Bird Droppings December 17, 2011

Seeking definitive meaning while stirring

 

Today I walked out into the darkness and got my feet wet as the dew was excessive on the grass and I was barefooted taking the dog out, could be why I have a cold. I may have been too foggy to realize till I my feet were soaked and it was chilly my dog even ran out and came right back after doing her duty. I recall being given an assignment by a professor many years ago. A special reading on a book that was published in the seventies by an educator considered very much the renegade, Ivan Illich. Illich wrote the book De-schooling Society. Illich was a scholar of theology, philosophy, history and psychology, he was at different times once a parish priest, philosopher, college professor and thinker. As I am sitting here thinking this morning after getting back End of Course Test scores his words ring true. We look only at a total score for a class of percentage passed. Nowhere does the data point towards potential of the group of kids other than a percent that scored over seventy percent. Somewhere in there we should be looking at increased numbers of special education students in inclusion classes. What about increased numbers of at risk students. Amazing how nationwide teachers are being evaluated based on a generalized percent of passing without even considering have they improved from last year.

 

“…imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.” Ivan Illich

 

My initial reading offered a view of the early 1970’s philosophy of the idea that the establishment is wrong. Discussing with teenagers in high school that favorite phrase of seventy is passing I am fine. I was thinking to a quality issue at my son’s former plant. His former company is a manufacturer of polyester fiber and in most situations requires one hundred percent compliance to quality to facilitate the processing and dying of the fiber. Watching over the years how changes and evolutionary trends in society have taken us from the hippie days of the 70’s through the overly materialistic 80’s into an era of ambiguity in the 90’s to an era of show me the results in the now 2000’s I find life is most interesting.

We speed through time and life watching from the windows of a tour bus seems to me how we look at life. Yesterday I was talking with students and watching imagination slip by. I asked several students to design and come up with a super hero in a matter of moments one handed me a character with a comic strip and logo and complete package. I said you did not create this he was convinced he had. There was a website that literally lets you create from templates a super hero. I tried to explain how taking a paper doll and changing outfits is not creating the doll. As I thought about education today and comparing how we look at results, test scores and then the world of results that kids see even though he came through with quite a package it was results but at what cost.

In our societal view of things probably he would have scored well on that task for some teachers. One of my favorites is going on line and buying prewritten papers which now middle school students and high schools students are doing let alone college and graduate students. What is so funny it is so easy to check even original papers from high school through doctorate level papers; they can be traced to ghost writers who even take credit cards.

 

“Imagination is the process by which we say that an image is presented to us” Aristotle

 

I thought back to my younger days when play time was a few sticks and a patch of scrub we called the jungle. Nowadays kids could have laser guns and vests to record kills even camouflage outfits and night vision rather than night eyes. One of my students is getting a six hundred dollar paint ball gun for Christmas. Do you remember the term night eyes, when you allow your vision to adjust to the dark? I recall a few months back I was going to the car one morning and I habitual walk out in the dark. I happened to go towards the spot where our trash can is located alongside the reptile building. My son waited till I came back into the light to head for the car and we have security lights that have motion detectors it was interesting at the time. Observer that I tend to be I was using my night eyes that point where darkness is revealed and you can move and see to a degree in the dark. Shining a flash light in your eyes at night ruins your night vision and your night eyes. Worse yet modern kids have halide flash lights with adjustable sealed beams and or fluorescent lights for maximum visibility talk about ruining forever night eyes. By far I am not against technology and advances but we have stripped away the imagination.

There is a doctor show on that I am somewhat addicted to although not quite as bad as NCIS, HOUSE. It is an interesting approach. Each week Dr. House is faced with an incurable and often untreatable illness in a patient that has been totally baffling to his crew of trained physicians. I recall many years ago a dear friend who was trained at Grady Hospital as a nurse, back in the day telling me a story. Emory University a well-known nursing program and medical school would send new doctors to Grady for residency. Often times this was their first experience in a real medical situation Grady being at that time and still one of the leading trauma units in the Southeast. Grady student nurses often would have to cover for Emory Doctors. They knew what they saw rather than knew what they had read.

 

“Imagination makes knowledge of the phenomenal world possible, by synthesizing the incoherent sensory manifold into representational images suitable to be brought under concepts.” Emmanuel Kant

 

I enjoy watching the scruffy Dr. House doodle on his white board eliminating possibilities while totally baffling his assistants with questions trying to get them thinking and into using their imaginations to find the answer.

 

“One day, a rajah’s son asked, “Father, what is reality?” “An excellent question, my son. Come, everyone, we will go to the marketplace.” So the rajah and his son went outside and mounted their royal elephant. The rest of the entourage followed on foot. When they got to the marketplace, the rajah commanded, “Bring me 3 blind men.” When the blind men arrived, the rajah commanded, “Place one blind man at the elephant’s tusk, one at the elephant’s leg and one at the elephant’s tail.” When that was done, the rajah said, “Describe the elephant to me, blind men.” The man at the tusk said, “It’s like a spear.” The man at the leg said, “It’s like a tree.” The man at the tail said, “It’s like a rope.” As the men started to argue, the rajah said to his son, “Reality, my son, is the elephant. And we are all blind men.”” Ancient Hindu proverb

 

When we train our imagination to be limited to be only that which we have been schooled in, trained in limits and or set parameters are laid out and we are in a sense stifled in truly finding answers. Dr. House’s students are limited by the texts they studied from as our many students who have been trained and schooled in most institutions today. We have been taught that this is the right direction even when many paths are there. You can only go this way, one way.

A school district in theAtlantaarea added a label to their (occasionally I actually use the other spelling of there, there are four, there, their, there’re and thur as in ova thur) textbooks a disclaimer on evolution. This was a few years back. I always wonder when I see a one way sign what if I go that way just this once. Granted in down town traffic in Atlanta on a one way street you may end up smooshed but what about when conditions allow wouldn’t it be great to see a street from a different view than the norm. To see the other side of buildings you do not normally get to see and perhaps even meet people you never saw because they were always walking the other direction. There are days when I stand in the middle of the hallways during the rush time in school simply to get a different view a different perspective of life. Boy do I miss the jungle a good friend actually bought it sort of to maintain those memories.

My kids had a place on the farm growing up they called paradise. It was an outcropping of stone with piles of rocks and pebbles. Many the times if we searched for the kids they would be sitting playing at paradise although many times with hot wheels and transformers but still imaginations running wild. As I am sitting here thinking back to childhood which really does not seem all that far away. I often wondered if it was to save that memory he bought that small patch of land. I would like to think so in today’s digital, sanitized, deodorized, and research based world.  So today perhaps a changing point in our nation’s history, maybe as ideas flow and understanding shift we can see more than is presented and please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts.

namaste

bird