What barriers leading us not to know something?

Before we know anything, there could be something we “not know” that we therefore search and study to know. It is simple, right?

However, we also run into many barriers on not allowing us to really know.

One obvious barrier is that you assume you know everything about the subject that you do not need to bother to look for any area you may not know; or no need to verify or evaluate the body of knowledge you have without any false, useless or conflicting data to see they really can apply in this universe; that help you really master the subjects you are proud of. You may easily find such attitudes especially from the so called “expert” or “authority”.

Another extreme of barrier could be some kind of attitudes, or false attitudes from someone or any authority, that the subject could not be known, and no one has ever attempted to know in the past that it is a total mystery. If you assume any area that can’t be known, you of course will not know something about it. Or it you may wreck your “talent” when you agreed with someone who told you that you did not have the talent to know about something.

So you see your attitudes of what you know, what you not know, what you can know and what you can’t know can determine how much you can really know about the subject.

You can also see from the above on how this is related with one’s education.

Hence, one’s education depends on the attitude that something can be known about, and know what you not know and then look to find out what you can know.

Such attitude is not restricted to any formal education system, but any aspect of life as one can do something on what one knows.

When you try to hat or train anyone on any post of your company, you may find the above helpful to identify what attitudes about knowing something from your staff. You may be surprised to discover those who can identify the areas of "not knowing" with the idea that that can be known, is easier to train than those who tell you how much they have already known about the subject.

I hope the above tip may help.

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Are all of our education so important that our students can’t feel relaxed?

On my last blog, I have briefly expressed my opinion on the subject of education which indeed is a big subject as the critical question is how our education system (including online education) can guarantee the ability to learn and apply. However, I have been very much occupied in the last few weeks that until now I could spend some time on my blog.

There has been a lot of pressure on study that we see some students going that far to commit suicide, or simply stop schooling, etc. Many of them are good students (in terms of good grades in school) prior to such dramatic behavior changes and made us wonder what had happened to them.

Where do all these unbearable pressure come from?

Each person is different for his or her response and solution handling toward his or her environment.

If we simply focus on education, let’s see what door can possibly open for a better solution.

There is one useful tip I have learnt from Mr. L. Ron Hubbard on his lecture about method of education that you can use it for your kids. For example, if he or she can’t feel relaxed on certain subject in school, or any particular topic of the subject concerned, you can ask , "Select something unimportant about the subject of ______”, he or she looks and gives you an answer, then you simply acknowledge it, and repeat the question again and again until he or she feels good about it. You can continue until he or she can select the unimportance and find what are important. If everything seemed important to him that nothing is unimportant, it could make him feel very tense like"killing" him. By doing this drill, he may find out that there is nothing important for this subject as you know some subjects or topics may be useless if they contained false or useless data ; or he can find out something valuable of the subject that he can be interested in studying it about. By doing this, you can help him to establish the proper importance of the subjects he is studying without studying unimportance or useless materials. Any data of importance can be valuable only after being evaluated by the person himself. The person can study well only on the subject he could find interest to study as it is based on his own self-determinism. It could even be better if the person masters the skills of study technology on the subject.

But before you help your kids feeling relaxed about study by the above suggested drill , you may ask yourself whether you have communicated everything around the study and education very important to him or her that you’re probably the source of putting all these “important” pressure on your kid. Then you may really need to look what the real importance of the education to your kid are.

I hope the above tip may help.

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What are the purposes of our education in Hong Kong? Being schooled or educated?

To survive through our educational system in Hong Kong is not an easy task for everyone, especially if the stress is to train “memory experts” with “endless tests and examinations” rather than educate the students with the purposes of the subjects that they can understand, evaluate, learn and use them in life with their own self-determinism.

If you ask anyone what the purposes of education are in Hong Kong, you may not be surprised that many people cannot give you the proper definition and purposes of education. Instead you will most likely get many similar answers like the reasons going to school are to prepare oneself to get a better job and earn a better living.

It’s nothing wrong to get a better job or earn a better living, but how can we achieve this? Can we achieve by training someone as a “memory expert” without duplication, understanding, power of choice of the received data, and knowing how to use it to achieve results in life? Our education is more geared toward “one way inflow of data to the students “ that one cannot easily challenge whether the text is correct or not, but all what one needs to know is how to relate the text to the examination questions. We can easily witness the failure of many graduates of good grade students in applying what they have learnt from school into life, and conclude that the talent of this generation is not so good as our earlier generation. But what has gone wrong?

In addition to our conventional school system, we have many other supporting businesses around the subject of so called “Education” that in fact they are "School Technologies', for example, how we prepare our kids for interviews for better school so to have a smooth school runway from kindergarden to university; where we should live to get a better school district; whom we need to connect so to help our kids studying smoothly in school; which tutoring schools we should send our kids to improve their memories to get good exam results; how we fill up our kid's time with activities that would help him to look good on his resume, etc, all kind of ramifications which are geared towards good examination grades without any inspection what exactly we need to have and do in educating our next generation with real results.

Our culture is held together by how well we can educate our own people including whether we can educate valuable subjects that are useful, and whether they are taught in a way that the individual and the society see the purposes and the need of them, so to have a roadmap how to achieve the purpose by our education.

So it is time to ask:
1) What are the purposes of our education?
2) When studying any subject, do we have any purpose of doing this subject? What kind of results do we expect in acquiring and applying the subject in life?
3) How does the subject we study relate to ourselves and others? Is it valuable?
4) How can we evaluate the information on the subject to know the importance, relevancy, application and have our own opinion on the subject?
5) Do we have any effective study method (rather than memorizing method) to help us to achieve the above and know how to learn anything in life as one wishes?

I have been educated in both school systems in Hong Kong and the United States. I see that there is a lack of effective education and study methods thoroughly taught in our school systems. Most of the time, we simply jump in receiving the teachings of the subject without first consulting the above questions for ourselves and from our teachers; with the assumption that we instinctively know how to study and if any improvement is needed in this system, it will be the effort on raising one’s abilities in receiving or memorizing the data of the subject.

We are self-determined beings. For any information we receive today, especially in this new era of information age, our self-determinism is very much required in the evaluation of the information so we can use valuable information to achieve the goals or purposes of the subject to the extent of our own goals and purposes in life; and from which we can possibly have a prospering culture of our own.

How do we raise our next generation in Hong Kong? "To Believe" or "To Observe"

Future depends on what we are doing for ourselves and our next generation today. If we want to have a better future as a group, a race or mankind, it also depends on how we raise our next generation today.

Remember when you're a kid, you had a lot of imagination and enthusiasm of life but some of us may probably do not even have this little fortune. In time, something has changed. After you got older and have enough experience (good and bad) through our education system, relationship with others, work, etc, you developed a personality package solution including various kinds of indoctrination to handle your life that you believe that can help you survive well in this society. However life could always give us challenge to shake our stable data or doctrines or beliefs that we're indoctrinated or brainwashed to uphold for years to put us into confusion all of a sudden. Worse, for some instances, you might feel that you're betrayed because the reality or outcome was not something you had been told so that you had believed for many years. How could we come out of such confusion? It is common for many people to simply grab another “belief” from another source, or any other “seeming to look good solution” to help us at least to get out of fear and insecurity… as a solution to confusion. However, how long does it last before this stable datum was shaken again from life?

I remember what I enjoyed most in high school was the time I wrote my weekly journals (which was part of our regular school assignment) as the other time I was very much told to read and memorize the textbook so to have good grades in examination (which was not a difficult job to me at that time). I used to write down my thought and my dreams in my weekly journals. It's actually a very fulfilling experience to me as I could ask and look many things than what they looked on the surface. Unfortunately, when I looked up the sky, there’s not a lot to see as we’re surrounded by a lot of high-rise buildings in Hong Kong. Was there more than what I saw on the surface? Our school system did not really teach us how to study, how to observe, how to evaluate and how to be responsible for what we honestly observe and tell what it’s.

If we could observe what it’s there correctly, we could be able to be responsible for what we say it’s there. But to believe something that we have not observed ourselves in the first place, we can’t be responsible and therefore we felt betrayed when the reality did not come out what we believed. Worse, we could use it to blame others to tell us to believe them so. But look, feeling of betrayal came about only when you finally could observe what’s there no longer true. True belief is better come after our own observation and evaluation as it is more real and solid.

So you see the security to live better here is to know how to know and how to observe but not what one's told to believe. If what we had observed might not be right, we could admit our mistakes to find out what we have not observed correctly and so we could move on to find better truth to help ourselves and others.

The better way to move out from any confusion is first to find out where you are and to look what stable datum have been shaken to put you into confusion in the first place. The solution to any problem is the problem itself. Any solution adding more to the problem is not the solution.

We may better ask our kids what their purposes in study are. Do they want to improve their perception so they can observe better, evaluate better, decide and act better for better abilities to achieve their goals and purposes in life? Or do they simply believe our system that they need to have good grades in exam, so that they could go to better school, better university, better career and better life? If you had observed both ways, which way do you want to raise your kids? I hope you and your children can make the right choice.

P.S. Here is some more information that may help you. You may download the booklet and do an online course on raising children at http://www.volunteerministers.org/#/solution/raising-children.