The Key

About Education & Literacy

Literacy involves both an inward turn toward self-understanding and an outward turn toward understanding what is created in the world. Formal education has traditionally emphasized external knowledge (facts, techniques, systems), while giving comparatively less attention to the internal forms of understanding that render such knowledge meaningful. Introspective literacy is foundational to critical thinking. The capacity to interpret one’s own consciousness enables the interpretation of the technologies and systems that extend it. The key to education lies in recognizing that these literacies are inseparable. Critical engagement with the world depends upon the development of reflective self‐understanding.