Irrationalism and its Respective Practices

Why do children know how to talk like normal adults before even knowing all the alphabets from A to Z and the formal rules of the language? Why is it that some people flourish without the aid of the educational system rather than the other way around? Why do some ‘liberal’ states thrive over other liberal ones? There are things and issues which we many a time refuse to face and answers we dare not acknowledge in light, ironically, of the so-called information age. Marketing a system of bureaucratic and deeply senseless practices to all fields of life seems so prevalent and absorbed into society that none see the light of reason. It seems that modernity is not enlightened at all.

The reality of the mind of the child is that, like any other living thing, it is always in constant need to adapt to its environment in order to suit its own needs. If they need water, they learn methods for showing others that they need it. Other times they attempt other kinds of techniques to request for food or attention. Do we need to teach the child what crying means by crying in front of it so that it remembers how to cry? No! If you were a parent, and you agreed that you have to cry many times in front of the child so that your child remembers how to cry, you are a complete idiot! If you can remember at all, your child cries probably because noise is the only thing which can wake you or anything up. In fact, it knows that when your face is facing hers, and she makes any noise, your facial expression automatically changes ever so slightly or greatly – a sign of response. So, when it is in its own room, and no one is there, it understands that its loud cry will correlate to high response rate from the parent. Again, do parents have to repeatedly act in front of the baby, one being parent and the other as the baby, to show it that crying loudly will bring the parents’ attention to it? Obviously not! These are small examples that relate to human nature, and that is the act of autonomous learning. You don’t need to repeat things in front of them before they puke all that that they see from you. They learn by their own means because they want things done to suit their own needs! And that is a fact of all living things!

Yet, despite this blatant example of real life experience of parents all around the world, the educational system advocates the act of repetition as the means of learning rather than the constant motion of intellectual inquiry as the true form of learning.

Have you ever thought how children learn to swim? The reality is that throughout the whole process, small mistakes are corrected and showed why other techniques don’t work. The child learns not by repetition, but by learning that closing the gaps between the fingers and pushing that hand backwards in the water creates greater force for stronger propelling. The child need not learn the full vocabulary of what I said, but simply the feel of it. The child automatically correlates closed fingers with swimming faster to beat his peers. It’s as simple as that.

If the educational system were so perfect, and we all know children learn to talk before learning the written version or its official rules, then all children will excel because it uses the natural method of learning. In reality, this is not the case. Humans, like all other living things, remember certain things because it serves them a certain purpose. It is precisely not the case with constant, meaningless, and senseless repetition.

The market of irrationalism seems closely bound to the by-products of a capitalist society. People are aiming to cut costs. So they have senseless programs which promote repetition as a theme of learning – like a robot doing the same task over and over again. They identify this to be a certain system of discipline, so that the child can be taught obedience through discipline and be good as such. It reduces manpower and effort or stress from teachers having to handle certain mischief as the computer keeps children stuck to the screens. The child is only amused by the cartoons and inserts whatever answers because some cute cartoon senselessly appears in correspondence to the ‘right’ answer. Again, it is interesting that children already know how to speak sentences when in school they are told to fill-in-the-blank. This all sounds ridiculous to me.

It is ironic that the polity of modernity is full with political ideals which structure themselves in so deformed a manner that it resembles only differing disciplinary polities aimed to structure all forms of oppression into the public so that a new kind of hidden mental-monarchy is formed. Some might argue that the Enlightenment has its effects still running in modern society. Yet, the forms of economic and social classism, racial comedies, isolated ethnic groups, and special laws on security, are all part of an implicit design of hidden oppression cloaked under the word ‘democracy’. It is interesting that where ‘democracy’ holds, we nevertheless witness all the mentioned horrific acts which come never close to their polity’s idealized spoken form of freedom of the people. There may be human rights, but there are also special internal security laws against them which give the government special privileges over individual freedoms.

It seems that people are so accustomed to being lied to by their own sovereign power that they are misguided on many issues which are, in fact, most closely to the heart.