Archive

THINKING AND THOUGHT

“DEFINE YOURSELF!”

October 24, 2016
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, IDEAS, THINKING AND THOUGHT
3 Comments

Stop all the clocks,…
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;…–W. H. Auden

* * *

EXPERT: One who usually has advanced knowledge AND skills in a field and who UNDERSTANDS technical language and information in that field.  (He or she handles THEORY and practical applications with ease.)

PROFESSIONAL (non-expert): One who has the education and the ability to read and to understand difficult and technical information in a field.  (She or he is able to handle practical information and applications with some ease.)

GENERALIST:  A person with a broad general knowledge, especially one with more than superficial knowledge in several areas and the ability to combine ideas from diverse fields.

HUMANIST: Someone trained in the humane letters of the ancient classics, who uses those skills, or studies the humanities as opposed to the sciences.

SOCIALIST: A socialist is one who believes in “socialism” yet finds it difficult to define “socialism.”  (There are “socialists,” and then there are “socialists.”)  (One who collects monthly Social [-ist] Security income checks and complains only about the amount.) 

THEORIST: One who formulates principles or assumptions into some kind of system for understanding, whether scientific or not, or who attempts to provide explanations for “wonderosities” or “events.”

REALIST: One who deals with objective data, “just the facts”; one who “sees” practicalities, using the past and the present to extrapolate for the future.

IDEALIST: One who is not usually a pragmatist/realist, but is one who cherishes noble, often “ideal” principles.  Sometimes the idealist is seen as a visionary reformer, optimist, dreamer, perfectionist, and “romantic” with lofty goals–often impracticalities. 

PLAGIARIST:  One who dishonestly presents words or thoughts of another as if they were those of the writer or the speaker himself or herself.

OPTIMIST:  Someone who always seems to believe that good things will happen, seeing the brightness of the half-full glass, most often taking a favorable view of dire situations while predicting positive outcomes. 

* * *

In 1989, at Stockholm, the 18th Congress of the Socialist International adopted a new Declaration of Principles, saying: Democratic socialism is an international movement for freedom, social justice, and solidarity.  Its goal is to achieve a peaceful world where these basic values can be enhanced and where each individual can live a meaningful life with the full development of his or her personality and talents, and with the guarantee of human and civil rights in a democratic framework of society.”  [–Wikipedia]

interrobang

“TELLING STORIES = BELIEF IN GOD” BY SAM KEEN

October 16, 2016
AUTHORS, IDEAS, THINKING AND THOUGHT

“We become human only on leaving Eden, mature only in realizing that childhood is over.  We come home to the fullness of our humanity only in owning and taking responsibility for present awareness as well as for the full measure of our memories and dreams.  Graceful existence integrates present, past, and future.”  –Sam Keen, To a Dancing God [1970]

Sam Keen (born 1931) is an American author, professor, and philosopher best known for his exploration of questions regarding love, life, religion, and being a man in contemporary society.  He also co-produced Faces of the Enemy, an award-winning PBS documentary; was the subject of a Bill Moyers’ television special in the early 1990s; and for 20 years served as a contributing editor at Psychology Today magazine.  [He completed his undergraduate studies at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and later completed graduate degrees at Harvard University and Princeton University.–Wikipedia]

…

“The story is the basic tool for the formation of identity.

“A large part of our self-concept consists of the narrative by means of which we remember and relate our past experiences.

“Human life is rendered ultimately meaningful by being incorporated into a story.

“Telling stories is functionally equivalent to belief in God.  **

“Once the individual recovers his or her history, she or he finds it is the story of every man.

“The more I know of myself, the more I recognize that nothing human is foreign to me.  In the depth of each person’s biography lies the story of all man.”

Actually, telling our story strengthens our ego:  “The very process leads the teller to become aware that he or she is a person with a unique history of triumph and tragedy, with as yet unfulfilled hopes and projects.” 

**“In exploring the significance of the metaphor of the story, I will suggest that telling stories is functionally equivalent to belief in God, and, therefore, ‘the death of God’ is best understood as modern man’s inability to believe that human life is rendered ultimately meaningful by being incorporated into a story.”  —To a Dancing God

interrobang

THIRTY YEARS AGO: GEORGE F. WILL: “LEARNING FROM THE GIANTS”

October 7, 2016
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, SCHOOL/SCHOOLING, THINKING AND THOUGHT
1 Comment

“The sense that our nation represents a progressive rupture with the past breeds complacency about dispensing with the serious study of history, which sinks into a bog called ‘social studies.’”  –George F.  Will, “Learning from the Giants,” Newsweek (14 Sept. 1987).

George Frederick Will:  Pulitzer Prize–winning conservative political commentator.  In 1986, The Wall Street Journal called him “perhaps the most powerful journalist in America.”  He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, (BA, MA), and received MA and PhD degrees in politics from Princeton University.  He has taught at the James Madison College of Michigan State University, the University of Toronto, and at Harvard University (in 1995 and again in 1998).  He has served as editor for National Review, has written for the Washington Post, and from 1976 until 2011 he became a contributing editor for Newsweek.  (“Often combining factual reporting with conservative commentary, Will’s columns are known for their erudite vocabulary, allusions to political philosophers, and frequent references to baseball.”)  [from Wikipedia]

…

In 1987, the best-seller list included E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s Cultural Literacy (What Every American Needs to Know), “ a daunting assortment of information Hirsch says must be mastered before true literacy can be claimed” (says Will), and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, “an analysis of the damage done by higher education today.”

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (Lynne Cheney) argued then that “inadequate teaching of history in public schools is putting at risk our national character, dissolving the sense of nationhood that is our civic glue, and threatening to condemn our nation to perpetual infancy.”

[In 1987] 2/3rds of America’s 17-year-olds could not locate the Civil War in the correct half century…  We can teach children how to think [and] “to learn things worth thinking about,” to teach them “how to understand their world [and] the events and ideas that brought it into being.”

“…the serious teaching of history and literature…the core of the liberal arts curriculum.”

“Liberal education” is “intensely useful,” but “a certain elevation above utilitarian concerns, [with] …glimpses of the good … [and] rich in examples of noble human types.”

“History [should be] properly taught, not as a smattering of dates but as a spectacle of human striving…”

“…education should be first and primarily the transmission of treasures [implying] that some things are clearly and permanently more precious than others.  …there are discoverable and teachable standards.”

“The real hubris is in thinking we can dispense with the transmission of the achievements of the giants of other generations, on whose shoulders we stand.”

interrobang

 

 

LEARNING FROM LITERATURE: WHAT?

September 9, 2016
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, LITERARY CRITICISM, READING, THINKING AND THOUGHT
2 Comments

“A great work of art may provide us the opportunity to feel more profoundly and more generously, to perceive more fully the implications of experience, than the constricted and fragmentary conditions of life permit.”  –Louise M. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (Noble, 1968)

. . .

Underlinings and Notes from A Literary Education by Joseph Epstein (Axios, 2014)

“Apart from those people trained as professional scholars or scientists, we are all finally autodidacts [self-taughts[, making our way on our own as best we can, with our real teachers being the books we happen to read.”

“…the best that any university can do is point its students in the right direction: let them know what the intellectual possibilities are and give them a taste of the best that has been thought and written in the past.”

“…literature, largely though not exclusively imaginative literature, provides the best education for a man or woman in a free society.”

“While novelists may have a plenitude of ideas, or deal with complex ideas in their work, it is rarely their ideas that are the most compelling things about their work.”

“A literary education establishes a strong taste for the endless variousness of life; it teaches how astonishing reality is–…”

“…a literary education teaches the limitation of the intellect itself, at least when applied to the great questions, problems, issues, and mysteries of life.”

“A literary education teaches that human nature is best, if always incompletely, understood through the examination of individual cases [and] those cases that…prove no rule–the unique human personality.” 

“…  [I]t provides an enhanced appreciation of the mysteries and complexities of life that reinforce the inestimable value of human liberty…”

. . .

Epstein quoting Marcel Proust: “Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate instrument for revealing truth.  It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning, but through other agencies.  Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”

 interrobang