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There’s a wonderful article in today’s Guardian by Jenni Russell, who consistently writes perceptive and stimulating articles on education and learning. There are several themes – learning, leadership, power, government, decision-making, humility, confidence, human fallibility, etc.
Theresa May is fallible. We must allow her to admit that.
As Theresa May’s case shows, a culture that demands overconfidence at the top will suffer the consequences.Bill Clinton has a new mantra. Once a day, as he told an audience this week, he makes it a rule to find a reason to say “I didn’t know that” and “I was wrong”. He takes it so seriously that if the opportunity doesn’t come up naturally, he creates one.
Clinton is doing this because he is ferociously curious. He’s a man on an intellectual journey, and he wants to understand a complex, constantly changing world, rather than being trapped by limited, outdated interpretations of it. He’s trying to challenge the mind’s natural inclination to jump to conclusions about a subject and never question it again. He says he wants to be a learner until the day he dies, and that the only way to achieve that is to have an open mind.
Put that way, Clinton’s approach sounds like eminent good sense. It’s more than that. It’s difficult and remarkable.We don’t tend to do it ourselves, preferring to stick to a set of certainties we happened across some time in the past.
Read the rest of the article here:
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