Stories, learning and ignorance

This is not a great story. This is a fragmented note I am making to this blog. The thesis of the post is:

Learning is story telling. Avoid ignorance.

Learning is story telling because we make sense of the world through stories. Teachers job has always been story telling. This should be in the core of the students activity, too. Tell stories.

Listen to a story someone is telling you, and tell a new story for someone willing to listen to you. You are learning. It’s actually pretty simple.

Laurie Anderson said in the weekend’s Financial Times:

“Wow, it doesn’t matter that it’s not true, it matters that it is a good story…it has an evil king and hidden weapons”.

Last week in a conference in Finland Olli-Pekka Heinonen of YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company said something like this:

“With digitalization everything is changing; our work, organization – everything, except the fact that we are still in the story telling business”. (This is not an exact quotation)

Some weeks ago in a PARC Forum in California Chris Anderson (not related to Laurie Anderson, as far as I know) said something like this:

“I find the news from my daughters playground much more interesting than the news telling that my country is again bombing some country somewhere”. (This is not an exact quotation)

Two Andersons and Heinonen are all so right but do they ask the real question: who is telling all the stories and who is willing to listen them? I assume we all agree with Laurie Anderson’s another point:

“what I find dangerous is ignorance…”

…and I’ll continue: Ignorance to listen and ignorance to tell stories for yourself and for your children is dangerous. Ignorance of the sad stories – those that are often called the truth – is most dangerous, because it meanas that you are not learning anymore.