June 3: What I blathered in a recent blog entry regarding schools and my responses to endwar's comments on what I blathered in purple, his responses in red:
Not that schools are not of value to a society. We need them to free adults from children for at least part of most days. They are effective as conformity factories, too, for they do succeed fairly well in properly indoctrinating the less intelligent (who do need guidance, else they can get in the way of others, and even sometimes cause damage)--and in innoculating the intelligent against indoctrination. So far as valid learning goes, I believe schools can and often do attract genuine teachers to work in them, and facilitate the storage and use of valuable learning tools like books and computers. Hence, they can make certain kinds of learning easier and more fun for the few capable of significant learning.
Schools also provide employment for certain kinds of people unable to do anything else society would be willing to pay them for (I'm one such)--until they've been dead a generation or more, especially in colleges. Speaking of colleges, they are probably essential, not for teaching, but because of the way even our relatively free society is set up, some kind of official institutions are necessary for licensing, and for funding certain kinds of expensive research--astronimical, for instance. They would not be required in a free society, but a free society is probably an impossible ideal, at least for a few more centuries.
The first two sentences propose school as a kind of daycare, which at this time probably is needed, since both parents typically have to work, or with so many single mothers. The next part, about students needing indoctrination and others needing inoculation against it, is odd, though i can sort of see it. The stumbling block is how do you tell the "intelligent" from the "unintelligent"? Should that be "imaginative" and "unimaginative"? "self-directed"? I'm not sure that intelligence is the entire issue here. Also, if the two student constituencies can be identified, could the school experience for each be tailored to their needs?
Haw, endwar, telling the intelligent from the unintelligent is as easy as telling poetry from non-poetry--for me. Except at the border between the two kinds. By my definition of intelligence--which would certainly include imagination. Saying a person without imagination is intelligent seems to me as silly as saying a drunk is intelligent. Spending your waking hours drunk is stupid, so a drunk can't be intelligent. We all know rote knowers without imagination, and they have their uses, but I can't call them intelligent. Not sure what I'd call them.
Of course, I believe many people have special, valuable mental abilities, but I, no doubt idiosyncratically, would not call them intelligent. If I weren't crackerbarreling, as in the entry involved and this one, I'd say a lot more on what I consider intelligence. In fact, I hope to write a book on it--and have written an outline and fairly substantial notes toward just that. I think eventually, all mental abilities, and intelligence by whatever definition, will be genetically recognizable. I think more than two "constituencies" would be found.
Those two constituencies, by the way, aren't really constituencies but victim groups. The members of one need to be indoctrinated, from society's point of view. The members of the other don't "need" to be innoculated against indoctrination, but I (perhaps partly in jest) suggested (or intended to suggest) that schools helped them by innocuating them against indoctrination--simply by exposing them to it. One difference between the truly intelligent and those not so intelligent is that the former can recognize and learn defenses against indoctrination.
To be less contentious, I'd probably call those automatically absorbing the indoctrination schools subject them to as utilitarianly intelligent, those superior to it creatively intelligent, and those inferior to it (too dumb to be taught) unintelligent.
I think schools should tailor their wares to individuals much better than they do now. What usually happens to a great extent (and large generalities are silly since, for example, there are lots of teachers who are not indoctrinators) is that all students are subjected to indoctrination of various kinds. Some absorb it and go on to become society's worker bees--at many levels up to Ph. D. occupations; some can absorb it but reject it and go on to become the future's worker bees; some can't absorb it and go on to factory work, or less.
Which reminds me that I left out one function of schools: to act as a vocational screening house for industry and government, ranking each graduate in level of absorbed indoctrination, and indicating what indoctrination was absorbed. (Not that everything one might be indoctrinated in is necessarily bad.)
Next paragraph -- "astronomical" is misspelled, and you may be better saying "astronomy".
Interesting. Not the spelling error (which I hope I remember to fix) but the use of a noun as an adjective. At first I thought why? But I never refer to "chemical ideas," for instance.
Would a free society pay enough to support astronomy research, though? There is increasing pressure on colleges to be self-sufficient. For engineering professors to bring in enough research grant cash so that the overhead covers their salaries, thus keeping the program solvent. Lots of emphasis on what sort of patentable research can be generated. Universities are becoming less a shelter for society's intelligent misfits from the ravages of market capitalism than they were. And many professions require a lot of specialized training -- engineers, doctors, etc. -- that the university system provides. Would these people in a free society learn as apprentices instead?
Huge questions, these. First off, it would depend on the kind of free society we're talking about. In my utopia, private tutors would teach a lot of specialists. And the Internet! Also apprenticeship arrangements. There would still be schools, some just as they are now--except that there would be no laws requiring doctors or the like to have degrees from them. There would be private rating services that would rate people calling themselves doctors that patients could sign up with. These would probably be adjuncts of insurance companies. Sign up with Bob's Insurance company and your medical expenses would be paid for--but you'd have to use Dr. endwar. Etc. I have given all this thought, but am not up to saying more about it here.
|
Here's this again because of:
May 7: If you are trying to divide "garden" into "grammar", shouldn't that be ")" rather than "(" in the division sign? "(" doesn't look right.
It isn't. Odd that I completely missed it. I like the way it looks, but it's wrong, so I'll change it here. Maybe somewhere else it can be used to metaphorical effect somehow. . . .
I think that catches me up.
endwar
Much thanks, endwar. And I have another easy blog entry out of the way. By the way, I haven't forgotten the "formulas" of Nico Vassilakis's that I was going to discuss. I'm ridiculously out-of-wack in many ways, again, but will get back to them before too long.
|
|
