[MD] 42

[John Carl]

Ron,

sorry to hear you're sore


On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 11:02 AM, Ron Kulp <xacto at rocketmail.com> wrote:

> Dave,
>  Exactly what I was aiming for, I am
> Sincerely glad that you returned to
> The MD. Yourself and Arlo, Andre
> Too, have communicated the ideas
> I also hold but unfortunately I am
> Unable to express them with the level
> Of proficiency that you gentlemen have displayed at the moment.
> Having sustained a few painful
> Injuries it has really limited my ability
> To contribute the way I would like.
>
> Thank you
>
> Ron
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Jan 14, 2014, at 11:08 AM, david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Just some relevant quotes on the topic.... Obedient mules or free and
> creative persons.
> >
> >
> > Now, at last, the standard rhetoric texts came into their own. The
> principles expounded in them were no longer rules to rebel against, not
> Ultimates in themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for producing what
> really counted and stood independently of the techniques... Quality.
> >
> > ...The whole Quality concept was beautiful. It worked. It was that
> mysterious, individual, internal goal of each creative person, on the
> blackboard at last."
> >
> > In other words, rules are tools, they're not supposed to constrain you.
> And they don't really make any sense until you have something to say first.
> When you have a purpose, when you have your own internal goal then the
> rules become a helpful guide, a helpful aid, then they make sense.
> >
> >
> >
> > At first the classes were excited by this exercise, but as time went on
> they became bored. What he meant by Quality was obvious. They obviously
> knew what it was too, and so they lost interest in listening. Their
> question now was 'All right, we know what Quality is. How do we get
> it?'Now, at last, the standard rhetoric texts came into their own. The
> principles expounded in them were no longer rules to rebel against, not
> Ultimates in themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for producing what
> really counted and stood independently of the techniques... Quality. What
> had started out as a heresy from traditional rhetoric turned into a
> beautiful introduction to it.He singled out aspects of Quality such as
> unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow,
> suspense, [brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on]; kept each
> of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the
> same class reading techniques. He showed how the asp
>  ec
> > t of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be
> improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument
> could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives
> authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught
> in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving
> Quality they had a purpose.Now that was over with. By reversing a basic
> rule that all things which are to be taught must first be defined, he had
> found a way out of all this. He was pointing to no principle, no rule of
> good writing, no theory but he was pointing to something, nevertheless,
> that was very real, whose reality they couldn't deny. The vacuum that had
> been created by the withholding of grades (another experiment he created)
> was suddenly filled with the positive goal of Quality, and the whole thing
> fit together. Students, astonished, came by his office and said, "I used to
> just hate English. Now I spend more time
>
> > on it than anything else." Not just one or two. Many. The whole Quality
> concept was beautiful. It worked. It was that mysterious, individual,
> internal goal of each creative person, on the blackboard at last."In other
> words, rules are tools, they're not supposed to constrain you. And they
> don't really make any sense until you have something to say first. When you
> have a purpose, when you have your own internal goal then the rules become
> a helpful guide, a helpful aid, then they make sense. The students
> discovered this on their own. Well, not completely on their own. But he
> began to wonder why it worked. And he soon realised that this was no small
> gimmick.
> >
> >
> > The students biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built
> into him by years of carrot-and -whip grading, a mule mentality which said,
> "If you don't whip me, I won't work." He didn't get whipped. He didn't
> work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained
> to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.
> >
> > This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of
> civilization, "the system", is pulled by mules. ...The purpose of
> abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them
> but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.
> >
> > The hypothetical student, still a mule, would drift around for a while.
> He would get another kind of education quite as valuable as the one hed
> abandoned, in what used to be called the "school of hard knocks." Instead
> of wasting money and time as a high-status mule, he would now have to get a
> job as a low-status mule, maybe as a mechanic. Actually his real status
> would go up. He would be making a contribution for a change. Maybe thats
> what he would do for the rest of his life. Maybe hed found his level. But
> dont count on it.
> >
> > In time six months; five years, perhaps a change could easily begin to
> take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb,
> day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory
> and too many grades in college, would now become re-awakened by the boredom
> of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would
> have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design
> machinery himself. He'd think he could do a better job. He would try
> modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel
> blocked because he didn't have the theoretical information, he'd now find a
> brand of theoretical information which he'd have a lot of respect for,
> namely, mechanical engineering.
> >
> > So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a
> difference. Hed no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a
> knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His
> push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of
> discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors were slacking on
> the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd
> be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd
> better come up with it.
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