The Future of Education

Khaled Hosseini chooses to begin the narration of “The Kite Runner” from the occurrence of an intense emotion that catapulted the protagonist towards a distant frame of life. While he starts remembering his childhood, his first thought goes to the intimacy shared with a friend through the experience of a game [1]. This narrative passage could be a pretext to reflect on the potential impact which a ludic experience can cause along the path of growth. The paragraph contains a suggestive game of connections, in which the term “light” acts as a fil rouge, linking the reflection of sunlight through a shard of mirror with the one flickering through the leaves. Through its accidental protagonism, “light” becomes a metaphor of clarity, of cloudlessness, of divertion from the immobilizing tangle of rational thoughts. That ray of sunshine creates a bridge between the sky and the earth, keeping the protagonists in a state of flow [2]. It is a “light” that shows the “lightness” of a moment of leisure, in counterweight to the heaviness of duty. When it is “enlighting”, a game itself becomes a paradesha: a «circumscribed place in which there is a time that has got the quality of being» [3]: secluded, separated from the repetitive actions of daily life and reserved for spiritual refinement. It is right in its shamanic circle [4] that the game assumes a preparatory function of projection towards a higher awareness and it can express formerly unrevealed or repressed manifold parts of oneself. In 1938, Huizinga claimed the value of the game for the genesis of human culture [5]. In this perspective, an ancestral, transcultural expression of the game that generates non-transmittable understanding and knowledge is the practice of divination. Considering the role it has been playing in many cultural contexts, I think that the link between divination games and knowledge would deserve to be investigated from an educational perspective. Mistakenly considered as an interlude between significant moments, the game shows itself to be an effective learning experience. Observing it in this “light”, it can be considered as a chance for an exploration of the often disregarded opportunities afforded by human life.

Keywords: light, knowledge, divination;

References:
[1] Hosseini K., The Kite Runner. Riverhead Books, NY, 2003, p. 3.
[2] Csikszentmihalyi M., Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. Harper Perennial, NY, 2008.
[3] Antonacci, F., Puer Ludens. Antimanuale per poeti, funamboli e guerrieri. FrancoAngeli, Milano, 2012, p. 56. (TdA).
[4] Eliade M., Lo sciamanesimo e le tecniche dell’estasi. Edizioni Mediterranee, Roma, 2005.
[5] Huizinga J., Homo Ludens, Einaudi, Torino, 2002