[coberst]

From birth to post-schooling: It’s all Spin

The infant enters into the world that is amazing, frightening, and totally alien in form and content. The infant recognizes that Mom is the life-raft on troubled waters and that to lose Mom is the most terrible experience possible. The infant wants to respond to its natural biological urges but Mom shows the infant that some are acceptable and some are not. The infant does all it can to do those that Mom likes and not to do those that Mom does not like. Like all creatures the infant learns to adjust and adapt to its environment.

One significant difference here is that the human creature becomes a creature of a world of symbols rather than a world of Mother Nature. The infant learns to set aside its animal urges and to accept symbolic meaning and values as the guide to ‘fitting in’.

The infant quickly recognizes that it is an actor on a stage and that the better it adapts itself to the requirements set by the social culture the more likely it will remain safely cuddled within that environment. The infant becomes a social creature ready to play whatever role is necessary to ‘fit in’.

The child grows into adulthood clutched in the embrace of the family and the school or college. The educational institutions educate the growing child in the knowledge that child needs to fit in. Should the child go onto ‘higher education’ then the young person grows more accomplished at becoming knowledgeable of all the symbols of a well structured life within the bosom of the social environment. By observing other creatures within that environment that youngster grows into adulthood fortified with the values that were taught by family and educational institutions.

]b]What happens to this adult who has been raised in this world of spin after school days are over? Almost unanimously this adult holds as sacred all the lessons learned from all the spin doctors of childhood and enters into other spin laced forms of thought.[/b]

From birth to post-schooling we absorb reality as others present it to us. After our schooling is completed we must become learners. After schooling our time has come to prepare our self to learn and from that learning we must make judgments and consider how to make the world a little better than it was given to us.

[nutronjon]

Would you like to say anything about how a liberal arts education puts a different spin on us than education for technology for military and industrial purpose?

[coberst]

Originally Posted by nutronjon

Would you like to say anything about how a liberal arts education puts a different spin on us than education for technology for military and industrial purpose?

I think that we have focused our educational system to provide graduates who can help maximize production and consumption with little regard or comprehension for our needs beyond the work place.

We have produced an army of specialists who, as the saying goes, know more and more about less and less.

Why is this a problem?

This is a problem because in such a situation we fail to acquire the intellectual sophistication required to comprehend the problems our technology has created for us.

I recently had occasion to hang out in the waiting area of St Joseph Hospital in Asheville for a few hours. I was free to walk many of the corridors and rest in many of the waiting areas along with everyone else. It was early morning but it was obvious that the hospital functioned fully 24/7.

A person can walk the corridors of any big city hospital and observe the effectiveness of human rationality in action. One can also visit the UN building in NYC or read the morning papers and observe just how ineffective, frustrating and disappointing human rationality can be. Why does human reason perform so well in some matters and so poorly in others?

We live in two very different worlds; a world of technical and technological order and clarity, and a world of personal and social disorder and confusion. We are increasingly able to solve problems in one domain and increasingly endangered by our inability to solve problems in the other.

Normal science is successful primarily because it is a domain of knowledge controlled by paradigms. The paradigm defines the standards, principles and methods of the discipline. It is not apparent to the laity but science moves forward in small incremental steps. Science seldom seeks and almost never produces major novelties.

Science solves puzzles. The logic of the paradigm insulates the professional group from problems that are unsolvable by that paradigm. One reason that science progresses so rapidly and with such assurance is because the logic of that paradigm allows the practitioners to work on problems that only their lack of ingenuity will keep them from solving.

Science uses instrumental rationality to solve puzzles. Instrumental rationality is a systematic process for reflecting upon the best action to take to reach an established end. The obvious question becomes ‘what mode of rationality is available for determining ends?’ Instrumental rationality appears to be of little use in determining such matters as “good” and “right”.

There is a striking difference between the logic of technical problems and that of dialectical problems. The principles, methods and standards for dealing with technical problems and problems of “real life” are as different as night and day. Real life problems cannot be solved only using deductive and inductive reasoning.

Dialectical reasoning methods require the ability to slip quickly between contradictory lines of reasoning. One needs skill to develop a synthesis of one point of view with another. Where technical matters are generally confined to only one well understood frame of reference real life problems become multi-dimensional totalities.