[MD] Barfuersserkirche (ZMM & Dewey)

[David M]

Hi MOQers

My thought on education is that children
are likely to be entirely familiar with the
quality of experience, but education generally
knocks it out of them. The question therefore
is how to reform education to make it less
damaging. There should be no curriculum
only opportunities for exploration that can
be taken up or not. Free, dynamic, explorative
and directed by curiosity.

What we have now needs massive reform
as the below implies, so that sends us back
to the problems with politics I'm afraid.

David M


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Arlo Bensinger" <ajb102 at psu.edu>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 7:40 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Barfuersserkirche (ZMM & Dewey)


> Hi Dan, All,
>
> I find nothing to disagree with in your post, Dan. So rather than just say
> "yep, yep", I thought I'd extend three key points.
>
> "Schools are, indeed, one important method of the transmission which forms
> the dispositions of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared
> with other agencies, a relatively superficial means." (Dewey). I'd argue
> family, church, teams, scouts, peers, indeed we are awash in information
> that structures and informs our values. Recall the long series of essays
> "Everything I need to know I learned in/from..." and books themselves tend
> to reify normative behaviors and norms of value. The Family, I'd argue,
> also imposes a particular normative, conforming, and anticreative 
> structure
> on the developing child. Gav made this point in his reply. Is it that The
> Academy pretends it is exempt from this? (not all, of course, as many
> post-modern scholars have called into question the role of "education", as
> Bourdieu in my last point is one example) There was an interesting theory
> advanced a while back, "Legitimate Peripheral Participation". The authors,
> Lave and Wenger, have since distanced themselves from the deterministic,
> unidirectional movement the theory supposes, but in general I think it
> provides an interesting metaphor that examines "knowledge domains" as
> "discourse communities", in the same way a baseball team or a theatre 
> group
> also are. That is, becoming a "biologist" means nothing more than "being
> accepted into the group known as biologists", and doing so requires 
> meeting
> group norms in language, behavior and thought. Scholarly articles are as
> much about declaring oneself "to be part of a community" as about 
> advancing
> intellectual patterns. Now, in saying this I realize I've gone and made
> that artificial distinction between K12 and University education. I'd
> argue, however, that K12 education has oriented itself around the notion 
> of
> "citizen" (in both a democratic and utilitarian way) as the "group" the
> students are moved towards. "Why do we have 'public education'?" is a 
> great
> question. Nearly all answers revolve around some form of social
> reification, and place intellectual level activity as secondary or
> demonstrable only as it effects one's performance on the social level.
>
> "The Academy isn't about educating students so much as it's about ranking
> them, ordering them, according to each other." Its a little discussed fact
> that teachers who do not submit "bell curve" grades come under the 
> scrutiny
> of the Academy's bureaucracy. A truly gifted teacher, capable of reaching
> all her/his students and bringing them to whatever level of mastery the
> course requires, is actually punished by the foundational thought that the
> role of the Academy is not to "teach", but to "weed". Now, while this is
> not the case in every classroom of every institution, my experience in the
> Academy has shown it is quite common. In many ways, it is not The 
> Academy's
> fault. It needs weeding. There are too many people flooding its gates for
> no real purpose, with no real interest in intellectual level activity or
> seeking truths. The skills they are here for ARE social. Jobs, interesting
> jobs with perhaps less backbreaking physical labor, and better pay, but
> jobs nonetheless. They WANT grades for the same reason Pirsig described in
> the quotes you've provided. No one has ever really told them that climbing
> to the top of a mountain is a reward in and of itself. In this way, The
> Academy is moving towards a role as "trade school", with its primary duty
> to prepare citizens for careers. Is that a good move? An inevitable one?
>
> Back in 1996, an article came out which proposed that
> cultural-technological changes in the way we interact with information
> would lead, inevitably to the end of The Academy. The author, Eli Noam,
> wrote it for the journal "Science". Its available online at:
> http://www.asis.org/annual-96/noam.html
>
> A quick summary with excepts. "Information institutions started about 5000
> to 8000 years ago when, at different places around the world, priests
> emerged as specialized preservers and producers of information.
> Collectively, they were also the primary information storage media of 
> their
> societies. Because reliance on individual and group memory to transmit
> information across time and space was inefficient, recording methods
> emerged. Writers had to be trained, and schools emerged. Writing, in turn,
> led to the establishment of formal information-storage institutions. Under
> the Assyrian King Assurbanipal (668 to 627 B.C.), the royal library in
> Nineveh stocked over 10,000 works. Documents were arranged by subject such
> as law, medicine, history, astronomy, biography, religion, commerce,
> legends and hymns, each in a separate room in a compound. Wise men
> congregated there to use the information and to add to it. No doubt they
> also argued among themselves and were surrounded by disciples. Thus,
> knowledge and inquiry were already being organized along lines strikingly
> similar to today's university departments." The author proposes the
> historical functions of the university are to (1) centrally store
> information when acquisition is prohibitive, (2) as scholars came to the
> information, students came to the scholars; "teaching", (3) 
> cross-fertilize
> from bringing together information regarding a spectrum of domains, and 
> (4)
> social networking relating to a "rite of passage" or finding employment.
> Following his critiques of each of these points, he seems to suggest that
> the future model of The Academy will be one of small, possibly commercial,
> certifications (such as McGraw-Hill University). Specialization, costs, 
> and
> the declining Quality of the classroom will lead to the end of The 
> Academy.
>
> "So I've been thinking: why not a children's book on the MOQ? Get to them
> while they're young and it's easier to twist their pliable little minds...
> er, I mean... to educate them."
>
> A brilliant idea that deserves consideration and exploration.
>
> I've been a little swamped this week and was not able to get back to this
> thread as I'd have liked. David Granger wrote to let me know that his book
> on Dewey and Pirsig is now available in the states. So The Academy and its
> role will be a topic on my mind for a while, and hopefully I'll get into 
> it
> more than I've been able to this week.
>
>
>
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