Stop the school

Experiential learning is our philosophy of life.

After 5 years service as IALT organization (www.ialtnetwork.org) in the education, it is time to remind ourselves of our mission by answering the gloomy question: why are we here.

Any clerical education program act to develop a righteous person who is an active citizen, with a sense of duty, resilience and love for enterprises; unfortunatly the conventional and standardized education we’ve received during the 20th century, forgot to enhance the innate and intimate power that everyone of us receive at birth: the power of the emotions.

It has always been clear that there is more than we think in anyone of us in terms of quality and vastity; we have a natural physical aptitude to overcome our received educational inaptitude.

This weak education system is accomplice, of the decline of our contemporary society; nowadays we observe even a dramatic decline of our natural and primitive force as Homo Sapiens.

Modern methods of locomotion and the fast pace of life, are guilty in the decline of health and individual fitness.

TV shows, social media and show business, have caused the decline of natural action skill transforming most of the people into a “noisy audience” with no initiative and braveness.

The confused and compulsive modern life, overwhelmed by superficial and manipulated information, is guilty in weakening the love for history, memory and even imagination.

High demand of goods and the industrialization drive, even for the food, is killing any craftmanship and ability to do things by hand.

And what about the fear of a word as discipline, associated with tyranny and violence, as if the discipline could not live with the freedom.

Last but not least the unbearable decline of compassion due to the narcissism egoic.

As IALT organization we certainly agree that education is never indoctrination and force someone into a specific education program is just manipulation. But at IALT we think also that our duty is to guide and even plunge people into experiences which are likely to present opportunities for self-discovery. Especially youngsters.

Offering challenging experiences, in respect to the people’s wishes, we might be able to enhance the natural growth of inner human qualities which the participants of our projects will need for their own happiness. This achievement will transform their stay in this life, anyone in his way, in a service for the whole humankind. I should say that this is my way to be “pragmatically idealistic”.

Be realistic, demand the impossible. E. G.

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Living Room Hoax: DX and SX hemispheres

If from the beginning of time there were Right and Left men, we’d have seen the creation of separate tribes at war with each other.

Obviously we didn’t see this kind of division, although there were many others, but according to different variables.

Certainly, are not cognitive processes and relationships that make a core difference when it comes to human being.

We have discriminated “the other” about many things (skin color, status, habits etc.); we couldn’t discriminate so successfully about being predominantly rational contra being mainly related to emotions; not yet.

This dichotomy between hemispheres and men, between left and right, between rational and emotional is not the fault of the american scientist Roger Sperry and his team; his theory led to get even a Nobel price.

The blame for this “Sofa Hoax”, is due to popular culture who easily and “emotionally” collected the dichotomous view of the world to go to justify a concept that every human being takes great care: if you’re not with me, you are against myself.

Guys, the true is that there is no dominance and the two hemispheres, although specialized in their function (not in the same way and not in all the people), work in parallel.

Sperry declares:

 “… Both the right brain and the left may live simultaneously conscious mental experiences, sometimes even conflicting with each other but traveling in parallel.”

Thousands of tests on thousands of brain masses, have denied the specialization of creativity and logic and rationality and emotions. Absolutely false.

If the language as a tool, seems to be located in one hemisphere, that does not mean that in the same we will be able to localize more analytical and logical tools.

Therefore let’s live with the idea, we are an emotional machine that sometimes runs into rational actions. Just look around to see what is the Man and really what he is capable of doing.

Is it rational at all ?

Antonio Damasio is the most knowledgeable of all currently on Earth on these issues and tells us that every human decision is governed by emotions.

“And it is as we were possessed by a passion for the reason: an impulse that originates in the brain’s core, permeates other levels of the nervous system and emerges in the form of unconscious feelings or inclinations to lead the process of decision.”

The mind-brain is an indissoluble body and is made of physics and chemistry.

There is a brain machine equal to another and people are passively and actively governed by their emotions all in a different way, in a unique way.

Each and every act of our lives is tied to the internal dialogue.

Even if we adopt the dichotomy DX / SX as a metaphor, it would be very unlikely to say that an engineer it’s the kind of person with little attitude to follow his heart: are Gustave Eiffel, builder of incredible beautiful and useless things or Thomas Andrews manufacturer of bankruptcy Titanic, rational SX people ?!

Similarly we can accept that an artist is guided only by his innermost emotions?

On the web you will find a lot of stuff on this issue.

This study of 2013 published in Plos One (The world’s first multidisciplinary Open Access journal, PLOS ONE accepts scientifically rigorous research, regardless of novelty), “An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right Brain Hypothesis with Resting-State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance imaging ” debunks the myth of the “competition” between the two cerebral hemispheres.

I conclude by saying that behaviorism is long dead and that Mr B. F. Skinner, although it has been influential in the development of psychology, was perhaps more an artist than a scientist.

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