(From Teaching as a Subversive Activity)
Reflect on these questions - and others that these can generate. Please do not merely react to them. We will spend a good portion of our time next week going over each of your answers/reflections and seeing where they might lead us the rest of the term.
- What do you worry about most?
- What are the causes of your worries?
- Can any of your worries be eliminated? How?
- Which of them might you deal with first? How do you decide?
- Are there other people with the same problems? How do you know? How can you find out?
- If you had an important idea that you wanted to let everyone (in the world) know about, how might you go about letting them know?
- What bothers you most about adults? Why?
- How do you want to be similar to or different from adults you know when you become an adult?
- What, if anything, seems to you to be worth dying for? How did you come to believe this?
- What seems worth living for? How did you come to believe this?
- At the present moment, what would you most like to be - or be able to do? Why? What would you have to know in order to be able to do it? What would you have to do in order to get to know it?
- How can you tell 'good guys' from 'bad guys'?
- How can 'good' be distinguished from 'evil'?
- What kind of a person would you most like to be? How might you get to be this kind of person?
- At the present moment, what would you most like to be doing? Five years from now? Ten years from now? Why? What might you have to do to realize these hopes? What might you have to give up in order to do some or all of these things?
- When you hear or read or observe something, how do you know what it means?
- Where does meaning 'come from'?
- What does 'meaning' mean?
- How can you tell what something 'is' or whether it is?
- Where do words come from?
- Where do symbols come from?
- Why do symbols change?
- Where does knowledge come from?
- What do you think are sane of man's most important ideas?
- Where did they come from? Why? How? Now what?
- What's a 'good idea'?
- How do you know when a good or live idea becomes a bad or dead idea?
- Which of man's ideas would we be better off forgetting? How do you decide?
- What is 'progress'?
- What is 'change'?
- What are the most obvious causes of change? What are the least apparent?
- What conditions are necessary in order for change to occur?
- What kinds of changes are going on right now? Which are important? How are they similar to or different from other changes that have occurred?
- What are the relationships between new ideas and change?
- Where do new ideas come from? How come? So what?
- If you wanted to stop one of the changes going on now (pick one), how would you go about it? What consequences would you have to consider?
- Of the important changes going on in our society, which should be encouraged and which resisted? Why? How?
- What are the most important changes that have occurred in the past ten years? Twenty years? Fifty years? In the last year? In the last six months? Last month? What will be the most important changes next month? Next year? Next decade? How can you tell? So what?
- What would you change if you could? How might you go about it? Of those changes, which are going, to occur, which would you stop if you could? Why? How? So what?
- Who do you think has the most important things to say today? To whom? How? Why?
- What are the dumbest and more dangerous ideas that are 'popular' today?
- Why do you think so? Where did these ideas come from?
- What are the conditions necessary for life to survive? Plants? Animals? Humans?
- Which of these conditions are necessary for all life
- Which ones for plants? Which ones for animals? Which ones for humans?
- What are the greatest threats to all forms of life? To plants? To animals? To humans?
- What are some of the 'strategies' living things use to survive'?
- Which unique to plants? Which unique to animals? Which unique to humans?
- What kinds of human survival strategies are (1) similar to those of animals and plants; (2) different from animals and plants?
- What does man's language permit him to develop as survival strategies that animals cannot develop?
- How might man's survival activities be different from what they are if he did not have language?
- What other 'languages' does man have besides those consisting of words?
- What functions do these 'languages' serve? Why and how do they originate? Can you invent a new one? How might you start?
- What would happen, what difference would it make, what would man not be able to do if he had no number (mathematical) languages?
- How many symbol systems does man have? How come? So what?
- What are some good symbols? Some bad?
- What good symbols could we use that we do not have?
- What bad symbols do we have that we'd be better off without?
- What's worth knowing? How do you decide?
- What are some ways to go about getting to know what's worth knowing?