Education,
Part 1c
Use
Your Head
The fourth item in the first part of the ten-week Communist
University “Education” course is our own “conspectus” (overview or synopsis) of
Tony Buzan’s book, “Use Your Head” (download linked below).
We have
sometimes been defensive about the inclusion of this book in a Communist course.
The author Buzan does not propose, or proceed from, any overt political
premises. If anything he appears at first sight to resemble a utilitarian
bourgeois “management guru” or “motivational speaker”. What makes his work
stand out from the others of that kind is its great practical effectiveness,
and not any obvious political aspect.
Yet, after
all the years of forcing Buzan’s work to cohabit with Marxist texts, it becomes
clearer to this VC why it fits in so well: It is dialectical! And it is
intentional! Therefore it is Freirean, whether consciously or unconsciously.
From a
practical point of view, Buzan’s appeal is that he offers assistance with
faster, more purposeful reading; with memorising; and with note-taking, particularly
using his invention, the “mind-map” technique, of which an example is given
above. These techniques are just what students need to help them get through
their studies, and just what conventional education often failed to give them.
Students used
to be obliged to try to learn before having learned how to learn. Buzan filled this gap very well.
But what
underlies Buzan’s approach? It is not that he was lucky to stumble upon three
techniques, like a prospector discovering diamonds. No. What distinguishes the
mind-map, in particular, from other forms of note-taking characterised by lists
and bullet-points, is that it begins and ends as a “unity and struggle of
opposites”. It is a representation, in one glance, of the way in which any
phenomenon is the product, or resultant, of many abstract dynamic forces, or
vectors, pulling in different directions.
The
mind-map is a very good illustration of exactly what is meant by “dialectics”.
The other
main characteristic of Buzan’s approach is its “intentionality”, to borrow a
term from Paulo Freire’s vocabulary. Towards the end of Chapter 1 of Freire’s “The
Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, Freire quotes Alvaro Vieira Pinto saying that
intentionality is “the fundamental property
of consciousness”, remarking that this concept is “of great importance for the understanding of a problem-posing
pedagogy”.
Buzan’s
approach is full of intentionality. There is no question, for Buzan, of
wandering about, learning for learning’s sake, in a random, eclectic way. Buzan
says that you must be looking for a result.
Karl Marx,
in the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, said that while the philosophers
have interpreted it, the point is to change the world.
Thus
intentionality, as well as dialectics and dialogue, are common and basic themes
in Freire, Buzan and Marx.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Tony Buzan, Use Your Head, 1974, Conspectus by D
Tweedie.
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