Keith Hudson wrote:
Brad,
As is so often the case, you've hit the nail right on the head. The modern
education system for most young people is a travesty and, to the dullest
and the brightest (that is, brighter than their teachers), a gross injustice.
Also, there are different *kinds* of brightness. I had a fairly
high IQ: I could answer more and more obscure multiple choice
questions per hour than most of the other kids. But there
were probably others whose horsepower rating would have
been even higher than mine.
My particular gifts lay more in the direction of connoisseurship
and being both able and desirous of distinguishing quality
from lack of quality. I didn't need more multiple choice
questions to answer, but rather in depth leisured, thoughtful
exposure to meaning-full cultural life and its products.
Maybe I should have been apprenticed (at age ca. 8?) to a museum director
or a philosophy professor -- but in our society persons
do not become either museum directors of philosophy professors
through apprenticeship -- which may be part of the problem.
I suspect that, you loved junior school up to puberty but hated it
afterwards. That was my experience, anyway.
How can I describe not being aware that there was any alternative?
I didn't ever like school, but I didn't think: "This is really awful",
either, because I could not imagine any alternative except
dying of starvation abandoned in the street (that I could
vaguely imagine, probably because one of the ways my
parents tried to manipulate me into showing them more of the
worship they expected from their child was by, when I was
age 5, my mother pretending to be leaving the home because
I didn't show her enough love. Since I had nowhere else to
go, the threat of abandonment frightened me, just like
Galileo was frightened by being shown the
instruments of torture.
Ever since I got out of college, I have never been
able to imagine how I got through my schooling without failing
or going mad. I sometimes use the battery-and-generator
image: I must have been born with a big battery, since
the generator wasn't bringing any current in to
recharge it. As for "puberty", it is only in a
clinical sense that I had one. The message was somehow
conveyed to me that, as one doctor at Penn State's
student health department told me (I can no longer recall
the pithy eloquence of his damnation):
Different persons have different roles in life.
Success with women is not one of yours.
It was late in life that I discovered that persons could
be intelligent and culturally accomplished *and*
be sexually fulfilled, too. Freud's theory of "sublimation"
really described my less-than-/defective-lifeworld (Abwelt).
I can only hope that my blind man's experience of the
elephant was perhaps of an infected, suppurating sore
somewhere on its body which, although
it was quite large enough that its
pus soaked me through and through, the sore had no
effect on the elephant's health, and, indeed, was so
relatively small that the elephant didn't know it
was there and would have gone to the doctor and
had it treated if the elephant had discovered it.
My preparatory schooling and Yale eduation taught me that
I, like Paolo Freire's illiterate Brazillean
peasants, was less than an animal because at least
animals had value to the masters so they treated them
fairly well. We may speculate that George W Bush's
experience of Yale (he was in the same
"class" as I was...) did not teach him the same lesson.
\brad mccormick
Keith
At 16:35 01/02/03 -0500, you wrote:
Harry Pollard wrote:
Karen,
You know the old saw about either giving a hungry man a fish, or
teaching him how to fish.
'Tis the same with kids. You can either "larn" them - or you can teach
them how to learn.
My experience in observing hundreds of high school is that there is not
much learning how to learn involved in education. For example they don't
learn how to use the library, they "do" library.
An important part of learning how to learn is the urge to learn. This is
dampened rather than enthused in the modern high school.
[snip]
This sounds good to me. But how far are you willing to go?
As a child, every assignment that was imposed on me just
stifled me and ultimately made me resentful.
Every grade taught me that
people could hurt me, which my parents had already
amply demonstrated. I'm not sure what would have been
best for me, but one option would have been to make
me a member of the faculty
(at age, e.g., 12 if not earlier...)
so I could teach instead
of stew.
It probably doesn't prove anything that
finally at age about 45 I got an opportunity to do a
major project 100% my way (my dissertation), and I
*loved* it. Maybe I needed to be tortured for
45 years in order to be able to learn at age 45? (I
doubt this, but it is possible, just like the big
spot on Jupiter may have been the thing that enabled
me to do my dissertation....)
My point is that there are *exceptions* out there,
and, unless one wants to repeat the lesson of
Bertolt Brecht's play _The Exception and the Rule_
(which I will be glad to explain if anyone needs to
learn it because it is a very important lesson),
then one may need to do very unusual things with
very unusual people.
**************** SEXY *******************
Are you into nurturing young persons' sexual
pleasure? If not, then please have the decency
to not use the word "sexy" in this context.
There are at least 2 kinds of sexual abuse. One
kind has been in the news a lot these days. But there
is another kind which gets off on repressing the
child's sexuality. In all sincerity, if I could
have been sure I would not get a venereal disease
from it, I would rather have been raped by my
teachers than repressed as I was by them. I mean
this entirely seriously. Never again.
\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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Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
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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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