Great Doubt, Great Enlightenment

Posted on | December 12, 2007 | Comments Off

I drop by Doug Noon’s blog most days – he’s an intelligent blogger and teacher who knows how to write and who manages to avoid the trap of visiting and re-visiting the same old edublogging ground over and over again. Instead, he tends to ask questions – hard questions. Or he picks up on acute questions asked by others. His is one of the blogs that I like to read in situ, so to speak, rather than via an RSS feed – the warmth of his humour and the depth of his wisdom are somehow more evident that way. He also takes the wider implications of his role as a blogger seriously, and usually manages to sidestep the dangers of vanity and the echo chamber.

Doug offers a Zen quote in his About the Author page that kind of sums his approach up:

“Great doubt, great enlightenment. Little doubt, little enlightenment. No doubt, no enlightenment.”

One of my own internal philosophies is simply: “Doubt everything!” I even remember carving this simple statement onto the side of a clay pot I produced at teacher training college all those years ago. [Postscript - the motto has lasted a hell of a lot longer than the pot!] Easy to see why I find Doug’s writing worth returning to!

Some of the poorest teachers and educationists I have met bore few doubts about the rightness of what they were doing and how they were doing it – often, ironically, the same teachers that ‘the system’ held up as exemplary. But then, the system can rarely cope with doubt, I suppose.

He is particularly adept at exposing, gently and with his usual good humour, loose thinking by anyone careless enough to forget that there is little new under the sun. In a recent post entitled The Larger Question, he picked up on an example of someone else asking similar-type questions. Three very good questions from Gerald Bracey in, of all places, the Huffington Post, the last of which is:

“Is job preparation what schools should be about?”

The questions preceding this one are even better!

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