lose the depth of our thoughts

I suggest reading this thought by Italo Calvino expressed in his Lezioni americane more than thirty years ago.

“Sometimes it seems to me that a pestilential epidemic has struck humanity in the faculty that most characterizes it, that is, the use of language that manifests itself as a loss of cognitive force … that tends to level the expression on the most generic formulas, anonymous … to extinguish every spark that sprouts from the clash of words with new circumstances”.

How does the cognitive force of thought manifest itself in our daily lives?

Through words that allow to express our ideas and emotional states. If the words are well organized in a specific language we can be understood by other people. Social networks and the increasing amount of time we dedicate to them, precisely because of the simplicity they require, decrease the expressive capacity of our thoughts, as they are forced to become simplified and superficial in order to be shared and increase our followers. The repetitiveness in time of this way of communicating will determine the reduction of the depth of our thoughts.

Salvation to this mental downsizing of human beings can only be given by studying and reading novels.

Let us reflect.