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23 May 09

Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

  • While doing the work of a mechanic provides intellectual challenges and the intrinsic satisfactions of completing problems from start to finish, Crawford knows that working in the trades is seen as déclassé and too limiting for a college graduate. And then he goes on to show how stupid that viewpoint is.

  • The first piece of evidence to consider is a quote from the Princeton economist Alan Blinder about how the labor market of the next decades won't necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: "The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not." Binder goes on to summarize his own take: "You can't hammer a nail over the Internet." Learning a trade is not limiting but, rather, liberating. If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm, or downloaded, you will always stand a decent chance of finding work. Even rarer, you will probably be a master of your own domain, something the thousands of employed but bored people in the service industries can only dream of.
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26 Dec 08

Who Was Jesus? | Friendly Atheist by Hemant Mehta

Good comment thread suggests readings on the questions "Did Jesus even exist?" and "Who was he?"

friendlyatheist.com/...who-was-jesus - Preview

atheism non-theism christianity history books

Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century (Review of Postman book)

  • Postman offers a wide-ranging perspective on events and trends from 18



    th,



    19



    th



    ,

    and 20



    th



    centuries. He reminds us, for instance, of the concept of tabula rasa: “Locke

    wanted education to result in a rich, varied, and copious book; Rousseau wanted

    education to result in a healthy flower. … Children are [today seen as] neither blank

    tablets nor budding plants. They are markets; that is to say, consumers whose needs for

    products are roughly the same as the needs of adults.” Children are not seen as members

    of society with special requirements, but just another market segment.

    Postman looks at how the nature of education has changed; he points out some

    serious short-comings he finds in contemporary educational practices. Viewed from a

    slightly different perspective, children are not simply a market segment but a largely

    passive audience for an expanding use of technology. And education’s own increasing

    reliance on technology poses a serious short-coming. He writes, “Before the printing

    press, children became adults by learning to speak, for which all people are biologically

    programmed. After the printing press, children had to earn adulthood by achieving

    literacy, for which people are not biologically programmed. This meant that schools had

    to be created. … And it is my contention that with the assistance of other media such as

    radio, film, and records, television has the power to lead us to childhood’s end. … There

    is no need for any preparation or prerequisite training for watching television … .

    Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no

    such thing as remedial television-watching.”
    • I question the TV watching skills. There's much to intelligence "reading" of TV. - on 2008-12-22
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  • What should we do to bring some sense of

    integrity (in the sense of integratedness) back into school? Firstly, Postman wants us to

    remember the importance of a historical narrative. That narrative provides continuity and

    connections and above all context. We don’t have to re-invent ourselves with each new

    generation (baby-boomers, baby-busters, Gen-X). We have a long history and a valuable

    collection of lessons-learned. We would do well to remember the story and build on it.

    On the other hand, we can’t assume that we have discovered The Truth in that narrative.

    So, secondly, to balance that narrative we need to introduce (or re-introduce?) critical

    thinking into the school curriculum as a useful response to mindless viewing of

    technology or listening to the narrative. “Wisdom,” he reminds us, “means knowing

    what questions to ask about knowledge. … Wisdom does not imply having the right

    answers. It implies only asking the right questions.”
    • This is why I'm such a huge proponent of narrative history and interdisciplinary studies. - on 2008-12-22
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