Akkam’s Razor

Here are three serious links about the nature of education and being an intellectual…

This kid in Atlantic City took advantage of the bully pulpit at commencement to decry our educational system:

Education can be defined a number of different ways. For me, it is the product of human curiosity. Intellectual thought, as far as I can tell, is nothing but the asking and answering of questions. In my reflection, however, and I have reflected on this a great deal, I found that many of life’s most important questions are ignored here. What is the right way to live? What is the ideal society? What principles should guide my behavior? What is success, what is failure? Is there a creator, and if so, should we look to it for guidance?

These are often dismissed as questions of religion, but religion is not something opposed to rationality, it simply seeks to answer such questions through faith. The separation of church and state is, of course, important, but it should never be a reason for intellectual submission or suppression of any kind.

Ethics — it is what defines us — as individuals, as a society — and yet it is never discussed, never explained, never justified. Rousseau, Descartes, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, nearly every major writer I’ve encountered devotes time to the subject. And it’s not as if these questions are without practical concern, that they are less immediately relevant than science for instance.

Our laws, our institutions and all our actions are a reflection of our ethics. Our own society owes itself to the writers of the enlightenment, but we never probe their work — we fail to espouse the movement’s central principle, doubt — doubt everything. We study what is, never why, never what should be. For that reason, the education we have received here is not only incomplete, it is entirely hollow.

Then, some thoughts on the nature and intent of our educational system from John Taylor Gatto , multiple winner of NYC Teacher of the Year and 1991 Winner of New York State teacher of the year for 1991,  at the Memory Hole on the nature of our educational system:

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things.

This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still known within education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001:

I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world…that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world."

And lastly, some concerns about the lack of intellectualism and innate human curiousity in our society and the anti-egghead mentality of our western world, and a dimissal of that fear:

“[T]here are just no intellectuals any more” or that, if there are, they are “not taken as seriously as they used to be and/or ought to be”. These views are subjected to a magisterial dismissal by Stefan Collini in his new book Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, the subject of his recent RSA lecture. Collini points out that the absence of intellectuals, or of proper respect for intellectuals, has been the subject of hand-wringing since the word entered the vocabulary a century ago.

[…]

Collini accepts that there is some resistance to the label: “The very word irritates people,” he writes. “They sense pretentiousness, arrogance – on most of its outings, ‘so-called’ travels with it like a bodyguard, never far away even if not immediately in view.”

[…]

For him, the role of an intellectual involves four key elements: a level of achievement in a certain field of creative, analytical or scholarly endeavour – a ‘qualifying activity’; the existence of media through which they can reach beyond a specialist audience; the expression by the individual concerned of ideas that “engage with some of the general concerns of those publics”; and finally the “establishment of a reputation for being likely to have important and interesting things to say”.

[…]

But if we need to hold intellectuals to high standards, we should also lower our expectations – not about the quality of their work, but about the ability of any one person, however brilliant, to act as a one-stop solution for our problems. TS Eliot suggested that: “It is perhaps too much to expect of any man to possess both specialised scientific power and wisdom.” In fact, it is too much to expect anyone to possess wisdom at all, especially with regard to some of our most intractable public issues. Climate change is an area of public concern requiring specialist knowledge in international law, business, macroeconomics, microeconomics, anthropology, psychology, meteorology and oceanography. Similar lists can be drawn up for international migration, intellectual property and pension reform. Being wise in all these areas is beyond the power of mortal individuals.

Has our world gotten so complicated that the existence of the Renaissance Man,  the artist, sculptor, musician, philospher, invento, scientist, the new DaVinci or Franklin, is no longer possible?  Or we no longer dependent on brilliant individuals, and instead hoping for merely "bright" groups?