Itchycoo Park and the Purposes of Education

From RockSolid Monthly Music Magazine

 

 

 

In their delightful song, Itchycoo Park, the Small Faces encourage the listener to spend some time in nature rather than labor over academics:

"We could miss out school
Would that be cool?
Why go to learn
The world's a fool?"

Besides the fact that it spends 2mins and 21 seconds on the marvelous borderline between pure pop and top drawer psychedelia, Itchycoo Park offers a vision of what education might be about:  illumination.

The predominant view of education is vocational:  You need education to get a job or, in other words,  "Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift." 

Homeless shelter in West LA  (Photos by Olin Ericksen)

And that is true.  Schooling can give one the technical, bureaucratic and literacy skills one needs to find and hold a position primarily in the private sector. in the myriad of institutions that support industry, or, occasionally, in some government agency or non-profit whose mission isn't directly tied to business, e.g., the Parks service or some aspects of the military and justice systems.  In this era of recession throughout the US and much of the West, having the security that is afforded by a job is a very big deal indeed.  If you can't pay the rent, you're up a creek. 

Innumerable assumptions are built into that model, not the least of which is an expectation that there is something like stability in the economic system, i.e., the jobs that are here today are a lot like the ones that are going to be here tomorrow.  There is certainly a lot of reason to think that this will be true.  Think of all the reasons to hire lawyers, for example!  Shakespeare lamented them, but almost everyone needs 'em. 

However, the era in which my consciousness was formed incorporated the prospect that everything was about to change or certainly could change.  There was no security.  We were surrounded by a senseless war against Vietnam.  The world was careening toward an ugly chaos.  Everyone my age was looking at getting shot at for what, going to jail, leaving the United States, trying to create an alternative with virtually no capital and an enormous amount of opposition, or...all of the above.  We were being educated for a past that was history and we were living in deeply uncertain times.  The situation was unsustainable. 

It was a period in which the power of a completely alternative frame of reference could make head way; the future had no boundaries...if we could only get there.  As The Small Faces put it, if one got "high," one would see that "It's all too beautiful!"  A  radiance envelopes us and lives in us. See how beautiful it is and you will cry tears of joy. 

Psytrip, by psion005

I don't think that anyone can have the epiphany of illuminated reality and be a cynic–at least not at the moment that it's happening.  It might turn you into a drug addict, which would be unfortunate; but, it will make you into a pursuer of beauty as a goal of consciousness, even if only for that moment that you'll never be able to recall with full clarity again.  And, if you know what you're looking for and have some way to find it, the experience of enlightenment will make you an idealist, a person who can't and never wants to turn your back on your vision–your moment, your lifetime in eternity.

So, if the ability to witness beauty truly and let it shape one's life is a worthy aspiration for the nurturing of consciousness, what does that imply for the purposes of education? 

Here are a few Itchycoo Principles of Pedagogy:

1.  Education should foster the ability to concentrate.  Many  challenges yield up their mystery to one who can concentrate and the emergence of the web and its collective intelligence will reveal the wholeness underlying many more seemingly tangled-up situations. 

2.  Education should excite imagination.  The education person ought to see possibilities because virtually everything is possible.  The Singularity Buzz is an example of the fact that a very thin membrane stands between cold hard facts and mind boggling science fiction.  Will computational power achieve a liftoff velocity in 2025 and allow our species to break the "shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity"!!!! Well... maybe.  It's possible.  Some really smart people are imagining it.   If anything like the Singularity happens, getting a paycheck will be the least of your worries.  If you can imagine it, it can happen. Education should demonstrate the truth of that statement.

3.  Education should encourage respect.  The rabbis have a saying, which goes something like this: "Two universes interact when two people meet."  Here is how my friend and mentor, Mark Horowitz, describes  the principle of mutual respect:  "I am a person of value and worth and you are a person of value and worth."  Mark has activated this vision as one of the creators of Mediem, a place for people holding strong and maybe differing perspectives to interact.  Education should address the fight, flight and distancing mechanisms of human existence that make it very difficult for us to show respect when we feel threatened, bored or disengaged. Respect is the door to humility.

Concentration, imagination and respect would make a powerful contribution to humanity's evolutionary prospects.  There are definite threats to the viability of our species on Earth.  (And, if we can't make it here, where are we going to make it?)  Education mostly operates in an atomistic fashion, training people for specialties that may well disappear with hardly a trace.  Education should  bring us into deeply visceral awareness of the existence of a shimmering reality within us and without us.