The important lessons... and how you can teach them to your kids.
> my grouch is that the person who can make a contemporary college education
> meaningful is very nearly self-taught. that kind of person could receive
> nearly as much benefit from reading a couple dozen books on the subject at
> hand.
Seems that way. One of my profs said that the primary function of
the intro courses was to weed out students, not to encourage them. This,
some did quite well! They did this in all the professions, save Computer
Science, where I met some really interesting people that had curiosity,
and asked real questions to see if we could think, then stepped back to
see what we did with it. And in a stale world of rote memorization,
suddenly there was a breath of fresh air! It was as if I had real hands
again. I was hooked!
As to learning by reading, my thing is to take a stab at it, try to
figure it out without the books, THEN to pick up several books and read
them at the same time so as not to get locked into one point of view. For
if I don't try it first, the books often just don't seem to make much
sense.
The real purpose of an education, however, is not to teach you to do
anything; but to give you a broad perspective of where this civilization
is, and how it works. Engineering and other technical majors ignore this
for the techniques of the profession. Sure, that is important; but if you
don't understand how civilization works, you will be a wage slave, and a
stupid one who says, so what Billy C lies in court, he's Prez. And once
you let that pass, it's so what Billy G lies in court, the Prez does, so
he can too, and so can anyone. Civilization then gets one of it's legs
kicked out, The price of taking advantage of someone else just dropped to
the point where anyone with money can screw anyone without, and NOT fear
jail time. Soon enough, subtle fraud and white-collar intellectual theft
rises; your wave slave status becomes a lot more real, as your ideas, and
respect, are stolen from you.
My biochem prof, then an old guy near retirement, said all we can
teach you, is how to look it up, and how to make some sense of what it is.
New techniques, new compounds are coming out too fast to do anything more
than that. This, in 1969.
In contrast, the engineering instructors tried to teach exactly how
to do things. After I took one class in logic design, I sat in on it a
year later, and it was totally different. A year or two after that, I sat
in on it again, and it had changed again. They went from teaching the old
sensible state minimization using Karnaugh maps, the teaching of the need
to make things SIMPLE, to using ROM's, to saying don't bother wasting
time, just throw a microprocessor into it and forget the complexity of
trying to simplify things... much to the detriment of the profession, in
my opinion.
It is perspective that helps one see the need to identify what things
should do, to design clearly, and simplify intelligently.
I would suggest that to help teach children both the perspective of
how civilization works, and the art of life, one play this game with them
while driving to and from where ever you go. That game is "What's Going
On", or "What Do You See". One example of that might be he shopping plaza
-- what do you see? I see not just people coming and going, but the
exchange of things for money.
See the trucks delivering the goods? Where did they come from?
What's inside? How did they make it? What kind of people made them?
See the chair? Where will it be used? How was it made? How did they
use to make it? What kind of people made it? What kind of people will
buy it? Where will they use it?
See he armored car taking money to the bank? What kind of people did
the money come from? What will the bank do with it?
And with that, a child begins to look beyond the surface, beyond the
present; and begins to visualize the systems civilization is build of. It
isn't a "What we see just is" kind of world anymore.
This is the lesson I learned from my Grandfather walking in the
woods. See this little path? How big was that animal? What was it?
Where was it going? And suddenly, the woods and fields were filled with
paths and animals, even thought I rarely saw most of the animals.
One of the most important lessons of my life came from my father who
use to take apart many of the things he bought, just to see how they were
made. We would sometimes discuss these things in my primitive then-child
vocabulary. That was the start. I still take many of the things I buy
apart to see how they work. It helps me fix them later, if they can be
fixed when they break down. It enables me to buy broken junk cheap and
fix it, sometimes for the savings, but more often just for the amusement
and satisfaction of Doing it, or just to see how the stuff worked.
Those simple lessons had enabled me to understand more about how this
world works, than most of my contemporaries. They gave me a sense of
imagination and curiosity. Those simple lessons, at the kitchen table
with my father, and in the woods with my grandfather from about age six
through twelve or fourteen, were the most valuable lessons I have ever
learned. I wish I had children to share them with, for they are too
valuable to lose.
How many of you have done things like that?
What key lessons have you learned, that helped make you whom you are?
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