[MD] 42

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[John]
It's probably too late to go over this ground again, but I thought Pirsig said it was *the law* of gravity that was merely in our heads.

[Arlo]
You can substitute whatever intellectual pattern you feel comfortable with, the point is that we have torn down the "objectivism" of intellectual patterns but our only recourse has been to regress to "subjectivism". Certainly you're not arguing that Pirsig was advancing subjectivism? Instead of expanding intellect, we've simply said its all relative opinion, and opinion that should bow to social (often in the guise of religious) authority. And this underscores a big problem for education.

[Arlo previously]
We are seeing a culture whose intellect has destroyed its own objective position (rightly so), but rather than an expansion of reason we are simply reverting to subjective relativism.

[John]
Very astute Arlo; the argument Rigel made perhaps?

[Arlo]
I think Rigel demanded a return to social authority, because he believed it was the only protection against subjective relativism, which was in turn the only alternative he saw to objectivism. Rigel's problem was that he didn't see the alternate way out of this dichotomy.

Moreso, what I was evoking here was Pirsig's sentiment that "And from the early seventies on there has been a slow confused mindless drift back to a kind of pseudo-­Victorian moral posture". (LILA) In a world of subjective relativism, social authority becomes THE authority, and this is what we are seeing in the way we are responding to the crisis in education. We see the walls of objective "Truth" come down, posit instead (the only alternative we see in) subjective relativism, and social authority moves into control the curriculum. 

[John]
Freeing the mules to kick as they please reduces the world to a desert.  You don't mess with social patterns lightly.

[Arlo]
Well, as was mentioned by DMB and myself earlier, creativity and transformative power arise through structure, anarchy would ultimately lead back to biological rule. No one has suggested, that I am aware of, that social structures be torn down just because they are social structures. For Freire, the goal of education is to allow people to not simply see when and where they are being oppressed by which social structures, but also the power to transform and reconstruct those structures to eliminate oppression. Freire was not an anarchist that wanted to see everything burn. Nor is Pirsig. Nor am I. But, simply preserving and recreating structures isn't the answer either. "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run".

[John]
SOM is a social pattern.

[Arlo]
I've been avoiding this, and I think Dan gave a great reply already, but since you're saying this again let me say, "no". "SOM" is an intellectual pattern of values that holds subjects and/or objects and primary metaphysical entities. 

[John]
All intellectual patterns that succeed, influence and create societies that adopt them, "idolize" them, make them into concrete structures whereby people live and breathe.

[Arlo]
There is undoubtably feedback down the hierarchy. Indeed, ZMM is largely about how a culturally-adopted subject-object metaphysics has impacted the way we live, and the way we work, as much as it has the way we think. (In the same manner, social behavior has influenced the biological level of patterns.) For Pirsig, and I agree, SOM is an intellectual pattern, that certainly informed the social pattern in cultures where it was predominate. Consider that a Buddhist tea-ceremony is not SOM, subjects and objects do not become the primary metaphysical realities just because the Buddhist has moved from thinking about the cosmos to having tea in a certain way.

[John]
And again, I think this use of the term "intellect" is questionable because it seems by that you mean a certain social authority (academia) whereas the MoQ definition of the 4th level is more complicated than the shorthand term we use around here - "intellectual".

[Arlo]
Calling academia a "social authority" is recreating the confusing between the Church of Reason and the university structures in ZMM. Of course, the Church of Reason is much larger than what we see as 'official' buildings and institutions of academia. Above the library here on campus reads the words "The true university is a collection of books", and while I am not so keen on the materialization present in the language, I get what they are going for, and I agree in spirit. 

[John]
The one thing I don't like about the English system is you do that testing once and for all. 

[Arlo]
I agree, and have been arguing this for years. This is part of the homogenous, factory-line process of 'education'. It is part of the 'sorting' that requires certain people 'sink' to fill certain labor needs. It is a gross misuse, and misunderstanding, of learning and assessment. One of the dirty little secrets of public education is that "remedial" kids really get no remediation, kids who need the most assistance at a task get the least. When I was in school, grades 5 through 8 were broken down into 5-1 (the smart kids) through 5-4 (the dumb kids). In every yearbook I've been able to review, there is very little (almost zero) vertical movement of students. That is, 5-4 kids are 8-4 kids. And those kids got the least attention, the least effort, the least materials, the least encouragement. One failed test could, quite literally, put you on a conveyor belt towards not just low-income labor, but a path where the benefits of creative and critical skills, the humanities, cultural literacy and even self-esteem were ultimately absent. By the end of the fourth grade, by about the age of ten, "education" has determined who grows and who is left to stagnate. And, not surprisingly, these are almost always kids from lower socio-economic families. I am not proposing a deterministic structure, of course, but certainly one that skews the results.

[John]
One way we fail our kids today is that its too easy to pass each grade - nobody wants you in the system for long.

[Arlo]
I agree, but would extend this by saying that "grades" (here not "A" or "C", but "5th grade" and "8th grade") need to be abolished along with grades ("A" or "C"). 

[John]
Who cares these days about a high school degree?

[Arlo]
Economically, I think we must realize that high-school alone no longer provides sufficient skills for most labor (higher paying labor) positions. For nearly all forms of employment, some additional labor training is required. The question is, should it? This gets back to the question of what do expect a "high school degree" to confer? In the past, we expected it was closely aligned with employment (as we do now with college degrees). But is that expectation part of the problem? What if we removed the vocational aspect from K-12 all together, made that an entirely separate undertaking, and made a high-school degree mean civil awareness and skills towards the goal of an 'informed citizenry'. What if we started philosophy in elementary school, and tied K-12 education to cultural literacy, creative and critical thinking, the "arts", the non-labor specific skills that make us "free men" and not "employable labor"?

[John]  
I think we should teach philosophy in high school and logic in the 8th grade. When I took logic in college I was incensed to think that all this time I'd been going to school, ignorant of the basic structure of argument.  And younger is a good age to teach philosophy too.  I think it, like creativity, is a skill we have in kindergarten and gets trained out of us for adult convenience.

[Arlo]
Agree on all counts, except maybe I'd advocate even earlier introductions of philosophy. "Logic" is (as I see it) one derivative of philosophy, so I'd start in elementary asking "what is good?", what is beauty? what is right? What do these questions mean? Of course I would not expect a third grader to read and understand Kant, but the basic questions, and how we think about them, and WHY we should think about them, can start early and should be part of everything that follows. In other words, turn the pyramid upside-down. Don't have philosophy be some ultimate end-point of post-secondary education or post-doctoral work, have it be the starting point for all inquiry. 

[John]
Philosophy for the masses!

[Arlo]
How about, philosophy BY the masses? :-)

[John]
The internet is offering more and more possibilities all the time.  I hear you can get an education from MIT for free online.

[Arlo]
You can, the catch is that you have to pay if you want the 'credit' for doing so. This is really no different than saying all knowledge rests in the libraries. Sure, anyone can go in and read all they want. But if you want a piece of paper saying "John knows X" or "John can do X", you need to find someone to sign off on that, and that is where MIT charges. There is a movement now called "Prior Learning Assessment" that (basically) says that 'you go out and learn all you can for free, in any way, and via any means, you'd like, then you come to us, we'll charge you only for assessing your skills/knowledge and the piece of paper that legitimizes your efforts'. You won't pay MIT to sit in their classrooms, talk to their teachers, use their computers, eat their dorm-food, read their books, etc., but you will pay for MIT's prior learning assessors to 'accredit' what you learn on your own. MOOCs are going towards this model as well; open for anyone and everyone, but to get 'credit' for being there, you have to pay the MOOC provider a fee.

[John]
But what we mean by "college" is more collegial.  The direct interaction with a good professor is what makes education much more than mere content.

[Arlo]
This is the big question. Is education more than simply access to information? Just because everything is online (or in a library), does that mean that all education is is the consumption of that information? Direct interaction with a good professor brings us back to what makes a good professor? And, of course, a big part of 'college' (of ANY educational institution!) is social networking. Who you know, who you work with, comes to mean (as I think you mentioned about Harvard kids) almost more than what you could get out of reading a book. Its almost no secret at the graduate school level that what you pay for is contact with certain social-professional networks. People often choose graduate school (certainly doctoral school, maybe not as much at the masters level) because they want to work with a certain professor, and become part of that professor's social-discourse community. I think (let's just say) doctoral students at MIT would certainly say they are paying that money for the chance to become part of a certain, specific faculty's community, not just for the information they are taught. 

Acceptance into a community of practice, not simply skill, is a large part of what educational institutions provide.