What will you choose – The Red Pill or Blue Pill?

June 15, 2009 at 1:42 pm · Filed under Notes and tagged: education, thoughts

In today’s schools, there is so much pressure even on a 11 yr old to perform and proceed from one targetted standard to another in the shortest possible time. Parents want their children to study “hard” for exams, they review how other students in the class are obtaining better marks and put their children into extra tuition classes to be able to compete.

There is a focus on achievement, not self realization. Education is about, how well a child can perform on specified and fixed content. Schools are chosen based on how well the children from there perform in examinations.

Conservative columnist George Will puts it as: “The crucial predictor of a school’s performance is the quality of the children’s families.”

A school like Rishi Valley once had a fluid and evolving curriculum – it was a living school. But parents ask them, “How well will my child do in exams? Will he score enough marks to make it?” Some say, these are crucial questions that all parents need to ask, but do they ask, “Will he be mindful and contemplative? Will he be able to follow processes to take on challenges he will encounter? Will he love to read, and think critically so as to understand the interconnectedness of all things around him?

It is all about decisions, choices and thinking.

As Geetha Narayanan puts it in her paper “Crafting Change II: The Project Vision Hypothesis”:

There is perhaps no better example of the dilemma of personal choice, than that portrayed in the film The Matrix. In the film Neo, the principal character, is asked to make a choice between “ignorance” (which could be bliss) and that of an “examined life”.

Morpheus, another mysterious but central character in the film offers Neo the choice of two pills – the red pill and the blue pill. The question, is not about pills, but whether reality and truth are worth pursuing. The blue pill, if we consciously make that choice, will leave us as we are, in a life consisting of habit and secure in the safety of our beliefs. The blue pill symbolizes the ordinary, the routine and the everyday.

The red pill represents the unknown. It might help us to find the truth but do we know what that truth is? Or even that the pill will help us to find it? The red pill symbolizes risk, doubt and questioning. Making a choice may mean that you need to gamble your whole life and lived world for a reality you have never experienced. Taking the red pill needs to be an act of conscious choice and one that needs a “splinter in the head” just as Neo described it, to motivate one to continue the quest for a reality that is beyond the present. This is critical and transformational thinking.

So the choice before us is to find ways of searching for and locating future realities. This is about making conscious and critical choices of method, of processes and of the tools that will break the structure of conventional thinking and create a more critical transformatory form of thinking.

Geetha Narayanan presented this paper at:
The Global Summit 2006- Technology Connected Futures
Sydney, Australia
20th October 2006

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