Education and Spontaneity

Initially, knowledge acquisition, especially through formal education, snuffs out imagination & spontaneity. This leads many people to decry education. They see the dulling of imagination as a wrong that has been done to them. A part of them has been brutally neglected by the powers that be. But that is not a completely honest telling -- while it is true that imagination and spontaneity decrease during the time of your life devoted to acquiring knowledge within school walls, this is a necessary step to bring your self into the rational world space. The person who mourns the death of their imagination and blames 'the system' has wrongly assumed that personal growth ends when formal education ends. Formal education is the beginning, it provides the rather dull foundation upon which the rich colorful world you tasted as a child can be rediscovered.

Teach Me

I would love it if I could go to a website, type in something I'm interested in learning- say, "19th Century Philosophy" - and then immediately be taken to a curriculum composed entirely of on-line information -- articles, full texts, videos, lectures, tables & pictures. The curriculum would start with the most basic information about the subject - and once the visitor felt like they fully understood the basics they could graduate themselves on to the next level.

Right now I spend a lot of time reading books and watching videos that contain repeated or irrelevant information, and I'd like it if there were a service that arranged relevant information in a sequential & complementary fashion so I could learn it more quickly.

The article Every Shareholder Should Read This Now contains a suggested reading list of books on investing, organized in this way:

Learning from the Past?

"While it is true that certain historical examples of goodness may be brought to bear for the moral education of children and the elevation of their minds in order to impress them with what is morally admirable, it is also true that the destinies of nations and states--with their interests, situations, and complexities--are a different field of knowledge. Rulers, statesmen, and nations are told that they ought to learn from the experience of history. Yet what experience and history teaches us is this, that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, nor acted in accordance with the lessons to be derived from it. Each era has such particular circumstances, such individual situations, that decisions can only be made from within the era itself. In the press of world events, there is no help to be had from general principles, nor from the memory of similar conditions in former times--for a pale memory has no force against the vitality and freedom of the present." [GWF Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Pg. 7-8]