Think of a computer desktop. Now imagine if you never knew how to organize or dig through folders in that system. Everything you ever downloaded, stored, or created would simply be another icon directly on the desktop. What a mess. After a few years, that machine would be an impossible task to sort through, find information or programs on, and just generally use in any efficient manner.
Well that’s how we teach our children to use their brains. We throw them into school at a young age and say, “learn now” without ever teaching them 1st, how to learn. They ask, “how?” And the best we can provide is the method we used to get where we are. Essentially, looking at information over and over again and trying to remember it until some sticks. What an asinine method. There is a more efficient way to use the mind.
PE teaches you not to lift with your back, 1st because it risks an injury, and 2nd because you can lift more with your legs. Well what class teaches you the mental equivalent of how to lift with your mind? There is none, and there should be.
I would create a new field called Cerebral Ergonomics (CE). The classes designed around this field would focus first on teaching children that they can learn; that learning is easy; and most importantly, how to learn… How to best organize the mind, and consciously, where and how to place new information. Then, how to retrieve it efficiently.
Spending a year on how to learn before an influx of information is poured on kids, would accelerate and improve the process at every step to follow.
Just as we continue with PE throughout most of our school-life, so would be the case with CE. Higher level classes would work on even more elaborate methods of the mind. Learning to think acoustically and kinesthetically; learning to think with smell, and taste, and sound, and radical empathy. Learning to think consciously with all forms of internal imagery and whatever else can be added to the list to change the geography of the brain and bring new mind to bear on new matter.