The Pantomime

This website is gradually fading into the distant horizon. I have no ambition to try to “teach” how to paint.

Why not?

Because you either want to learn how, and teach yourself, or you don’t care and in that case I can’t teach you.

Here is what I mean.

I can’t tell you “how” to do what I do. I can be an example but copying what I do, slavishly, produces a slave, not a creator. You either have the ability to do that or you don’t.

The education system we have is a fraud. The idea that children are “taught” is absolute garbage. You can’t teach anyone to do anything. The best thing you can do is produce a “pantomime” of the process. You will produce something that LOOKS like a master performing a task, but it’s really phony.

Now this differs from TRAINING. Training is not teaching anybody how to do anything creative. It’s about switching off your brain and falling back on training IN A CRISIS.

Some years ago, we had an electrical fire. I “fell back” on my Air Force training. What is the first thing you do with an electrical fire?

You shut off the power.

So, I walked past the flames, went down the stairs to the circuit breakers and shut off power to the stove (where the fire was).

This put out the fire.

It also showed the power of “training.” When in crisis, trained people continue to function. Untrained people will run away.

But this is not the same thing as teaching someone “how” to do something like play music, write a story or invent a new machine.

You can’t “train” someone to create.

3 Replies to “The Pantomime”

  1. Quite right – today however peoples want teaching/training but aren’t aware of that.
    They think reading a book or website, watching a movie or some such is what will teach/train them to do stuff like modelbuilding.
    They don’t want to try themselves if somebody else is doing that and they may just wait for somebody to do that.

  2. Looking back over life I have to agree I wasn’t taught much. I think I learned mostly by example and
    inspiration. “Yeh I can do that.” Of course I sometimes bit off more “can do that” than was wise, but I managed somehow to stay alive. I could tell about the “Black Hole” of Ole Miss, a supposed 16mm Film processor in a closet, that nearly killed me, but it’s tooo long a story. Stay the hell out of Mississippi boys.

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