What Makes us Human?

Note: This post has been cross-posted on Pete on Books.

Yesterday, I posted the following photo on Facebook.

It is the book I intend to read next, once I'm done with Cindy Trimm's Commanding Your Morning and Mbugua Mumbi's Becoming an 'A' Student in Life.
A comment on that Facebook post has made it necessary to explain what the book is all about. And please note this is not a book review at all, just a sneak peek.

Well, this book is inspired by talks that were presented at a symposium held in Oxford, in March 2006.

The book, put simply, is an attempt to answer the following questions:
Are we half ape or half angel? Is it our cognitive abilities, our use of tools, our story-telling, our beliefs, our curiosity, our ability to cook, our culture, that make us human?

These are the book chapters:

1. Imitation Makes us Human
2. Memory, Time and Language
3. Why are Humans not just Great Apes?
4. The Hominid that Talked
5. Half Ape, Half Angel?
6. Material facts from a non-materialist perspective
7. What Makes us Human? Our Ancestors and the Weather
8. Curiosity and Quest
9. Human Evolution and the Human Condition
10. The Place of "Deep Social Mind" in the Evolution of Human Nature
11. Causal Belief Maes us Human
12. The Cooking Enigma.

The book What Makes us Human? is available on Amazon and elsewhere across the web.

Sharing Our Knowledge and Experiences With Others

"I believe that children are our future

Teach them well and let them lead the way

Show them all the beauty they possess inside

Give them a sense of pride...

Everybody is searching for a hero

People need someone to look up to..."

- Whitney Houston.

The 2013 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) results were officially released yesterday by Education Cabinet Secretary, Professor Jacob Kaimenyi.
Thanks to both the overall and national schools rankings, I do feel there is an urgent need to rethink and actually do something about academic performance and the success of learning institutions in Kenya.

Sleeping Giants

A top performing school that I attended is now ranked 26th overall and 15th among National schools.
Looking back, Mang'u High School has always been among the top ten for decades, and has attained top position for a good number of years.

I do believe such drastic change in performance provides a most needed opportunity to reflect and identify the reasons why this and other schools are no longer performing as expected.
Also, and of more importance, this also serves as a poignant reminder of just how easily the mighty can fall. History has shown time and again, that the mighty do fall, with the following being both stages of decline and warning signs of impending doom:

1. hubris born of success
2. undisciplined pursuit of more
3. denial of risk and peril
4. grasping for salvation
5. capitulation to irrelevance or death

 Whatever has in KCSE 2013 happened to Starehe Boys Centre and School, Mang'u High School and others should be a case study for us all, a cautionary tale for top schools and a source of hope for those who refuse to believe that top positions are the reserve of a chosen few. Schools which have performed dismally in the past now know that they need not acquire a culture of submission and despair. Likewise, top schools that house the elite and have acquired status now realize they can no longer promote the belief that there is a special few.

The Author's Note in Samuel M. Wamae's 'How to Win in the Coming Jua Kali Boom' contains the following enduring insight:

Status, wealth or attainment are the result of endeavor and not natural endowment... people of status continue to fall from grace and others with humble beginnings attain prominence.

Now is the Time to Act

In view of the foregoing, what can we as individuals do to make things better?

I have in recent days decided to share my past experiences that resulted in exemplary academic performance for over a decade of my life (between 1987 and 1998), during which time I consistently attained top position and remained top in class both in Nderu Primary and Mang'u High schools. In both primary and secondary school, I witnessed near impeccable academic success - both mine and that of my classmates. There is something students, parents and educators can learn and gainfully apply from such that.

For this reason, I have already started writing this book and commenced speaking sessions. It is my understanding that if we share both our knowledge and experiences, we can positively influence those who need those insights most.

Today's students are undoubtedly facing a wide array of challenges both in their academic pursuits and other aspirations in life. True, they do have different distractions to deal with than we had.
While these challenges may be new, and the tools with which they'll be met modern, the values upon which academic success depends remain old.

It is for this reason that I have decided to fully address myself in activities whose primacy is improvement in academic performance for our children, for that is what matters most to them now.
In any case, twenty years of each person's life are typically spent in school. Two decades is a lengthy period of time, and worth taking seriously.

Stop Living a Limited Life

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."

 - Cecil Beaton.

Yesterday while reading some stuff on Wikipedia, I came across the following words by Steve Jobs, that I first heard in 'One Last Thing' on PBS:

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Steve says it all so damn well, I have nothing at all to add.