Towards GRHAPTSIA+ HOEWAG: A whimsy about improving education for better civic conversations through listening-reading-watching suites of experiences
HOEWAG: History of Everything Without Any Gaps series of podcasts, books and docu-dramas with reconstructions and expert talking head - heck, let’s add immersive experiences into that as exhibitions too for GRHAPTSIA+ global literacy.
Amateur passion can be more resourceful for competent outcomes (e.g. the Shamela project) than publicly (or even privately) funded ‘consultants’ (e.g. so many thing each one of us can bring examples).
We know that current institutions of higher education are no longer effective. We see exam papers and syllabi from ten years ago, fifty years ago, a hundred years ago. The Good Life is to get a job with a middle class salary (see this Substack post by Scriptorium Philosophia that did the rounds). We are coasting along otherwise so long as we have that with ChatGPT-written essays, generational illiteracy and national ignobleness.
As the Egyptian poet Aḥmad Shawqi (d. 1932) says (in my loose translation): Nations survive so long as virtue remains, when that their virtue goes, they go.
We may not be physically conquered but we will be gobbled up by a superior nation (or non-state actor) but perhaps not realise it. Maybe the only tangible signs will be all our cities turning into Detroit, Michigan or Birmingham, UK.
The formula of HOEWAG podcast-books+ appears effective for education of the everyman. We should not confuse vocation with education. We do not need for many of us to learn how to make horse shoes any more. We all always need to learn that the aspiration to know what is true and right, and to do and behave accordingly, to be wise, honest and courageous in doing so, will be the qualities of the Good Life. That is the difference between vocation and education. We will differ, but we will be civil in our disagreements because to value the inherent worth that lies in each one of us is to uphold it in our neighbour. We must arise beyond the transactional to recognise in generosity lies nobility.