Hi Guys, I guess you should call this my cafe conversation time. I do have three projects today as well as two coaching rehearsals but I thought I would comment on the first thought that struck me about both Harry and Keith's postings.
First I wondered if that Liberal club was what we call conservative here in the US since, as I posted earlier, the term is all screwed up and stuck in history. So maybe I could ask you to define terms here in the beginning. Were you Liberal in the US Pragmatic sense or what were you? What were the founding principles? As for leadership. The first fallacy of teaching is "I tell, therefore you know." However, there is such a thing as lectures which serve only as literary starting points for life long explorations of basic principles. They are not THE answer but serve to start the opening of the mind. Books serve some of the same purposes but in a much more controlled artistic fashion. Leaders, on the other hand on a very superficial beginning level, give orders to be followed. In order to make such a thing work it requires a system that gives the power to that individual that makes the followers agree to such an arrangement. Teaching or Pedagogy, requires some of the latter but only in terms of completion of performance. Generally it is involved with the creation of an environment for discovery on the part of the students. An environment that is controlled and hooks up with the history and genetics of the student in such a way to make the learning both faster and deeper, i.e. more efficient, than the student would do alone or left to the experiences of life. There are two kinds of teaching. Class and private. Both are used world wide, but the West has generally developed the group teaching to a more organized and higher level than the rest of the world with all kinds of teaching aids and tools for group learning. Private or one on one instruction is the rule for individual competency in performance professions. e.g. you cannot teach piano efficiently solely in a class situation. It requires the individual teacher's unique attention to detail to build the subtility of technique required. That being said, as an education researcher I was involved in explorations of small group piano learning situations that were both highly efficient and subtle but it requires a level of expertise from the teacher that is akin to Medical specialities and few piano teachers can afford to spend the time and money necessary to develop such an expertise but that is whole another story. I have been involved in the development of very advanced programs for the teaching of music but they ran "head on" into both the competition from the societies economic stories that would make their development essentially a gift to the society provided by the individual for free. People are generally willing to work for little or part time to do their talent but rarely are they able to provide such things for free, except in church. Even the great Charles Ives and BL Whorf had substantial jobs to keep the food coming in but ultimately failed because they couldn't cut the schedule. Paid work has a way of insidiously demanding your whole life. As for your statement about the 1,300 opera houses. They were local community government organizations that were occasionally used by private entrepreneurs. The immigrants wanted their children to learn and know who they were so they provided the venues for that to happen through their governments and the venues were usually in the Court Houses and Municipal buildings. It was the competition from the Church venues and the loss of the children to the factories in the cities that killed their aspirations. The invention of movies and the lie of everyone's "private theater" provided free for the cost of a TV Reciever and paid for by advertisers completed the destruction. They transformed those theaters into movie houses where the passive audience was invented, and then sustained by the invention of the myth of TV. What they got was economy of scale, productivity and schlock for an identity. Esau selling his birthright for a cup of soup. But back to my original thought: Let me just say that your story about objectivity is a story. Stories come from someone, from somewhere, and have succeeded in providing a context for a particualar task. They are usually time and culturebound. The culture binding of objectivity in your case is English. The relationships between Objects or Direct Objects of English grammar. It claims to be free from history and Western science in its immature phase is bound to it. "Youth you can grow out of but immaturity tends to hang around forever." For objectivity is really "local knowledge" neither free from history nor from the context of the time and place when it first succeeded. John Warfield calls it "Trusels" but as you travel in history too many things have to be cut from reality to make the story fit. Finally the story itself is abandoned. "Trusels" are truths from one place that don't quite work in another but are assumed to be true and so create inefficency and ultimate failure. For example Mike Gurstien's comment about the roots of England's health crisis being locked in being "English" as an example. Personally, I wonder if there is some way we could keep the culture but get rid of the bad side of the class structure. Sort of like the Queen Knighting the Beatles. So I personally am more comfortable with your stories since they give me a context for your systems and also let me know whether you are just trying out ideas on "virgin" ears. Such abstractions are fun, like Cubism and the Dadaists but you have to know the rules or you will believe that everyone is nuts. Metaphors and anecdotes are also nice since they do the same. It has helped me immensely to know about Keith's business and when I've found him difficult, because of my interpretion (personal historical genocide filter) of his words which are the same as the people who destroyed my family, people and culture, I just put it together with him singing and doing a good job saving all of those great masterworks for the future and his action helps temper my experience of his words. Obviously there is a human being there that I am missing as I hear the same words as were used by the people who "did in" my family three generations ago. Got to go rehearse Ray Harry, I thought I read your saying that you taught some high school students.
