Thanks Ed. You're right of course. The closer you get to seriously disadvantaged communities, the more you realize that they are a lot more normal in their reactions to things then they get credit for.
I posted the Texas post because Texas is modern and the GOP is white. Two groups who are supposedly better off than the local reservation, according the stereotype. Modern scientific philosophy posits the possibility that Math is a language. But the language of math in logic and critical thinking is a far distance from the arithmetic that the local older business folks learned in their schools. If Math is a language and English is the only language allowed in public schools in Texas, Oklahoma etc. then what does that make their citizen's potential for hiring in a current economy? It is a sure bet that the demand for a return to the three Rs is not positing a support for teaching Set Theory or Logic to grade school students where my daughter learned it in NYCity. It's not the words but what is underneath the words, what actor's call the "subtext." If it's impractical like banning cursive writing in schools in Oklahoma when they have to sign their signature in cursive on legal documents, then the law is probably not about what the law says it's about. The problems are those damned unwritten rules that the Pentagon keeps talking about. Having gone to school before set theory was introduced and having to learn set theory and thinking in relationships as a part of my work, it does pose the problem of language not meaning what it means in historical reality. Happily I'm a Cherokee on that (later). Consider the "unimportant" word "value" for example and its meaning in economics, i.e. wealth producing. That has a lot do with the worth of a person's life and significant contribution in my world (sarcasm). In fact it almost negates that possibility in my world. That's the argument I've had with Harry over the years about desires and efficiency. What is specific to his world is the way to failure in mine. Not that the idea doesn't have value but if we are speaking economically about my world, it is without value i.e. worthless. More like a virus than an answer. As a Cherokee Indian my religion is based in the value of cosmological relationships between all of life and the study of such. What C.S. Peirce called the Phenaron. We are called Ani-Kituwahgi or the people of Kituwah whose path is The "Way of Right Relationships." English is not quite holistic enough to get the drift but System's thought, speaking about the different types of generic math and scientific relationships, is closer to what we mean. If you want to look this up you can probably Google "Way of Right Relationship" and come up with a whole bunch of Cherokee books by practitioners some of whom were connected to my father's student's students. But if you want the European version, the best way is to tackle the model in William Harlen Gilbert's "The Eastern Cherokees," There is an online version at: http://archive.org/stream/easterncherokees00gilb/easterncherokees00gilb_djvu .txt Or you can buy an easier to read copy from Amazon. Gilbert was a well trained philologist/anthropologist. His exploration of the foundation of the idea of "Relationships" in the environment and in the Cherokee Clan structure, based on the religion, is about the best I've seen when it comes to the obvious semiotic problem. Gilbert was writing during WWII when the nation wasn't paying attention. But still, his accomplishment is laudable considering that it didn't help that all serious Cherokee scholarship stopped when the religion was banned in 1883 until 1978 when it was once again allowed to be legally practiced. Imagine officially stopping critical thinking or math for 100 years. Oops. That is what the Texas GOP platform advocated this year and Oklahomans, with their "English only" law are accomplishing. But the Tower of Babel is an accurate metaphor for what has happened cyclically throughout history with languages. Without an academy regulating the language, words like "inference" and any number of common prose terms used in math, have different meanings from common usage. Another is "complexity." Some are even the opposite meaning from the roots but most are slightly off. Just enough to throw the word out of phase with the meaning. When you put that alongside the vast differences in school curriculums across the nation in K-12 education one could wonder if the information era has not become a modern tower of Babel. Years ago I learned that I couldn't trust the dictionary for definitions of prose English words used in music. That demanded a special dictionary that runs to the number of volumes of an encyclopedia. Today I'm studying another usage of words for Systems Theory that is close to what we call, in music, "Form and Analysis" in musical style but still slightly different. It also has problems running into cognitive and neurological uses of words like "inference" and the psychological term "projection." On this list, my experience with the word epigenetic, ran head on into Keith's use of the word. Why? Because I knew the word from geology. I have a big beautiful fluorite crystal on my table with white quartz crystals epigenetically covering one side of it. It didn't help that Keith was so far ahead of the curve on the new use that Google had nothing on it for a couple of weeks after he used it. The way that modern genetics has latched onto the phrase is, as Keith points out, a big deal. But like the word "variable" in an algebraic format, "things are not always what they originally meant." This little fact of educational life in a language that grows like Crown Vetch through a wheat field in Pennsylvania, makes life and communication variable at best. Does this mean that a Texas or Oklahoma accent will be indicative of those who can't do advanced logic and critical thinking because they weren't taught the languages up to standard? There is a problem with math teaching. The answer is simple but not likely. When the new languages are taught it should be to the whole family, because without that, it does skew the communication between parents and children. We are in a breakdown mode here in the US and the problem here is standards, generic standards that can be taught nationwide. For example note the comparison on this list between rules from small scale systems being applied to mega-systems. As if Scale had nothing to do with success. Sort of a Horse and buggy Prius. Or like thinking that a household deficit is the same as a many trillions of dollars economy or worse that the cost of another Nuclear accident in Japan has nothing to do with the survival of the Japanese people. They will rise above it just as they survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki. REH PS: I CCd my relatives in Oklahoma and Texas so I won't be talking behind their backs to everyone else. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2013 7:27 AM To: [email protected] Cc: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] [Ottawadissenters] More victims tell of sexual abuse on reserves | CTV News I've done a lot of work with northern Native people on land claims and general economic conditions, and while there was the odd instance of corruption, the people I worked with were honest and very concerned about putting things right and with the welfare of their people. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: michael gurstein <mailto:[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2013 11:03 PM Subject: RE: [Ottawadissenters] More victims tell of sexual abuse on reserves | CTV News Yes, things are very bad on some (a lot of) reserves. I've worked in those environments and the ways out are complex (rather more than the simplicities of the Fox News's of the world choose to understand. Certainly becoming "Idle No More" i.e. not being passive in front of infantilizing/dependency producing interactions/legislation from INAC and their (often well) paid emissaries is cerainly a big step forward. Blanket descriptions of chiefs etc. as corrupt or whatever is really quite unhelpful (and at its base racist). Some are, many aren't. rather like bizness people in a lot of coutnries where normal rules of conduct/legal systems have collapsed or been allowed to erode for someone's or other 's self interest (INAC=WB???. 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