Below a large number of short reflections on the "System track" and what the students learned from it. The "Systems Track of Challenges of Modern Society" addressed every week a new challenge of Modern Society. From political correctness, via food safety, media and propaganda, globalization and the downside of capitalism, war and geopolitics, to money and the economy. All these topics will be part of the Thought Course. In all these cases the teacher leads the students to high quality thinkers that provide a well-reasoned and well-founded perspective on a topic. The students then decide for themselves what to take away from these thinkers. No favored opinion exists, only the difference between shallow and narrow on the one hand and deep and broad on the other hand is used as guiding principle.
Reflections on "The System track" or "Systemics"
I had lots of fun learning over the past nine weeks. I learnt so much more than I thought that I would and also had fun learning about topics that I never thought could be taught in a fun way. This course has given me a great insight to how I can improve my learning and is definitely something that I would recommend others to try even if they aren’t comfortable with it at first because I definitely wasn’t.
As a classmate once said “Systemics is not so much about learning about the regular topics an educational institution offers, it teaches you about life”. I believe that this sums up the course accurately, for Systemics has covered a lot of aspects that are directly applicable to daily life. Systemics has taught me how to think – not what to think – using a bit of myself and a bit of Systemics.
What is very important is the fact that due to this course I am starting to think for myself. I feel a little more confident in getting out of my comfort zone and I learned that it is all right not to know everything. I am starting to develop my own knowledge and address facts and opinions critically instead of running along with the mainstream media. I am not there yet, definitely not. But I feel like after this way of thinking is addressed, there is no turning back point and I think this is something positive. I am trying to become an independent thinker and this course has been a huge contribution to this.
The things I learnt during this course are very diverse. Most of all, I learnt how broad my interest field actually is. There might be several subjects which do not interest me at first but while digging deeper into the material there always seem to be interfaces with components which do interest me. Propaganda for example never drew my attention. I learnt about it in secondary school as something they used to use during wars. To my surprise, propaganda, still is a huge attribute for governments to make their country/state look more appealing, creating a more nationalist feeling within society. It also struck me how much the media shapes our way of thinking. In fact they decide what is important for us to know. This is something that had not occurred to me before and I find very worrying.
Overall, especially when looking back at it, the course was eye-opening. As told in my introduction my thoughts are shaking and I think I will never forget the need to be critical on new information. I also think that I gained the skill to be critical on new data and that is something that I really value, even though it does not make life easier. Something that I also learned is to be more open to new insights without putting them down and to pick my battles in which I really want to persuade my opinion.
Since we were learning this skill by talking about different subjects in different societies, it also feels like I know more about what is happening in the world. Of course, there are still many other “world-problems” that I do not know about, but I have learned about issues in the world where I did not now (enough) about. However, this is how I feel about it now, after we have finished the course. During the course, it sometimes felt like we were not doing a lot and not learning a lot. I think this is because it felt like I was only busy doing homework, then making pitches and after that making the infographics. After a while, it was not about the content anymore, since we were so done with pitches and infographics, especially with the infographics. They were only bothering us, so we were mostly just annoyed instead of sourcing into the content and learning more about the content. I talked about this with a fellow student, and she said exactly the same thing. That while she looked back, she really had the idea that she has learned a lot, but that she had never had that feeling during the course.
In conclusion, the systemic course was a joyful experience. It shaped my thinking skills to be sharper and more independent. The homework assignments trained me to be more consistent in doing tasks. The pitches helped me to develop my speaking and listening skills. Also, the infographic taught me how to work well in groups and respect the differences that we have in the UCG and as human beings in general. Lastly, Tjeerd has been a great teacher and inspiration for me to be even better than I am now. All in all, I am really glad that I took part of the Systemic course as it really helped me to shape who I am as a person and as a student.
In conclusion, I feel as if my interventions were not excessively overwhelming because I often found myself actively listening, asking myself questions and trying to figure out how each one of us has a different perspective on global issues. I feel as if I learned a lot about trust and critical thinking in a constructive way, so being able to accept different views, and being more open to building up solutions with other people, thanks to the group work and the brainstorms we did in class together.
Overall, I am highly satisfied both with the course and with myself. Although I do realize that the road is still long and hard, I feel enriched, more acute and broad-minded. I hope to use this knowledge in my future of science and healthcare assistance.These 8 weeks did not only educate me but also changed the way I look at things now and what I think about our world. I knew that it is controlled by a few powerful people and that there is a lot to improve but I did not know that it was this bad. Our systems have so many defects and that is part-wise our fault. We think we cannot do anything about these defects but that is not true. We give those people in power the power by listening to them and by ignoring their bad actions. We should spread the concept of knowledge 2.0 and make more people aware of what is actually going on in this world and then we might be able to make an end to the ‘uncontrollable’ power abuses. For example, the secret intelligence services. Although they are part of the government they keep doing illegal stuff like killing and torture people to secure or gain their power. That should be something we do not accept. Our power should be that the ones who actually have the power are the minority. We know that but we never make use of it. We also should not accept that the government is able to do all those things secretly, it is just not correct and we have the right to demand more insight and guaranty about the truth of information they give us.
Furthermore, I got to know how to make infographics and to gain knowledge and put it into essays with 300 words. My English improved a lot and I found out that I am really interested in politics topics since the way you taught us is way more attractive and interesting than the way I was taught at school. The infographic presentations were really nice because we had a lot of different subtopics covered in one week and we were free to choose what we wanted to dive into deeper.All in all, I really liked your lessons (and the day at your (Tjeerd’s) farm) and now that it is over I really see how much I have learned. I already know that I am going to spread my new knowledge by sharing it with my friends and my sister to make sure they know how useful knowledge 2.0 is and that it is important for our society to have more people knowing about it and using it.
Thank you very much for everything, it was an amazing experience and really eye opening,All in all, Systemics is a class I will not soon forget. It provided insight on major issues surrounding the globe and different methods of undertaking it. It taught us to be more open minded thinkers, and I believe it succeed to an extent. It introduced to many of us the challenge of attempting to solve a problem or pick a narrative, while exposing us to the fallacies of our arguments. It allowed us to become more critical in our choices and encouraged us to think differently. It taught us about the world. That is why I believe Systemics is "a lot of everything”.
Obviously, not all subjects of the assignments interested me so I was much or less engaged but I wanted to try to understand everything. It has been very beneficial because I had some good surprises when I discovered that some topics that I first thought not really interesting were at the end very exciting. For instance John Perkins on "The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption" and The Shock Doctrine: Naomi Klein on the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. I thought these videos so enriching that I needed to share it with one of my friend in Paris.
To conclude, these two months helped me to wonder what I personally think and how I feel about some controversial topics. In challenging all our personal believes, and what we thought we knew, we had the opportunity to get back to the basics (who are we, what are our emotions) and build our own perception based on our personal identity.In summary, even if it made me go through difficult moments where I had to struggle with my emotions and also with more practical issues like understanding how I could use the programs to make my infographics, the course was really constructive for me.
Through integrating all that I have learned about the characteristics, developmental patterns and complexities of systems, I feel like I have become much better equipped to constructively contemplate how existing systems can be improved to be more sustainable; and how new systems should be created. This course helped me expand my knowledge about current systems as well as general system characteristics, thereby helping me lay the tracks for efficacious future rumination about ideal systems.
So yes, I might have missed a few classes because I was feeling upset or apathetic, but this course has made me feel extremely motivated to continue the thinking I had been neglecting for too long. These last weeks I have been incredibly cognitively productive, and see it as a result of having a better overview of which problems still have to be tackled within our society. Distinguishing and defining the problems is much more important than I thought (I thought I would not be able to handle the reality of the evil of society) to be able to properly suggest solutions.
I chose this course rather ignorant of the content, what would be expected of us and cases we would study. What I expected the least, however, was how much it would influence my existing understanding of our economic, financial and geographical systems. The world we are living in is ever expanding, ever changing and this course taught me who is influencing, initiating and suffering from these changes. Wealth in our world is equivalent to power; our media is controlled by the people who can afford to dictate. Overall, this course taught me how to independently detach myself from bias and how we can use this skill to analyse, scrutinise and interpret articles and reports for truth.
I found it useful and interesting to make infographics, and it was awarding to see that by the end of the course we could all produce visually pleasing and informative infographics on our own. Discussing a new topic every week was interesting, and I found the Wednesday afternoon sessions were always intriguing and informative. Even if I was not always quick and confident enough to voice my own opinions, it was constructive to hear other’s. This course was a perfect first dip into University studies and the beginning of our journey as independent thinkers. Although this course left more unanswered questions in my head, it also gave me the tools to find the answers to them.
In conclusion, I have learned a lot during this course and I am convinced that the content will be beneficial for my future academic journey. The freedom I was given helped me to unfold myself and combine the content with my interests.
I went through ups and downs, moments of disappointment and enlightenment. However, if I would not have, then I do not think I would have learned anything. I might still be on my way to becoming an independent thinker, but at least now I have an understanding of how to be one. I am sure of the fact that I will encounter many moments in which I am forced out of my comfort zone, but in these moments, I will tell myself: "This is what it means to grow (up) and you signed up for this."That is my conclusion of the course: “we are one”. And I will keep repeating the sentence I was ridiculed for, with pride and with certainty. And if my friends ask me why life goes up and down all the time and if that will ever stop because it exhausts them, I will show them the adaptive cycle and explain them with a smile why it’s natural and not at all bad but rather beneficial if we know how to use it. I will try not to let myself believe again that I am without power, because if I believe that, it obviously becomes the truth. I am just very grateful for everything I learned, about my increase in confidence, my ability to think things through more carefully and less impulsive than before, the worth that my fellow students added to my life with their views and different characters and for the systemics course to motivate me to get interested into life and knowledge again.
I think for me it was the best possible start at UCG I could have asked for, after taking some time off school for the past 2 years, it was satisfying to delve straight back into work with some really stimulating and interesting classes. The topics we learned along with the progressive teaching style made for a really great introduction to UCG. It was really unlike any class I have taken before, but I think that is a good thing for sure. I feel like I’ve always been a very opinionated person but now my opinions have so much more strength and validity. I am also much more open to changing my opinions if I am presented with the facts and know how to approach new information with confidence and a critical mind.
To sum up, systemic track has changed me as a person and a thinker. It helps me to be prepared for the upcoming liberal arts education. I believe I will be facing different options in my three years of university educations, and the thinking system I learned from systemic track will help me to get through them.
Prior to coming to UCG, I believed I was well versed in looking at problems from multiple points of view, as that is what we were trained for at my previous university. During my time in this course, I must admit I was wrong. Not only did I misread what UCG was going to be like, I misread how I approached situations. Normally, I would dislike admitting that I was wrong, but this course has shown me otherwise. Although professional behaviour was central to this course, I have grown accustomed to it thanks to my previous academic experience; therefore I was able to prioritize my focus on the skills and content of the course. This enabled me to learn to value my own opinion and to better it by exploring other points of view. The course has taught me to go deeper into topics and present my findings in such a way that it makes the listener or reader really think. The Systemic Track does this, whilst also increasing my knowledge base by changing topics on a weekly basis. All in all, I am glad that I chose this course.
All-in-all I honestly think that this course would be very useful for everyone who goes to university because it prepares and gives you the skills you are going to need in university. Doing similar tasks each week, like all these infographics, may seem bit frustrating, but after the course, you really realize how much these tasks improve your way of thinking. I think that without this course rest of my college time would be lot harder.
All in all, I thought it was an excellent course that shook the foundations of my worldview as well as provide the perfect start to my university life.
I’ve always been acutely aware of the fact that I am not a specialist in any field of knowledge. I know a little about a lot of different things, but this course has really taught me about the extent of the depth that exists behind any given topic. Without a doubt, the two weeks with the most impact for me were those of Syria and climate change. The findings that resulted from exploring these two topics went against many of my pre-existing concepts and ideas. As a whole, the course opened me up to different ways of thinking about thinking, and thinking critically about knowledge and wisdom in general.
Personally, the most interesting concept throughout the course was of the relationship between knowledge and wisdom, and how they really seem to be separate entities at times. Although the two things go hand in hand, my perception of what makes you “wise” or “knowledgeable” has definitely changed. I find it hard to formulate this changed perception or concept into words, as I am still figuring it out, and probably will still be trying to figure it out for the foreseeable future. However, I can give the example of myself: although I don’t usually (or consciously) consider myself a knowledgeable or wise person, I definitely feel wiser than I was eight weeks ago. And although I suppose that I’m slightly more knowledgeable on certain topics (especially things like bitcoin, which I knew nothing about beforehand), I feel that the factual information which I’ve learned has had a lot less of an impact than the actual process of learning this information.
In conclusion, I think it must be evident that pretty much everyone who chose this track has had their world-view somewhat shaken. Above everything I’ve learned, I think the most important thing has been the realization that it’s okay for me to not be an expert on most things. After a week of intense research, we’ve still only scratched the surface of each topic, and although this was the cause of lots of frustration initially (here I was, wanting to go in depth into each topic and really “learn”), I feel that somehow, I’ve learned a lot more than I would have in a more traditional class setting.
It’s definitely been a more emotional course than I expected, and definitely more mentally challenging than I was prepared for, but I’m very thankful for what I’ve gained from it. Without a doubt, I’d certainly be a slightly different person today if I hadn’t taken part in it.The course overall was interesting as I have never had anything like it before. The systems thinking and ideology really intrigues me and I would like to continue to develop my areas of knowledge within this way of thinking.
In conclusion, I have learned to critically think, analyse the reliability of sources, to step out of my comfort zone and to challenge my own thoughts, ideas and beliefs. In addition to developing many skills; like producing a infographic by selectively choosing information for a specific topic. I have learned a vast amount from this course and hope to continue to develop what I have learnt here and to add this concept of thinking to what I already know. I feel my contribution to this course could have been more constructive and that I should have done more to make up for what I had missed. However, I still feel like I truly have learnt a lot from this course and that I am now much more able to perceive as close as possible what the ‘truth’ really is and that the importance of educating the majority is a key to bettering the world as a whole.All in all, the course was a rollercoaster for the mind. Since the start of the course, I feel like the development of becoming a critical thinking has been set in motion. Beliefs have been shaken, opinions have been changed, but most of all, I believe I have been enriched with new perspectives and a broader mind.
The course also made me overthink my values. When we did the value evaluation in the beginning intelligence, power and success were the ones I considered most important for me. However, looking at all the different challenges facing humanities and tracing all of them back to an undynamic mental attitude, I realised that lots of solutions require more open values such as cooperation, innovation and wisdom. This made start to rethink what characteristics make someone "sustainably successful" in the future. From now on I want to focus more on gaining those values instead of improving "unsustainable" ones I already have.
Overall I am very happy with my progress and all the things I have learned. I enjoyed dealing with the challenging material and hope that I will not fall back into old habits of accepting or rejecting information on the basis of my beliefs, but on the quality of argumentation.I originally thought this class could be a waste of my time. I first didn’t understand what the class was even about, and then after our first seminar I was left even more confused. There didn’t seem to be much of a structure and we were left to fend for ourselves much of the time. However, after these eight weeks, I can honestly say I was wrong about my approach at the beginning. The skills I learned were mostly in how to make a convincing and effective infographic, but I think the most impressive change was in my mindset, especially regarding how I process new information when I research. The homework was a good introduction into the topic of the week, forcing the lazy students, like me, to get informed before pitching our ideas; both of which received consistent feedback from both classmates and professors. Ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome of this course and thoroughly enjoyed it.
This course has taught me a lot and I think I’ll cherish many of those things for the rest of my life. I think I am much more reflective about the way I think now, than I was before. I noticed that this makes it much easier to change your attitude towards something. I think that now I’ll look for a story based on sources, rather than looking for sources based on the story. Working together in different groups has taught me how to set up small projects and plan so that you finish in time. I think these skills are going to be useful for anything I’ll be doing, not necessarily one type of project, but as sort of a general life skill. When signing up for this track I didn’t know my views would be challenged so much and having your views challenged is hard, but the things that I have learned from this course are worth that uncomfortable feeling.
As a result, in conclusion, I believe this course gave me a lot of new knowledge about different topics and problems affecting our society (Syrian war, global warming, the possible collapse of our economic system…), but, more important, it gave me a different perspective on how to approach the world: my attitude towards the news and the problems-solutions of our society (and as a result also individual problems) is changing. I’m creating a new constructive mindset which is in my opinion necessary to approach every issue or threat I’m going to face both within my private life and regarding the impact I want to have on the world, or on the parts of it I’m really able to change.
During this first half-term doing the Systemics track I have acquired more general knowledge of the world, and the many different systems within it. During each week we focused on a different system, and most of these made an impacted me in one way or another, there were no weeks where I do not think I learned something prevalent. As a student and even as a person I think that I have grown, both in my professional behaviour and the way I contributed in class.
Attitude and behavior to studies is key in allowing you to process and recall information learned. If you approach a topic with contempt and dispassion it will usually result in you rejecting the information and forgetting what you could learn. At the beginning of the course, I realize now, I was very closed in my views and opinions. I did not recognize that all my sources were from the mainstream media and establishment. I also felt we had very opinionated people in Yang and the topics we were discussing were very controversial and the explanations sometimes vague which made me feel massively out of my comfort zone. The homework set, made me feel very uncomfortable and confused that opinions I once held were sometimes very complex and hard to understand which tested my ability and endurance.
My mindset at the start required perseverance. I did not feel fully comfortable and happy with the subjects and the structure of the course at the start. However, over the course, as I began to gain confidence to contribute my opinions and questions on any topic discussed, I really became more invested and engaged with the course. Looking back upon the course, I am pleased to be able to say with complete honesty that I thoroughly enjoyed what I learned and feel that I have expanded my views, opened my mind and hopefully become a little bit less susceptible to accepting media sources without question. This course has left me a better educated person. I feel I have understood more in 9 weeks of lectures and seminars than I would have learned listening to a teacher teach for a set exam about these topics with set syllabus.The Systemics course often left me puzzled, making me feel confused and sometimes even filling me with anger since it challenged everything I believed in. Although it has been a painful and awkward experience, I am so glad that I have chosen the Systemics course. It has given me the right tools to become an independent thinker, which whom I am definitely going to use in the future.