Dead Astrologers Society

When Peter Weir made one of the most important feature films of the late twentieth century - 'Dead Poets Society' - starring the actor Robin Williams, he addressed not so much the problems of poetry and literature, but the problems of teaching and education in general, which not only have not lost their relevance, but have become even more significant today. We see it in schools and universities, and not only. To paraphrase the Pink Floyd, it is almost impossible to punch another hole in the wall in the education system. The soulless machine moulds comfortable people - future consumers without critical thinking, unless they are representatives of some elite layer, or a natural talent and a living heart that feels that the compass of life is pointing in the wrong direction.

The teacher's personality has always played a huge, if not key, role in education. But what can a modern teacher do when faced with a system within which he or she must teach and act? Become Iggy Pop or Nina Hagen, tearing education to shreds of anarchy? Or resign himself to becoming an obedient cog in a soulless mechanism? Today, this question is being addressed every day, in every teacher, in every field of knowledge, including astrology.

We are often reminded of Ilon Musk's words about his employees who graduated from Yale or Harvard: ‘idiotic tests have killed American education...’. By the way, this was said to many of his engineers, who were perfectly capable of crossing out the right answer option rather than thinking and creating. Consequently, he forced them to re-educate themselves on Soviet physics textbooks, which were always aimed at developing thinking rather than selecting ready-made answers.

Is all of this so far removed from astrology? We see some astrologers trying not only to introduce AI into the consideration of astrological chart questions, where the context almost always pushes the consideration beyond rules or techniques - beyond the known system - but also to introduce a system of test-based assessment of students' work, where all you have to do is pick the right answer and you get 10 points.

What are these future astrologers going to do when they are faced not with a test with ready-made answers, but with a living person, with his difficulties, aspirations and hopes? Whose question may sound one way, but contain another, perhaps diametrically opposite one? What will they do with the symbolism of the question chart? Is not this testing approach a dead end, leading to dumbing down rather than thinking? And isn't that the teacher's task to develop astrological thinking, thus breathing new life into the ‘Dead Astrologers Society’ - dead because there are fewer and fewer thinkers among them, and more and more of them floating on the waves of tests and ready-made equations? If not, we do run the risk of becoming dead - mind, soul and heart - astrologers. 

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