All Things Trending I’ve seen and heard so many things trend in Nigeria. Entertaining, educating and even some downright stupid ones but this “fall down and die” dance move takes the cake. Dancing is expressive and beautiful and sometimes even a way to relieve some stress but when I have to endanger myself in order to prove the point, that I’m “on point”? Thank you very much, but I’d rather not! We’ve seen so many dance challenges that started out as fun but then started endangering lives, such as but not limited to the “Kiki, do you love me?” challenge, where you have to jump out of a moving car. Folks, you got the moving car part, right? The internet and instant superstardom frenzy is different kinds of insane…
It makes me wonder why any sane human would propagate a dance challenge where you have to, like a friend said, “fall like you took a bullet to the chest”. The trending videos about the said dance was breaking the internet two weeks ago, but the funny part is that, barely three days since its inception, the “gone wrong” videos are starting to spring up! In a recent one, a guy knocked over a hot meal he was preparing and spilled it all on himself… And in that moment all I could hear in my head was “another one!”, in DJ Khaled’s voice.
Let me leave the critical analysis philosopher in me out of this and in the bid to make this a bit more reliable to my fellow Nigerians, y’all remember “village people”? Well, I’m not going to give them a chance to make me actually die from a seemingly innocent dance move.
The dictionary and so many other scholars have defined knowledge in the different ways but with emphasis on it as a “noun”. In practice, elites have termed knowledge to be skill and efficiency, society has termed it running streets, labour market terms it paper qualification, and for clarity sake in this work, it is termed ‘the known’; simply put, refined information. The philosopher Socrates said, “to know good is to do good, and not to know good is to do evil” which means that what you do or not do reflects what you know or don’t know (your action and inaction reflects your knowledge and ignorance), and as the work unfolds, the components of K such as culture, education, and skill acquisition, will be illuminated.
Academically education is basically divided into formal or informal education. Here, we will look at education from both the idealist and empiricist view. The idealist (idealism) which is championed by Plato, the philosopher conceives education from the Greek word “educere” which means to “lead out”. That is to say that man is born with an innate idea, there are things which one just knows how to do perfectly well or just understands so easily as though one has done that for a long while, this school of thought explains that it is so because one has known those things already, but is unaware of the existence of such abilities or ideas, so education becomes the way to lead such abilities and ideas out, bringing it to the open where the person is aware and makes use of them. For the empiricists (empiricism) the notion of education conceived by John Locke is derived from the Greek work “educare”, which means “to train or teach”. The idea behind this notion is that man was born ‘tabula raza’ which means ‘empty/blank slate’, this literally means that man knows nothing except what he has been thought by his environment or nurture. The point here is not state which school of thought has it right or wrong because they both make salient points which is the focus of this column. This point is that the essence of education is to lead out and to train or to teach; to bring to awareness by leading out that which is unseen but exists, one may refer to such as “potentials” and then, to teach that which is unknown, good enough they both work hand in hand, flowing from the unknown to the known. Why is this the case? Simply because every good teacher with the aim of having successful students must be to teach them effectively by relating from what he assumes or is certain that they already know, and every good student, who is not a paper student, (students who read or just cram to pass exams), relates to understands something new from what they already know, think of it, it is difficult to relate with something you have never seen before, if you are able to flow easily with something new, it simply because you have been able to relate that to something you already known, hence, the implication of Socrates’ Socratic method. Education on this level is basically about everything that can be known both by interest and necessity. Such includes, skill acquisition. For whatever you want to be (interest), acquire a skill that will help you achieve that and enhance the innate idea and ability that has prompted that within you(necessity), also pick a vocation that equips and develops you better for the kind of problems you want to solve(interest). Education is incomplete if self is not developed.
Merriam Webster defines culture to be the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religion or social group. In the 20thc, the subject social studies defines culture as the totality of a people’s way of life. Humans when thrown into existence stumble on circumstances in a bid to identify the essence of their existence and become accepted by each other in the society they find themselves, they unconsciously begin to come up with means and patterns which inversely is their response to challenges in their environment, gradually these patterns discovered in the face challenges and self-actualization become a way of life and a norm which over time metamorphose into the culture of a society and is passed on to generations. As the society grows and develops there may be a paradigm shift as a result of model crisis, and just like in science, there will be hypothesis, experiment, observation, test, theory, law and the cycle goes on, but the sole aim is to solve that problem. One may wonder what this may be driving at, the point is one fundamental knowledge that must be gathered is the knowledge of culture, in knowing the culture one understands “the why” behind the norms, standards and values of a people, this one knowledge is key to any successful revolution.