one of the most obvious but striking things about a modern education is that you go through it only once you show up every day for a number of years get filled up with knowledge and then once you're 21 or so you stop and You Begin the rest of your life before modern education took off the mightiest Educational Systems in the world were religions it was religions that taught us about ethics purpose and the meaning of life life and one of the interesting aspects of their pedagogy was that they were obsessed with repetition for them it
was absur to imagine ever learning anything if you went through it only once the whole basis of religious education rested upon repetition five times a day as a Muslim one was to rehearse the central tenants of Islam seven times a day as a Christian Benedictine monk one was to revisit the lessons of scripture as an orthodox Jew three 100 days a year were marked out for commemoration and ritual repetition of ideas in the Torah while as a Zen priest one would be inducted to sit cross-legged and meditate up to 12 times between Daybreak and Nightfall
religions had what one might term a Civ view of the mind that anything one pours in will quickly be lost in our perforated Memories by contrast modern education adheres to an implicitly bucket likee theory of the Mind one's meant to pour in the contents and bar accidents they'll stay there pretty much across a whole lifetime that's why we'll think nothing of earnestly declaring a book to be our favorite and then ding to read it only once far less naively and far more generously religions prefer to imagine that anything you tell someone in the morning will
by 2 in the afternoon be well on the way to evaporation and will be pretty much gone by Nightfall repetition is the only way of ensuring that something will stick once you finish reading a favorite holy text the story of Moses for example you just head straight back to the beginning and start again with the bull rushes and the baby infant we pay a heavy price for our lack of interest in rehearsing lessons and ideas there are all kinds of things we badly need to keep in our minds the better parts of our nature that
speak to us of being patient of remaining gentle of striving for for foress of pausing to appreciate of straining to understand what at first seems unbearably foreign we've been taught these things once of course but it was a while ago now possibly when we were seven and so naturally they're not at the front of our minds as we career through our lives smashing into things and people there's equal and possibly far greater wisdom to be found in the secular as opposed to the religious sphere but those who dispense this wisdom are far too hopeful about
the functioning of our minds they choose to tell us just once possibly in quite a low voice about all the things that matter maybe in a beautiful but very dense poem or in a quite slow moving novel we once read fitfully over a summer two decades ago and then they expect us to keep all this in mind our whole lives long and we're surprised that the march of human craziness goes on unabated we shouldn't abandon our most precious insights to The Lax guardians of of our memories we need to steal the idea of repetition from
religions and create our own catechisms our own midnight prayers our own cycles of rehearsed knowledge we need to make the most important ideas Vivid in our minds on a constant basis we should never be finished with school we should daily be reimmersed in the great truths that we will die that we must understand ourselves that we must love that others are sad rather than mean many of us are done with religion but we shouldn't ever be done with what religions knew so well about our minds that nothing stays active in them unless we rehearse and
repeat with every new dawn we need to keep coming back not least here at the school of life we believe in developing emotional intelligence to that end we've also created a whole range of products to support that growth find out more at the link on the screen now
