Abstract
One day I found myself in the library searching back and forth between the QP and R sections for the P books. Finally, in desperation, I asked the two student librarians: ‘Where have you put “P”?’ ‘Try the floor below!’ they replied. To their great amusement, I wandered off, repeating the alphabet to myself. Until we become senile (or have a temporary lapse of memory), the alphabet and simple arithmetic are part of our mental furniture that we automatically use to make sense of the world. Everyone shares these mental images, and we communicate on that assumption. It is ridiculous, laughable, not to know them. Yet in Moscow, my problem would not have arisen; the Cyrillic alphabet contains no ‘que’ to confuse with ‘pje’(π). In China, there is no alphabet at all. Characters in Chinese dictionaries are listed under the 200 or so different sound symbols they contain, followed by the number of brush strokes needed to write the character.1
The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction … Our task — and the task of all education — is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices … Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present antimetaphysical temper persists, the disorder will grow worse. Education, far from ranking as man’s greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction, in accordance with the principle corruptio optimi pessima.✶ E. F. Schumacher, 1974†
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Notes and References
E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered (London: Sphere Books, 1974) p. 83.
H. Jensen, Sign, Symbol and Script (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969) pp. 177–8.
M. Polanyi, The Study of Man (Chicago: Phoenix Books, University of Chicago Press, 1958) p. 60.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I 23,3; I–II, 109, 6; I–II 112,2,3. Translation from J.L. Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, 2nd edn (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977) p. 279.
R. Cavendish, The Great Religions (New York: Arco, 1980) p. 234.
B. Russell, ‘On the Notion of Cause’, in Our Knowledge of the External World, 2nd edn (New York: W.W. Norton, 1929) p. 240.
L. Brillouin, Science and Information Theory 2nd edn (New York: Academic Press, 1962), p. 314. See Chapter 21, especially pp. 302–20.
The Laplacean fallacy has been refuted by various philosophers. See Mary Midgley’s readable comment in Beast and Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978) p. 87, where she writes ‘The need for many different methods [of inquiry] is not going to go away, dissolved in a quasi-physical heaven where all serious work is quantitative’. See also p. 105 f and p. 141 in Beast and Man, as well as p. 17 in her Heart and Mind (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981). Philosopher-scientist Michael Polanyi deals with this problem on p. 139 f of Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). On p. 141 he writes: ‘The tremendous intellectual feat conjured up by Laplace’s imagination has diverted attention (in a manner commonly practised by conjurers) from the decisive sleight of hand by which he substitutes a knowledge of all experience for a knowledge of all atomic data. Once you refuse this deceptive substitution, you immediately see that the Laplacean mind understands precisely nothing and that whatever it knows means precisely nothing. Yet the spell of the Laplacean delusion remains unbroken to this day… For the time being,… the peril to the true values of science does not lie in any overt reaction against science. It lies in the very acceptance of a scientific outlook based on the Laplacean fallacy as a guide to human affairs. Its reductive programme, applied to politics, entails the idea that political action is necessarily shaped by force, motivated by greed and fear, with morality used as a screen to delude the victims… [T]he scientific method [has become] the supreme interpreter of human affairs’.
B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Bantam Books, 1971, 1980) p. 12.
Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 205.
B.F. Skinner in R. Epstein (ed.), Skinner for the Classroom. Selected Papers (Champaign, IL: Research Press, 1982) p. 217. Skinner argues here that learning demands reinforcement from others; since the teacher cannot provide this to his/her many charges, machines are the only solution.
J. Piaget, Biology and Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) pp. 48–9.
A. Einstein, quoted by J.L. Christian, Philosophy, p. 228.
T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
M. Midgley, Beast and Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978) pp. 64–5.
For a readable summary of Piaget’s work on cognitive development, see M.A.S. Pulaski, Understanding Piaget (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
M. Hunt, The Universe Within: New Science Explores the Human Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982) p. 136 f. (For a resounding rejection of the Skinnerian explanation of human learning see Chapter 2, ‘The Great Black Box Debate’.)
S. Levine, ‘Stimulation in Infancy’, Scientific American (May 1960) pp. 80–6.
C. Blakemore and G.F. Cooper, ‘Development of the Brain Depends on the Visual Environment’, Nature, 223 (1970) pp. 477–8.
M. Rosensweig, E.L. Bennett and M.C. Diamond, ‘Brain Changes in Response to Experience’, Scientific American (February 1972) pp. 22–9.
H. Dreyfus and S. Dreyfus, ‘Mindless Machines: Computers Don’t Think Like Experts and Never Will’, The Sciences (November-December 1984) pp. 18–22.
M.M. Waldrop, ‘Natural Language Understanding’, Science, 224 (1984) pp. 372–4.
See also H. Dreyfus, S. Dreyfus and T. Athanasiou, Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (New York: The Free Press, 1986).
G. Brown and C. Desforges, Piaget’s Theory: A Psychological Critique (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) p. 20.
J. Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: William Morrow, 1978) pp. 163–9. See also pp.205–11 for the effect of watching television on brainwaves.
I. Opie and P. Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) Chapter 8.
D. Boyd and L. Kohlberg, ‘The Is-Ought Problem: A Developmental Perspective’, Zygon 8 (1973) pp. 358–73. (The stages are defined on pp. 363–4.) For a critical discussion of the relative contributions of internal development and social learning, see the reprint of a ‘Symposium on Moral Development’, R.L. Simon (ed.), Ethics 92 (1982) pp.407–532.
Ever since 1969, when Arthur Jensen published his bombshell paper ‘How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?’, Harvard Educational Review 39, pp. 1–123, in which he claimed that ‘blacks’ in the United States had hereditarily lower learning capacities than ‘whites’, the issue of IQ and race has drawn heated debate. Numerous books reviewing the subject have appeared, including J.C. Loehlin, G. Lindzey and J.N. Spuhler, Race Differences in Intelligence (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1975). It concludes (as have most other recent studies) that within-group variations far and away exceed between-group variations.
For a carefully controlled study of IQ differences among children in United States cities, see P.L. Nichols and V.E. Anderson, ‘Intellectual Performance, Race and Socio-Economic Status’, Social Biology 20 (1973) pp. 367–74.
Opie and Opie, The Lore and Language, p. 4 f.
C.J. Lumsden and E.O. Wilson, Genes, Mind and Culture: The Co-evolutionary Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
C.R. Cloninger and S. Yokoyama, ‘The Channeling of Social Behavior’, Science, 213 (1981) pp. 749–51.
L.L. Cavalli-Sforza and M.W. Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, M.W. Feldman, K.H. Chen and S.M. Dornbusch, ‘Theory and Observation in Cultural Transmission’, Science, 218 (1982), pp. 19–27.
M. Mead, Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, Doubleday, 1970) p. 1.
J.A. Hostetler, Hutterite Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
Mead, Culture and Commitment, p. 61.
Mead, Culture and Commitment, p. 61.
For an excellent essay on the difference in the stakes involved between playing games and living one’s life, see Mary Midgley, ‘The Game Game’, Chapter 8 in Heart and Mind (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981).
Mead, Culture and Commitment, p. 87.
T. Marshall, ‘In Britain Today, Fair Play is Passé’, Los Angeles Times (4 August 1987) pp. 1, 15. Social critic George Mikes is quoted as saying: ‘Rather than being good but fair losers, I believe Britain today would rather be a land of shame-faced winners’.
R. Lamm, Governor of Colorado, ‘Promoting Finitude’, The Amicus Journal (Summer 1980) p. 7.
N.H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, vol. 1 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1969) p. 333.
G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1949). Throughout his life, Orwell was highly critical of the manner in which politicians used language to manipulate the public. In this masterpiece — his last — he foresaw how the coming technology of television could become the supreme agency of political control.
P. Wright (with P. Greengrass), Spycatcher (New York: Viking Press, 1987). This book by a former member of the British secret service was banned in Britain by Prime Minister Thatcher’s government on the grounds of containing official ‘secret’ information, despite its widespread publication abroad.
N. Cousins, ‘Iran-Contra: The No. 1 Question’, Christian Science Monitor (19 August 1987) p. 13.
The 25th anniversary issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (November-December 1986) was devoted to the recent history and current status of American journalism. Much of what follows is gleaned from an article by James Boylan, ‘Declarations of Independence’, pp. 29–45.
Boylan, ‘Declarations’, quoted on pp. 34–5. Lippmann spoke these words at the International Press Institute in London, 27 May 1965.
Boylan, ‘Declarations’, p.44. O’Neill’s address as retiring president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors was given in May 1982.
Boylan, ‘Declarations’, p. 44.
M. Parenti, Inventing Reality (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986) pp. 232–4.
This information came out in the testimony of Secretary of State George Shultz during the televised Congressional Iran-Contra hearings in the summer of 1987.
Boylan, ‘Declarations’, p. 45.
For an account of the degeneration in quality of televised news on CBS see Peter McCabe, Bad News at Black Rock: The Sell-Out of CBS News (New York: Arbor House, 1987).
Quoted in Parenti, Inventing Reality, pp. 52–3.
H. Mayer, ‘The Oppressed Press’, The Threepenny Review (Winter 1987) p. 4.
B. Mehl, ‘Ancient Greece: The Search for Community’, Chapter 4 in Classical Educational Ideas (Columbus, OH: C.E. Merrill, 1972) pp. 29–55; quote is from p. 33.
L.S. Stavrianos, The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976) pp. 4 ff.
H.S. Commager, The Empire of Reason (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978) p. 226.
P.L. Ford (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892–1899) vol. 10, p. 161. Letter to William C. Jarvis, 28 September 1820.
S.S. Wolin, ‘Higher Education and the Politics of Knowledge’, democracy, 1 (2) (1981) pp. 38–52.
Many Americans are shocked to discover Jefferson’s vision of a grassroots democracy was not quite as they supposed. Wolin, ‘Higher Education’, discusses the elitist attitudes of the various Founding Fathers (p.41). For Jefferson’s ideas, see Ford (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson vol. 3, pp. 235–55, ‘Notes on the State of Virginia. Query XIV. The administration of justice and the description of the laws?’ (especially p. 252).
Wolin, ‘Higher Education’, p.44.
P.C. Violas, The Training of the Urban Working Class: A History of Twentieth Century American Education (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1978) p. 230. A revealing account of how Americans have been educated.
M. Parenti, Democracy for the Few (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983) p. 42.
F. FitzGerald, America Revised (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1979) p. 151.
Sloan Commission on Government and Higher Education, A Program for Renewed Partnership (Boston: Ballinger, 1980) p. 3. In the 1980s, similar events have begun to take place in local schools, where corporations, banks and other private organisations have been offering financial support and teaching aids, all of them stamped in some fashion with the company’s name or logo. See Parenti, Democracy for the Few, p. 42, footnote 4, and also Science 225 (1984) p. 1456, for further citations of the role of corporations in the American classroom.
A. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
J. Marmor, ‘Psychiatry and the Survival of Man’, Saturday Review (22 May 1971) pp. 18–19, 53, 77.
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Clark, M.E. (1989). On Acquiring a Worldview. In: Ariadne’s Thread. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20077-1_8
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