New Year’s Cocktail: Regret With a Dash of Bitters is the headline today of a New York Times Health article, which is illustrated by Geraldine Georges’ drawing about darkness posted here. There is expert advice given about the corrosiveness of looking back. It is wise, we are told:
“to forestall the traditional morning-after descent into self-examination, that lonely echo chamber of what should and could be. Ghosts roam around down there, after all, and they are the worst kind — alternate versions of oneself. . . . Lost possible selves, some psychologists call them. Others are more blunt: the person you could have been.
“Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise.”
What would education be like for students now in school if the education industry had joined other major sectors like commerce, media, politics (and yes, porn) in an all out effort to understand and use the new connective world of the Internet? We can only imagine, and doing so is a corrosive exercise.
A New Year offers new paths. For education in 2008 the path into the Internet is wide and wonderful, while rutted, bumby paths of education’s past become increasingly weed-covered and muddied. Our hang-over can soon be gone and the global golden age of learning awaits.
Happy New Year!
