> Ed Weick wrote:
>
[snip]
> Real world issues don�t often come in a way that make the tools of
> economics directly applicable. Mostly they come as very difficult
> questions.
[snip]
In all seriousness, I have always treated *philosophy* as
something I expected to be pretty directly applicable
to real world issues -- and philosophy is supposed to
be much more "abstract" and "other worldly" than
*economics*....
[snip]
> So, to end this, I would suggest that we not get too hung up on the
> "nature" of something like economics as a received body of thought or
> theory. Certainly, one should not hesitate to question its premises.
> But to me the important question is whether what one learned in
> academe has helped one to think and solve problems. Even though I have
> not drawn a single indifference curve since leaving the classroom, I
> would answer this in the affirmative.
>
> Ed Weick
You seem to have made the best of what was less than the
best, and, in the process, described what the best would be:
The best education would not focally teach relatively
useless stuff to provide truly valuable skills as a
fringe benefit/side effect/externality/etc.
Rather, the
best (or even just acceptable...) education would
focally teach those valuable skills, and the meta-skills
to enable the student to best further improve his or her
skills and understanding thru the student's own
ever-more-self-empowering consciously self-directing
initiative.
"Indirection" -- teaching relatively useless
theory, etc. -- would only
be used to the extent that directly teaching
a given aspect of the genuinely valuable skills proved in practice
to fall on "ears that hear not and/or eyes that do not see",
*AND*, whenever such indirect instruction/mentoring
cannot be avoided, the teacher and learner would as quickly
as possible shift from this kind of mystifying
social praxis to *studying* the structure of such
indirect learning, to help the learner acquire
"perspective" and meta-learning prowess.
In an age where knowledge is safely stored in
printed books, the only information a learner
should ever be required to "learn" (i.e., to
cause his or her memory to serve as an ersatz
book) is information that the learner
needs to be able to use the information in the
books -- one presumably cannot do differential
equations without actually learning some of the
contect of the books about elementary algebra
and calculus.
I find testing in general problematic, but
certainly "open book" tests are a step or at
least a twitch in a constructive direction....
Now about this:
Learning is medieval,
Learning about learning is modern/postmodern,
and learning about learning about learning [...]
is appropriate investment of the so brief
life-time of ourselves and persons we
care about.
Edmund Husserl saw the constructive destiny of
"the West" as the overcoming of all forms of
"life lived in finitude" and our universal
transfiguration of our life into the pursuit
of infinite tasks [presumably in the
good company of good friends, a la
Rabelais...]....
To ask of ourselves the question Bernard Lewis
says haunts Islam vis-a-vis us:
Where did we go wrong?
"Yours in discourse [which cannot
exist as an object of grading...]...."
\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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