[007] Teleological Pedagogy

I'm teaching some upcoming classes at a variety of venues in Minnesota: Basketry (Mankato), Woodcarving (Mankato), Toys and Games (St. Peter), Handmade Games (Grand Marais), and Old World Games (Grand Marais). See you there?

⭐⭐⭐

"Will I run or will I face the moment? It is at once an almost overwhelming fear and the ever present question that will define the road ahead. Some cannot face the moment. Most live through it dragged along by the events and circumstances and the actions of others. A few grab it by the horns." - Joseph Marshall III, The Journey of Crazy Horse

I've been reading Eric Wargo's Time Loops . His vision of a retrocausal time stream is fascinating. The book proposes - very convincingly - that the future can affect the past, through the mind's ability to be aware of some aspects of its own future.

Maybe precognition and ESP make more sense if you consider that the mind is pre-remembering some information? If you have a bad feeling about a flight, it may be your pre-memory of reading a news article about that flight crashing. If you feel like you need to call your grandma, it might be a pre-memory of learning that she has just been swept to the hospital.

Wargo gets very granular, and suggests that down to the atomic level, elemental interactions might make more sense if they are understood to have a basic ability to pre-remember their own immediate future.

If this is all true, what might it mean for education? When a person has an innate "talent" for some kind of skill, is it perhaps a pre-memory of all the times they will use that skill later in life? When someone picks up a guitar and are immediately comfortable, does that indicate they are drawing on many many years of practice in their future?

Can you test pre-memory in a pedagogical setting? How would you? Are all skills drawing on both past and future practice?

Wargo's idea is that the mind is tuned to seek rewards and avoid displeasures, and so a hint of precognition about the future would be extremely beneficial in an evolutionary paradigm. If one could dimly feel their way towards a future which is joyful and victorious, rather than uncomfortable or disastrous, that would be a very desirable advantage indeed.

This makes me consider the role of presentation, show-and-tell, or performance in an educational setting.

A hypothetical situation: I have a circle of students learning to carve wood. Perhaps we're making small characters.

The students could go home with their carvings at the end of class, without showing or telling about them. Alternatively, we could have a show-and-tell or even a small performance with the pieces at the end of class.

If Wargo is correct, I think a show-and-tell would orient people towards creating a figure that they are proud of, and will receive joy from presenting, even if they don't know they are presenting their piece until the end of class! The future-feeling of joy and accomplishment would subconsciously orient students towards creating an object which they would be proud to present.

Is this true? I dunno. But, intuitively, it does feel like an accurate way to think about learning and experience. I would like to try out some experiments and see where they lead.

The axiom of temporality is only a taboo, and it can be transgressed.

"The past and the future are prostitutes nature has provided. Art is periodic escapes from this brothel." - Our Vortex (1914)