[FRIAM] Open Letter

[Nick Thompson]

Glen, 

It has come to the point where your silence would be a comment louder than anything you might say, so I guess you are stuck with making a comment, one way or the other. 

Your comment puts me in mind of that wisest of movies, The Wizard of Oz, in which the Wizard says:
"I cannot give you a brain, but I can give you a degree!"  

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2018 4:01 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Open Letter

I swore to myself I'd stay quiet.  But because I'm obsessed with the neoreaction (https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/blog/on-neoreaction.html), I've failed.

If we buy the premise put forth by "bias bubbles" ("echo chambers", "safe zones", "political correctness", whatever your favorite postmodernist bogeyman), then you might see why the long term benefits of higher education are not as *obvious* as the educated might think they are.  And even in the subjects most people usually agree are very solid educational investments (e.g. math or computer science), there are plenty of people who seem to think the way we educate those people is fundamentally flawed.

So, while I'm with you in the gist of it, I think education could do with a massive disruption like those we see in transportation (Lyft and Uber) and real estate (AirBnB).  Renee' and I have waxed and waned in the same ongoing argument for our entire relationship.  When she wants to learn something, her 1st thought is "school" or "take a class". (She *just* got her final grades and will receive her M.S. in December!)  When I want to learn something, I simply start digging.  Both are flawed in various ways, of course.  It's a matter of style, purpose, and interest.  But there has to be a hyper-space of middle ground with plenty of room for innovation if we can shatter it open appropriately.  Decentralization and co-creative participation are fundamental themes of the 21st century.

The point is even more oblique when we consider voting.  A responsible voter educates themselves before voting.  But only an educated person would understand what voting means (representation, local vs. federal elections, gerrymandering, etc.) and that (how and why) it matters in the 1st place.  A tiny minority yell about how important it is to vote, but turnout is reliably low (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/even-if-turnout-among-young-people-is-higher-itll-probably-still-be-low/).  People are either too ignorant to vote ... or not voting enough to get an education.  Or, perhaps the two are as unrelated as the uneducated non-voters think they are? >8^D

On 10/22/18 2:22 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> So, while I can see a crisis in medicine between our values about the 
> preservation and extension of life and the costs of medicine, it’s harder to see a /crisis /between the short term losses incurred in paying for higher education and the long term benefits to society in fostering it. It’s a crisis only if we are unwilling to invest in our common future.


--
☣ uǝlƃ

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