Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.
(E. M. Forster)
Archive for September 2008
Love goes, Tolerance remains
September 30, 2008Technology, Green and Gray
September 29, 2008Throughout history, people have used technology to change the world. Our technology has been of two kinds, green and gray. Green technology is seeds and plants, gardens and vineyards and orchards, domesticated horses and cows and pigs, milk and cheese, leather and wool. Gray technology is bronze and steel, spears and guns, coal and oil and electricity, automobiles and airplanes and rockets, telephones and computers. Civilization began with green technology, with agriculture and animal-breeding, 10,000 years ago. Then, beginning about 3,000 years ago, gray technology became dominant, with mining and metallurgy and machinery. For the last 500 years, gray technology has been racing ahead and has given birth to the modern world of cities and factories and supermarkets.
(Freeman Dyson, May 2000)
everybody was finally equal
September 28, 2008THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
(Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron, 1961)
’tis the school boys that educate my son.
September 27, 2008I pay the school master, but 'tis the school boys that educate my son.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Explanation is not Teaching
September 26, 2008We teachers – perhaps all human beings – are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else.
Perhaps once in a thousand times, when the explanation is extraordinary good, and the listener extraordinary experienced and skillful at turning word strings into non-verbal reality, and when the explainer and listener share in common many of the experiences being talked about, the process may work, and some real meaning may be communicated.
Most of the time, explaining does not increase understanding, and may even lessen it.
(John Holt)
the kids are doing absolutely nothing
September 25, 2008I urge people working on issues of instruction to pay attention to the work students are actually doing. In many classrooms where the teachers are working very hard, the kids are doing absolutely nothing because their job is to sit and listen quietly.
(Richard Elmore, from Teacher Magazine, 5/15/2007)
Quiet Revolution in Algeria
September 24, 2008In Algiers there is a whole class of young men referred to as hittistes — the word is a combination of French and Arabic for people who hold up walls.
(Michael Slackman)
Children are the living messages
September 23, 2008Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.
(Neil Postman)
Again, what we would like and what is
September 22, 2008Where do you stand? With those who say that, "given the opportunity, most people can do most anything." (See the recent Deborah Solomon interview with Charles Murray in the NYTimes.)
Or with those who say, "that ability varies — and varies in ways that are impossible to change," with the result that most people can not do most anything.
Isn't it truly amazing, unbelievable if the belief weren't so prevalent among us, that, given humanity's experience of the past 10,000 years or more, there are still legions of those who believe that people can do most anything they set their minds to.
Isn't it rather quite different? isn't it that when we see every day the real achievement of extraordinary individuals, be it the fastest 100 meters ever, the chess grand master battling Big Blue, and any number of other such feats, don't we readily admit to ourselves, that there is no way we can be at all like them, that there are in fact an infinite number of feats and tasks that will always be beyond our ability to accomplish?
This state of affairs, the discrepancy between what we would like things to be and what things are (the appearance and reality of the philosophers) is not too different from our continuing to believe in God, and in a God who loves us at that, even when we witness daily the horrible sufferings of people, and especially the suffering of children, the hardest to bear.
In other words experience, even the briefest amount of it, ought to make it patently obvious that most things are not within our reach, and that God, whether or not he is even present, is not our protector, let alone our loving father.
All of this continues to have two disastrous consequences. First of all the irrational beliefs of the true believers among us continue to be a serious obstacle in the path of science, that science which has done so much more than God and religion to alleviate human suffering (the creationists, for example, would ban evolution from the biology classroom).
And secondly, the belief that most people can do most anything they set their minds to keeps too many children failing at impossible tasks set for them by the school authorities (algebra, for example). This belief keeps too many children from working hard at what would otherwise be perfectly within their reach and within their power.
Because, and this is what I believe, all people have their own particular gifts, their own abilities and capacities, school should be in the business of helping them to discover those gifts, that which is within their reach and power.
And because God is absent, also what I believe, we should look to our own efforts guided by our own experience, by the experience and efforts of others with other gifts and abilities often surpassing our own, and by the on-going and endless discoveries of science, for the betterment of our condition.
Einstein on Common Sense
September 22, 2008Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach age 18.
(Albert Einstein)
