If I were asked what the fundamental priniciple of my educational, political, economic theory is, I think I might well answer this way: “We simply don’t know as much as we think we do and we can’t know it either. Therefore, we should stop trying to create a world based on our presumed knowledge.”
Ignorance is the beginning of reverence.
In a stunning development in the computer and evil industries, Microsoft has reportedly acquired the last quality needed for total world dominance. Read here.
We are not here studying the philosophy, we see it, as part of the ordered world. The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision of life can be complete which does not include the articulate formulation of life which human minds make.
So TS Eliot on Dante
This is why I believe teachers must all be poetic and literary, even in kindergarten and even in science class. Nobody was more versed in the sciences of his day than Dante.
And this is why I believe the basic study of a head of school should be, not administration, but literature.
The teacher is an artist, giving form to an “ordered world.” They can’t pick and choose what to include and how to include it based on personal preference. That’s tyranny. They need to come to prefer what is most fitting.
The head of school is the conductor who must show each teacher where her role fits into the ordered world while overseeing her performance. His goal is to enable her to master her instruments so together the school can make something beautiful.
I’m a luddite who is opposed to Wal-Mart, wish the car had never been invented, believe gloablization is a time-bomb, and am generally ornery about the way things are going. But I still thought it fitting to refer you to this Australian article on global warming. If you want to debate this issue, this article gives you some core issues.
There is only one thing more dangerous than education and we fail to appreciate that reality because of our sentimental approach to education. We think it must be good in every case for every person. Maybe that’s true if we’re really talking about education. But the sleight of hand that transfers the word education to the word school and then reduces the school to an information administation building blinds us.
The only thing more dangerous than real education is the refusal of education - to be falsely educated.
But we still need to realize the dangers of education. There is no safe path. Caveat discipulus.
When you are done the corpse must be alive. Lit provides models/types of the virtues in three ways: characters, writers, and texts. The protagonist will almost always model a virtue. The writer might be virtuous in his lifestyle or writing disciplines. The text itself is virtuous if its form and content fulfill the law of propriety.
Therefore
1. Select the best models
2. Encounter these models directly and whole. Don’t moralize.
3. Identify the core question in a text. For example, my son Andrew wanted to know why the Scarlet Pimpernel was rescuing French aristocrats if they were so bad. Great question and one worth a lot of discussion and reading.
4. Explore everything in light of the core question.
Beware of murdering a text in order to dissect it.
When people speak of the “real world” as something other than the educational experience, one has to wonder what they have in mind when the speak of school. I suppose in that situation school has become its own end since it is disconnected from the real world. This is ironic, but it probably is a scam language.
Becoming something is fun. How to bore a child: try to entertain him.
Why have we created a society that depends so entirely and ultimately on education? Do we not grasp the impossibility and inequity of such a society? Why has intellectual labour so thoroughly overthrown manual and spiritual labour?
It is the nature of the fine arts to push the boundaries of expression because the idea can never be perfectly expressed. The trouble arises when the idea is set aside and boundaries are pushed for the sake of pushing them.