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
and one of the interesting aspects of
their pedagogy was that they were
obsessed with repetition for them it was
absurd 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 tenets
of Islam seven times a day as a
Christian Benedictine monk one was to
revisit the lessons of Scripture as an
Orthodox Jew 300 days a year will mark
down 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
sieve the view of the mind that anything
one pause then will quickly be lost in
our perforated memories by contrast
modern education adheres to an implicit
limit buckets like 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 gaining 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 2:00 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 bullrushes and
a 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
forgiveness but pausing to appreciate a
straining to understand what it 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 a
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 lacs guardians 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
I should daily be re immersed 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