Our minds

Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/opinion/28kristof.html?_r=1&em

Hirsch on Testing

We do not need to abandon either the principle of accountability or the fill-in-the-bubble format. Rather we need to move from teaching to the test to tests that are worth teaching to.

E. D. Hirsch Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/opinion/23hirsch.html?em

Wasting Time

The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.
- William Gibson

Stories

"Stories are central to how we think about the world: from the individual to the wide sweep of history. The ability to put yourself in another's shoes is the foundation-stone of all morality.

And what is that but an imaginative process? Where do we learn it but in stories?

"In dreams begins responsibility," said W B Yeats. He wasn't kidding."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/11/25/bostory125.xml&page=1

Charles Mackay “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” London 1841.

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

“If you can’t say it, you can’t whistle it, either.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Hero

I want a hero: an uncommon want
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one.

Byron, Don Juan

Planning

"I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult."
E.B. White

Justice

Paul Newman-from the film The Verdict (1982, directed by Sidney Lumet, script by David Mamet).

You know, so much of the time we’re lost. We say, ‘Please, God, tell us what is right. Tell us what’s true. There is no justice. The rich win, the poor are powerless…’ We become tired of hearing people lie. After a time we become dead. A little dead. We start thinking of ourselves as victims. (pause) And we become victims. (pause) And we become weak…and doubt ourselves, and doubt our institutions…and doubt our beliefs…we say for example, `The law is a sham…there is no law…I was a fool for having believed there was.’ (beat) But today you are the law. You are the law…And not some book and not the lawyers, or the marble statues and the trappings of the court…all that they are is symbols. (beat) Of our desire to be just… (beat) All that they are, in effect, is a prayer…(beat)… a fervent, and a frightened prayer. In my religion we say, `Act as if you had faith, and faith will be given to you.’ (beat) If. If we would have faith in justice, we must only believe in ourselves. (beat) And act with justice. (beat) And I believe that there is justice in our hearts. (beat) Thank you.

Is College Necessary?

Is College Necessary in a Knowledge-Drenched World? By Trent Batson

We talk about "content" as if it's a commodity you can buy on Amazon. We talk about "delivery" as if FedEx could teach the course. We have devalued collaborative work by shouting "plagiarism" if students turn to each other for help or flout copyright laws, therefore leading to the delusion that young learners can (indeed should) learn alone.

If knowledge is just content and all you need to do is deliver it, and there is no social aspect to learning because individuals can learn alone, then of course people ask "Why go to college?" Our making education into a commercial transaction by our ways of referring to education has dug us into a deep hole. We would not have known how deep if the digital revolution hadn't shown us.

Learning is of course not content but a process that engages both teacher and learner, knowledge constantly alters because of that process, and all learning is social. Viewing learning as a social process which engages both teachers and learners makes the why go to college question moot.

9/17/2008

http://campustechnology.com/articles/67620/

From The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

By William Deresiewicz
in American Scholar
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html


"One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin says, “and captains of work must always be....[But] there is a wide difference between being captains...of work, and taking the profits of it.” "

On Warren G. Harding

As for Warren G. Harding, H.L. Mencken noted, "He wrote the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abyss of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

Poet E.E. Cummings kicked Harding when he was down, way down: "The only man, woman, or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead."

Thirst

"School [high school] provides drinking water--but it doesn't create thirst."
Tim Clydesdale in The First Year Out

Fish

"Whoever first discovered water, we know it wasn't a fish."
John Maxstadt in the ili-l listserv

Fundamental of Critical Thinking

"The first goal of a rational thinker is that, once a theory is formed, evidence that conflicts with this theory is sought. Searching to be proven wrong, rather than vindicated, is a cornerstone of critical thinking."
from http://howto.lifehack.org/wiki/Critical_Thinking

Libraries are Not . . .

"Writing is not about grammar and spelling and punctuation. It's about expression and discovery and the beauty of language. Libraries are not about Boolean searching, truncation, or APA, but about reading and curiosity and learning."
Ross LaBaugh in LOEX Quarterly

Multitasking

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”

"However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter." Clay Shirky

"The greatest advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur." Whitehead

Prophets

"Being a prophet is nice work if you can get it, but sooner or later you have to mention God."
Saul Bellow