Slow Learning Hall of Fame: Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore with nothing but time on his hands
Slow Learner, Philosopher, Artist, Musician, Composer, Poet, Novelist, Playwright, Nonauthoritarian Learning Leader, Nobel Laureate, School fund-raiser, Doodler, Underneath-the-tree-sitter/thinker

Born May 7, 1861
Died August 7, 1941

“Hunger for the Epic”

Highlights of Slow Learning Super Powers:

• Wrote  first poem at the age of eight.
• Started painting and drawing at the age of sixty.
• Wrote songs, including two national anthems
  
• Founded schools (an outdoor children’s school, university, and rural school)
• Proclaimed that learning might be natural, sympathetic, and pleasurable
• Extreme multidisciplinarian
  
• possibly gifted with Attention Surplus Syndrome (aka ADD)
  

Tagore on feeding hungry children:

We have come to this world to accept it, not merely to know it.  We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy.  The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.  But we find that this education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed.  From our very childhood habits are formed and knowledge is imparted in such a manner that our life is weaned away from nature and our mind and the world are set in opposition from the beginning of our days. Thus the greatest of educations for which we came prepared is neglected, and we are made to lose our world to find a bagful of information instead.  We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to teach him grammar.  His hunger is for the Epic, but he is supplied with chronicles of facts and dates…Child-nature protests against such calamity with all its power of suffering, subdued at last into silence by punishment. (Rabindranath Tagore, Personality,1917: 116-17)

Tagore on the pleasures of slow:

A Moment’s Indulgence

I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side. The works
that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite,
and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.

Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and
the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.

Now it is time to sit quite, face to face with thee, and to sing
dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure

For more on Tagore as Slow Learner and Slow Learning activist: Check out Kathleen O’Connell’s post on Infed.

a cure for outrage overload: the slow long now

Whenever I get too upset with current events, I find it comforting to step back, to change perspective, and to take a good, long, slow view of things.

My favorite Slovenian industrial metal band’s song, Kingdom of God, reminds me we won’t be here forever.

The John Cage As Slow As Possible Project involves a performance lasting over  639 years. Don’t laugh. They’re already almost nine years in.

And, now, at long last, I’ve found this:  The Long Now Foundation.

Talk about a gifted group of slow learners! The Long Now board includes Stewart Brand (remember Whole Earth Catalog?), Chris Anderson  of Wired Magazine, Brian Eno (yes, the composer, producer, superstar) and a whole gaggle of other legendary hot geeks.

The Long Now Foundation boasts the world’s slowest computer,  uses five digit dates (02009), supports a 10,000 year clock, hosts seminars in long-term thinking, offers some geeky thing called a long server, and supports the Rosetta Project, the “largest collection of linguistic data on the Net.

on re-learning language

Amanda Baggs‘ video challenges all notions of language, communication, and learning.  Be patient and watch through to her explanation about halfway through.

Does verbal  language prevent us from communicating? Is it possible to tell a story without language? What happens when we fully communciate with others? Is verbal language always necessary? Can we even think without words? Does all our talk keep us from connecting with each other? What is there to learn from people who speak in another radically different language? Baggs  learned to speak in our language.  What might be possible when we learn to speak in hers? Is nonverbal dialogue even possible?

to do list

Mindmap for possibility

on the way back home

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke

mindmapping

mapping thoughts that float by during the run

mindmapping personal narrative