Sadly just now, hunting, fishing, and hallucinations are possibly more useful in Spain than algebra and grammar.
I sympathise totally. I got too much pure theory and not enough application to demonstrate its value. Luckily I had a fascination for making aeroplanes. That drove me to discover the town library, and a parallel self-education based on need-to-know took off from there. All a bit lonely though, looking back.
After reading Balzac's "Germinal" at age 9, I had nightmares for months. I could have done with some supervision. I can still picture the riot.
There's another drive here to make science entertaining but turning it into a circus doesn't help because the underlying problem appears to be a loss of interest in the workings of the everyday world, from which most people are alienated because they never see the completed products of their labour, and seafood comes from supermarkets, so life becomes a walk-through cinema. How's that for a sentence.
I sympathise totally. I got too much pure theory and not enough application to demonstrate its value. Luckily I had a fascination for making aeroplanes. That drove me to discover the town library, and a parallel self-education based on need-to-know took off from there. All a bit lonely though, looking back.
After reading Balzac's "Germinal" at age 9, I had nightmares for months. I could have done with some supervision. I can still picture the riot.
There's another drive here to make science entertaining but turning it into a circus doesn't help because the underlying problem appears to be a loss of interest in the workings of the everyday world, from which most people are alienated because they never see the completed products of their labour, and seafood comes from supermarkets, so life becomes a walk-through cinema. How's that for a sentence.
but the conditions of preagricultural existence suggest >90% die off would have to happen before stable carrying capacity of Iberia were reached
another broad subject public education doesn't seem to teach -Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel", "Collapse" shouldn't be surprising synthesis for anyone considering themselves "educated"
we are way beyond the possibility of a "return to nature" without making Great Famine, Cultural Revolution or Killing Fields levels of upheaval, mortality look relatively painless
we need Techonology, must find a way to train technologists, educate voting public to not steer us into disaster - but we can apparently carry up to 40% ? unemployment rate without immediate social melt down, massive death - so another theme would be how to structure "post scarcity" society, culture – and how to educate for it
Last edited:
It is from Emile Zola...
True. Just shows how much I don't know about literature. The myth of the self-educated man! I guess I started from one end of the library, hoping to read it all. I can't have got as far as "B".
Haha, so true.
Same thing here, to read from the source is so much better than to read from dull intermediates. Similar to what happens when I watch documentaries about great people. The narrator lessens the value, and the object of the study no longer looks that interesting.
Be wary of Sir Ken. If you read what he actually says, he considers home schoolers as radicals and on the fringe. He is a shill for the Royals.
I see a lot of uninformed opinion on education and schooling in this thread. It is fine to have an opinion, everyone has one.
Modern public school was not invented for education. It was invented specifically and precisely for indoctrination.
Prussian education system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The father of this style of schooling was
Johann Gottlieb Fichte - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
who is also the father of Nazism. Think about that for a minute. Do you really want your children going to a school designed by a Nazi?
The school system was designed to destroy a child's imagination and his free will. They do this through the structure of the school itself. So, there is no way to fix public education. It is inherently broken, on purpose.
Modern public school was not invented for education. It was invented specifically and precisely for indoctrination.
Prussian education system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The father of this style of schooling was
Johann Gottlieb Fichte - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
who is also the father of Nazism. Think about that for a minute. Do you really want your children going to a school designed by a Nazi?
The school system was designed to destroy a child's imagination and his free will. They do this through the structure of the school itself. So, there is no way to fix public education. It is inherently broken, on purpose.
Yet this system had Hegel or Gauss as teachers and produced
the most refined scientists and thinkers in german history....
I enjoyed that. To be fair and to sound less negative there are good narrators and teachers but, speaking from my own experience, not that many. Certainly they are a minority.
Few people spend money on anything, including education, without some aim in mind. Given the choice between 'indoctrination' and ignorance (which was the choice for most ordinary people in Europe at that time) I think 'indoctrination' is not too bad an option given that the teacher can't guarantee the desired outcome.
All school systems are based on some world view or another. View-free or morality-free education is not possible; those who claim otherwise either don't recognise their own prejudices or wish to hide them.
All school systems are based on some world view or another. View-free or morality-free education is not possible; those who claim otherwise either don't recognise their own prejudices or wish to hide them.
Maybe i should have mentioned that I do not totaly agree with Sir Ken.
But I do believe that he touches some very important subjects. On the other hand - I agree alot with some of your views - Even though i do not think it's that simple. I know that the current education system I flawed by the core - and made to form "civilized" workes, that fundamentally are not meant to think radical thoughts that might endanger the position of the existing power.
Some might go so far, to ask: Are we really ready to be set free?
This one, might hit the spot a little more
George Carlin Education Sucks, Owners of America, Social Security and Mass Media - YouTube
Last edited:
The outcome of the battle of Trafalgar was pure luck. It was just the lousy weather playing dirty tricks with our ships, or so I was taught.
People don't need to know how to build audio amplifiers when it is cheaper and better for the economy to buy them. And when all music comes out of a computer (great computers that fill the hallowed halls of course), guitar strings get pretty irrelevant, too.
Yet this system had Hegel or Gauss as teachers and produced
the most refined scientists and thinkers in german history....
In all history, and they knew it. Hegel was right: they had the spirit of the world in their grasp. The idea of being the chosen people was a ghastly distortion. The spirit rests with whoever is making most progress. Just now it's upping sticks and moving to China.
Good education, like science, enables both heroes and villains.
Just a single chord, the culmination of all musical development, droning forever from all devices. A token for the epoch of progress, before we knew everything. Civilisation won't need our conscious participation. Education, like everything else, will be normal
Someone has to design the amplifiers and the computers. Of course, some people claim to be able to 'design' technology without maths but they are just using/abusing the results of those who can do maths.wg_ski said:
Maybe some might like a world where society is ignorant of technology and so exploited/ruled by a priestly caste of technologists (the only ones who can do algebra). We already seem to suffer from that in economics. It has worked really well, hasn't it?
People are far more likely to be debating economics (and education) at the bus stop than discussing technical design. Both have worked really well, but there have been many discarded prototypes along the way, and obsolescence gets built in no matter what we do. But this is all very today.
Tomorrow everyone will not be ignorant, but omniscient, so knowledge will cease to have value. Everything will be optimised. Social organisation will be just a matter of doing what's obvious. Bees don't need priests, economists, or mathematicians.
Today is pretty much over, tomorrow's worryingly different but possibly not too bad in itself. It's the bit in between that's scary.
- Status
- This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.