Christoph Reuss wrote:
>
> Keith Hudson wrote:
> > I see from today's Times that our country is not the only one with rotting
> > universities. In Paris, The Sorbonne, founded in the 13th century and once
> > France's most renowned university with the highest standards of
> > scholarship, has now given a doctorate to a 63 woman who wrote a thesis on
> > astrology (repeat: astro*l*ogy, not astronomy).
>
> Perhaps this incident is more a sign of political corruption than of
> academic decadence:
[snip]
I think there's lots bigger problems in the universities. One
problem is a whole bunch of pseudo-sciences of man (oops, that
sounds like astrology, doesn't it? or maybe phrenology?).
No, I'm referring to all the empirical social sciences which
try to predict the behavior of persons as if they were just
very large aggregates of physics particles. B.F. Skinner
was a scientist, right? The worst part of these
pseudo-sciences, of course, is that the "subjects" (i.e., the objects)
of the research, and "the public", by believing this hokum, use
their faculty of will to make themselves act more like the
theory predicts, and thus make the theory look even more correct
than it would in any case, since few persons ever have any
original ideas or act creatively.
Why do we not have slave-onomics departments in universities?
Because our society has decided that the management of slaves
is not how we want to manage the mass of people. But we do
have employee-onomics (AKA economics), because we do want
to manage the mass of people as rented (as opposed to purchased)
bodies.
The only proper study of man (woman, child) is the study of
dialogical discourse, because we are persons only insofar we
we participate in dialogical interaction. As Hans-Georg
Gadamer said: "We are a conversation." This sounds pretty
weird, doesn't it? Well, we have all been well educated in
the superstition du jour, which, for us, is not
astrology but psycho-physics and the idea that the
individual is a social atom in a mass-society social universe.
And the problem does not stop just with the "disciplinary
domains". It also concerns the modality of appropriation of
the domains by the persons. The teacher-grades-student-
who-takes-test-to-pass-or-fail-in-life modality of
human interaction cannot be dialogical -- it is
terror (which it is impolite and ill-advised to call by its real
name!).
Only the study of
persons as participants in dialog, which study
itself is conducted *in* dialog is an appropriate study
of man (woman, child). The Medium is the Message (or,
as Lawrence Kohlberg called it: "the hidden curriculum"),
and only a self-reflective, self-accountable and self-
constituting *self-*study among persons is fully human.
Dr. Francois Rabelais beautifully described the proper
activity of persons as free study in the good company of peers (see quote
at top of my page:
http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/aboutTime.html
My doctoral dissertation (also on my website) goes
into this in detail, in the specific context of
transfiguring the education of psychotherapists
to become radically self-reflective, and
self-accountable and self-constituting (including vast new
opportunities for publication of results!).
The difference between a person and what is less
than human is the ability, and the willingness,
to give good reasons for what one does, and to
be able to open-endedly elaborate and modify
those reasons in the light of any possible interlocutor's
[dialogical] response. As Hannah Arendt said, for
the classical Greeks, the line distinguishing the
human from the less than human did not run along a
species boundary, but *through* a particular species.
Perhaps a difference between us and the ancients is our greater ability
to help persons cross over the line. For I have yet to meet
a person who has risen so high that he (or she) cannot
reach a hand down to give another a hand up (although
I have met at least 2 who considered such an act beneath them....)
Our universities are as full of obviously true superstitions
as are our workplaces and our family lives. Yes, astrology is
obviously false. We are indeed superior to people
who cast horoscopes, e.g., Johannes Kepler. We
*know* that is it
neurotransmitters, not the stars, that determine our
destiny, because we were taught to believe it by
*our* society's scientific organs of "propaganda", rather than
by the religious organs of the institution which invented
the word (The Roman Catholic Church).
The universities have been rotting as least since "what
was once the leisured pleasure of a privileged few has become
the obligatory tedium of everybody".
Can you imagine Philip of Macedon tolerating his
son Alexander going under the yoke [yes, I know, "mixed metaphors"]
of taking the S.A.T.'s?
"Yours in discourse...."
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
