We do need some education. But why?

I visited the Iona School yesterday for their Advent Fayre. Some good friends' children attend this excellent school. It was a very nice family morning, with craft activities for the children, live singing, and freshly pressed apple juice. Also picked up a brochure about the Steiner Waldorf system of education followed at Iona, which says:

Integral to the Steiner Waldorf education is its view of each child as a unique, spiritual individual, developing... towards an adulthood in which the individual spirit can find full freedom of expression. Every step in the child's education may be seen as geared to this end.

Was struck by the contrast between this and a thought emerging from my own alma mater, Vidya Mandir, Mylapore:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All play and no work makes Jack an unemployed adult.

This is taken from an email that came through on the alumni mailing list. Work, in this context, means swotting. Play means loafing around like Aamir Khan in the latest Bollywood flick. The implication, deeply embedded in Mylapore culture, is that the purpose of education is to get a good job, earn a decent living, and support a family.

Does this Mylaporean approach also lead to the individual spirit finding full freedom of expression? Perhaps, yes. Especially if the individual spirit finding expression is similar to that of Mac MacGuff, the dad in the film Juno. Mr MacGuff's teenage daughter, Juno, is searching for her calling. She asks her dad about his career. He tells her that he found his passion, the calling which gave his spirit full expression, in Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) repairs. Which, fortunately, is the means by which he earns a living.

The Post-Feminist Goddess

Patriarchal cultures generally build their female characters around two polarized archetypes: the Madonna and the Whore. And so real women casting around for raw material with which to build their identities are forced to make a false choice between these archetypes, and therefore between virtue and sexuality. So, since the days of The Female Eunuch and The Feminine Mystique, one of the themes of the feminist movement has been to create icons who break this polarity, icons who are both caring and potent, who are both babes and moms, and who keep their lives on the rails.

From these icons, real women can more easily learn to be… like Angelina Jolie?

Naomi Wolf, the feminist intellectual, thinks Angelina Jolie is the iconic woman who brings it all together. In this article, Ms Wolf writes that

Angelina Jolie... for the first time in modern culture, brings together almost every aspect of female empowerment and liberation... she broke through into mass-market consciousness with her turn as cartoony superheroine Lara Croft... sexy and daring, confrontational and independent...

When Maddox appeared... Jolie revealed a new vision of single motherhood... tender, glamorous, and complete, father figure or no father figure in the picture... she blurs the conventional boundary of what female stars are supposed to do — look pretty, emote, wear designer clothes — by picking up Princess Di's fallen torch and wrapping her elegant bone structure in a shalwar kameez to attend to the suffering of Afghan refugees in Pakistan

So she becomes what psychoanalysts call an "ego ideal" for women — a kind of dream figure that allows women to access, through fantasies of their own, possibilities for their own heightened empowerment and liberation.

The article is a fun read, until you realize that it is not meant to be ironic or tongue in cheek. Is this really Naomi Wolf, the daughter of the legendary Bay Area teacher/poet Leonard Wolf, the Rhodes scholar who advised Al Gore when he was America’s next President, who wrote The Beauty Myth – a book about how modern women have freed themselves from all the traditional feminine myths, except the myth of beauty?

And is she really touting Angelina Jolie as an ideal? The same Angelina who broke off all relations with her abusive dad, french-kissed her brother in public, had a lesbian girl-friend, hit on a married colleague, and wore a vial of her boyfriend’s blood as a pendant. Never mind the bit about being the archetypal ideal woman. Is Angelina even just okay?

Moonballs from Planet Earth would like to propose an alternative feminist icon who brings it all together: Donna Sheridan, the character played by Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia. Donna is a mom, an entrepreneur, has a ton of fun with her girl-friends, doesn’t know which of her old boy-friends is her daughter’s dad, and lives on to enjoy a happy ending.

There’s a fire within my soul
Mamma Mia, here I go again,
My my, how can I resist you?

Dumbo, the great educator

Psychologists think the ability to delay gratification is central to academic achievement, and more generally, to emotional intelligence.

Consider this Stanford psychology study: four year old children were given the option of a treat right now, say, a marshmallow, or waiting for two marshmallows. Years later, the children who were able to wait had better academic performance (SAT scores) and life outcomes (stronger friendships, fewer behavioural problems) than their more impatient cohorts.

Given this evidence, training children to delay gratification ought to be a central goal of education. The question is how?

The answer: take them to Disneyland.

Last weekend, I witnessed hundreds of children aged between four and twelve stand in line uncomplainingly for over an hour, on a hot, sultry Paris afternoon, to ride Dumbo, The Flying Elephant. The ride itself lasts between two and three minutes. The ride is pretty cool, the rider can make Dumbo fly higher or lower by toggling a little lever. Nonetheless, this was an impressive display of delayed gratification.

If this is what today's youngsters are capable of, it bodes well for the future of civilization.

Have you ever thunk about thoughting?

Management is justly famous for doing strange things to the English language. Consider: option value, hedge, synergy, self-actualization, kaizen, off-shoring, intrapreneurism, portfolio, fudge, strategize, ideate, projectize, functionality, robustify, core competencies...

Plus two great new words to add to that lexicon. Both are creative conjugations of that ancient and innocent verb, to think, which can be morphed with modern technology into “thoughting” and “thunk”. I learnt both these words at a recent (and very good) seminar with Jack and Carol Weber at Darden.

“Thoughting” actually is a useful word; I believe it was coined by Jack and Carol. It is meant to describe the unsolicited thoughts that endlessly stream through every consciousness. This unsolicited stream is completely different from the disciplined, structured, methodical thinking needed to, say, prove a mathematical theorem. Or to professionally evaluate a business partner’s performance. Yet, this unsolicited stream often intrudes on formal, methodical thought, and sometimes subverts it.

Giving this formless stream of thought a distinct name, thoughting, to distinguish it from formal thought, thinking, is quite useful. A distinct name helps the mind switch out of the thoughting-mode into the thinking-mode as needed.

Maybe when Krishna told Arjuna to free his mind from the shackles of माया (maya) he was telling Arjuna to stop the thoughting and start thinking. माया is often translated as illusion. Maybe thoughting, the mindless chatter that clutters the consciousness, would be a better translation.

Maybe the meditative practice of emptying the mind is about stopping the thoughting. ध्यान (dhyana), the Sanskrit root of the word Zen, could be understood as freedom from thoughting. So the consciousness is released to prove the theorem, or evaluate the business partner. A mind that is full of thoughting will struggle to hit that little red ball hurtling towards the soft tissues at ninety miles per hour, with just a hint of reverse swing.

This famous story from Zen Flesh Zen Bones might be about thoughting:

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1869-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup", Nan-in said, "you are too full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen until you first empty your cup?"

Skilled thinking can't happen without knowledge, one has to know some math to solve the theorem. Thoughting, however, gets in the way of thinking.



__________________________________________

“Thunk” is not just an uncultured way of saying thought. It is typically used in the context of another management buzzword that includes the word thinking.

Let’s say you have a high-powered corporate mandate to do "customer thinking". This means building or modifying products and processes so they are easy for customers to use. Once this work has been done, the said product or process has been "customer thunk".

The same conjugation works for "possibility thinking", which means creative problem solving, understood as an attitude rather than as a technique. When this "possibility thinking" exercise has been completed, the business itself has been "possibility thunk".

What I love most about thunk are its poetic possibilities:

The CEO was in a funk
His stock options had turned to junk
So to the consultant he quietly slunk
His business processes were customer thunk
His annual bonus went up by a chunk
And he celebrated by styling his hair like a punk

Its surprisingly difficult to come up with positive words ending in unk. Sunk, bunk, dunk…. nothing uplifting or celebratory.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Hindu Haircut

Regular readers of this blog may not have been aware: Gwyneth Paltrow has had a haircut.

Gwyneth revealed that this was part of the healing process following the death of her father. "I was very very attached to my hair," she says. "I still had hair from when my father was alive. I made it a talisman. Then one day, on a shoot with Mario Testino, I suddenly said 'I need to cut it now'. It was almost as if it was part of the grieving process. I just had to let something go."

Gwyneth may not have known this, but she is a karma yogi going through the process of samskara.

A karma yogi fulfills her destiny, or achieves personal growth, or attains moksha, by facing up to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with integrity and dignity, in accord with her dharma. Rituals, like cutting one's hair when a father dies, are ways of ways of coping with grief and moving the soul along its natural journey.

Traditional Hindu doctrine might have preferred for the psyche to step into a new life-stage in front of the sacred fire rather than at a Mario Testino photo-shoot, but that surely is a minor detail.

Cultural Learnings of Eng-a-land for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Hindustan

A summit has been summoned in Kirkcaldy. The problem: asbo seagulls.

I sympathize with Dubya

CIA Asks Bush To Discontinue Blog

WASHINGTON, DC-In the interest of national security, President Bush has been asked to stop posting entries on his personal web log.

Cultural learnings of Eng-a-land for make benefit glorious nation of Hindustan

How did England's cricket captain Paul Collingwood meet his wife?

Here's how he describes the moment in his own words:

"I was at the bar getting the beers in and she was standing about ten yeards away with her friends. I shouted over 'Oi', which wasn't a very good pick up line. She looked around and I thought 'She's lovely'. So I said 'Come here, like' and she started walking over. She said 'Yes?' and I panicked because I didn't expect her to come over. I said 'I don't know what to say.' And that was that. I guess that is one way of breaking the ice."

True terror lies in the futility of human existence

Conceptual Terrorists Encase Sears Tower In Jell-O