Natural Born Learners and 10 Essentials to Human Learning
The lack of critical thinking in the safety industry allows nonsense like the Bradley Curve, matrices and pyramids to thrive. All of the assumptions of these models are seriously flawed, none more so than the Bradley Curve . The Bradley Curve assumes that humans have a ‘natural instinct’ to harm. Of course, this is contradicted by all the evidence that shows humans have a natural instinct to survive and learn. The other critical aspect of this marketing tool is that it has very little to do with culture, even though it is branded as being about culture. Counting injury rates has no correlation to either culture or the existence of safety.
The idea that humans are ‘natural born harmers’ flies in the face of evolutionary thinking and all we know about the human capacity to learn. Beard in his book Natural Born Learners (2018) totally demolishes the nonsense of the Bradley Curve. Only Safety could believe such a manufactured anthropology to support its naïve fear of harm. The enemy of safety is not harm, nor risk. Rather, the enemy of safety is ignorance and a lack of critical thinking. There is nothing rewarding or sense-able about speaking the nonsense of zero to humans.
The projection of humans being ‘natural born harmers’ is a construct of zero harm ideology. When one starts with the anthropological assumption that humans can be perfect, transhuman and infallible, one invents this kind of stuff to suit one’s flawed ideology. The idea that humans have a ‘natural instinct’ to harm is aligned to the reformed theological construct of Original Sin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin ). The construct of fall-ibility is based on the idea that humans were once perfect, fell from perfection and can attain perfection in the future (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/fallibility-risk-living-uncertainty /). The last thing humans need to aspire to is perfection. Such an idea rejects the nature of learning itself and the necessity of harm to learning.
Beard’s book is supported by extensive research that shows that within an hour of developing in the womb the purpose of human ‘being’ is learning. The quest to eradicate harm is a quest for anti-learning. Harm is foundational to human development and learning. Beard outlines ten essentials to human learning, these are:
1. Understand that learning is dispositional and a life long process. From birth humans never stop learning as they engage with risk and harm.
2. Harm teaches humans to be ‘human’ with each other.
3. Think critically. Dumb down thinking leads to dehumanization.
4. Be creative. The key to human ‘being’ is through discovery, innovation, creativity and risk. The rejection of risk is the rejection of creativity.
5. Develop character. Focus on the purpose, values, ethic and meaning of being human with other humans, particularly through ‘helping’.
6. Start Early. Critical thinking needs to define our systems not our systems to dumb down humans.
7. Grow cooperatively. Community and living socially is the key to tackling risk and harm
8. Practice teaching. We need to understand that we enculturate and model for others and that learning is more ‘caught’ than ‘taught’.
9. Develop wisdom, especially in the use of technology. Seduction for the machine that goes ‘bing’ draws our focus away from living humanly with the fundamentals of conversation, listening and care.
10. Understand that humans are the system and that systems are not inanimate. Systems serve humans, humans do not serve systems. Someone should tell safety that.
The trouble is, dumb down Safety cannot fathom a language that can both understand the necessity of harm and the definition of safety. So it preaches non-sense to people then human living denies such language daily. Then Safety goes ahead and records all the times it’s silly language fails and parades it for all whilst speaking non-sense to people. So in some companies they have ‘zero harm meetings’ with ‘zero harm managers’ to discuss injury rates??? You couldn’t invent more stupid language if you wanted to. Even the eradication of the language of ‘safety’ is crazy, indoctrinating participants in zero harm companies that counting and numbers are the goal of work.
Dr Rob Long
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