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In my life I have noticed that two separate sources of good information that ought to overlap in their interests and so provide a very complete picture or at least a more complete picture, do in fact very often have two borders that leave large unexplored territory between them.
You have probably heard the well repeated phrase: "Space, the final frontier". Well, there is a lot of space between these two borders that I mentioned without even having to step one foot off the planet!
That will be what I tend to communicate about, the space between those two borders.
In so doing you will have a unique and marvellous opportunity to share with me some of the most amazing ideas.
I guess a brief example will show you the kind of thing I mean, so here goes.
Many years ago a TV program in the UK called Mastermind that I happened to be watching and let me say before I go further that I always do extremely badly in all such kinds of quiz; I am hopeless at them, anyway, I listened to this question which I now paraphrase from memory:
"What is the name of the revolutionary school..." the quiz master begins.Now, I don't say this to show what a clever dick I am; I am not, not at all. Nor do I say it to say what a stupid person the contestant was, she was obviously not and she in fact went on to become the winner of the series, a kind of mastermind mastermind.
"Summerhill" I interupt
"...that was founded in the 1960s..." he continues the question.
"Summerhill" I interupt again
"...by A.S. Neil." he finishes the question.
"Summerhill" I say for the third time absolutely sure I am right.
The contestant replied "Pass".
I say it because she not only had had many years in the teaching, the education profession, but was a head teacher too.
I should add that I have no experience or knowledge other than that of any casually interested person in the topic of schools and education, maybe a bit more interest than usual but absolutely no formal education, knowledge, experience, expertise, or anything of the like.
So, my point is that I knew the answer for absolute certain from the first point: there is no other revolutionary school that stands alone to be called "THE revolutionary school" it is unique.
I knew too that it began in the 1960s and I knew that A.S. Neil was the founder.
And yet an expert in the field of education, who might be expected to know what is going on in that field didn't know anything about it.
Now you may say that that is a fluke, that it is appalling, that it is extremely unusual for (a) such an expert not to know something that should be well known in her field and (b) that I should know a lot more, relatively, on a specific aspect of her area of expertise.
It is not a fluke at all. I have experienced this so many times that I have come to realise that some of the things that I have to say will have that kind of value. What kind of value is that? The value that information has when experts, who ought to know it, don't (because of a certain kind of blindness), and they collectively don't know too. But I, who ought really not to know about such information, do know. Some of this information even runs the risk that I could be killed simply for sharing it with you. And I say that even though I promise you that I have absolutely no experience and never have been in any kind of position to obtain such knowledge and that it is all knowable by any intelligent, thinking, individual who just happens to be interested in aspects of the truth. I promise you that some of this information despite the fact that you could go find it for yourself just as easily as I have done, could get me killed for sharing it with you. I add this here to act as a small safeguard because if that happens a lot of people will realise I was not kidding and not delusional.
I have seen this kind of space or gap between the dots thing time and time again in my life and in a couple of years I will be sixty so I have been around a while to be able to reach reliable conclusions about this, the point is that there are areas of knowledge which I will be writing about which I think of as the area between two dots. I am if you like gap-technician which is in fact one of the ways I think of myself.
As this site develops you will get to see clearly the areas of knowledge I cover and those that I will never even mention (other than to say I won't be writing about eg Sport, Personalities, etc)..
What does it mean to be this kind of person that I describe myself as being in that little example? Well first it means that if I have something to say which neither fits tidily into one school of thought but nor does it fit into the one's that are it's close neighbours so that I am out on a limb with whatever it is that I am saying, then it means that it is worth making the effort to try and grasp what it is that I am saying.
Generally I write because I have some inspired thought that I want to share. Mostly by the time I have managed to make the conversion from wonderful but wispy insight to words on the screen or even words on paper, I know I have failed. In fact that is the reason that most of what I write I will rip up and throw in the bin a few days later. It is not that I didn't grasp a marvellous idea but that I failed to do the conversion.
In that sense of joining the dots, I am seizing on a fine dot that is just the bright spark of an idea, the jewel of a thought, and I am trying all I can to express it in words. Sometimes I can do it but usually I cannot. But those little 'dots' of thoughts come to me often, usually when I am asleep and my conversion process is really about grasping the nearest dots that you and I already are probably familiar with enough for me not to explain and then I try my hardest to explain this other tiny dot that is revelatory and has this kind of "of course, of course, of course, why didn't I ever think of that" quality about it. Simple, valuable or even priceless but unknown or unseen.
Paul E. Coughlin, February 2007
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