Re: Sub-group Analysis

[ABurke5054@aol.com]

I thought I had seen it all in here, with standardized testing causing the 
death of childhood and the destruction of public schools, with copyright 
infringers wearing the same crown as Martin Luther King, with people protesting 
school policies by wearing ropes at board meetings, and lots of other nutty stuff, 
but now somebody is arguing from astrology. 

ARN is a never-dry font of surprises.

Art

In a message dated 2/1/2004 6:41:22 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
pwmjoy@earthlink.net writes:
This is a gem because it possesses great wisdom. Why? It recognizes the
traditional test of educational value, the Socratic injunction to "Know
thyself." Inscribed at the sun god Apollo's Oracle of Delphi temple and
popularly (and rightly so) ascribed to Socrates, it was accompanied by
another two words, "Thou art." One Jungian interpretation connects "Know
thyself" with the assertion of the "Thou art" of others and eventually the
recognition of the "Thou art" of what some might call god, the essence of
the universe, the mystery of existence, or some transcendent awareness. All
this is nicely explained at
http://astrology.about.com/library/weekly/aa100102a.htm . Of course, what
one might call "raw knowledge" is necessary, but equally important is how
one comes to knowledge, whether or not it is valued, sensed as purposeful,
and understood as connected to being human. There is a drama around all
knowledge acquisition, and those "standardistos" who seem not to understand
this are projecting an epistemological illusion as if in Buber's lexicon
teaching was an "I-It" experience, i.e., teachers and students are isolated
egos facing each other's robotness and from that place of "objectivity"
simply, as you put it, experiencing "knowledge transference". Standardized
testing is one of the acts or scenes in this narrow drama. If someone had
explained to me that this was what education was all about, I would not have
become a teacher, a profession I love. Those who teach from the Socratic
perspective and embrace Buber's "I-Thou" understand what I like to think of
as the vocation of teaching and know the great challenge to resist the
objectification and the reification of teaching and learning which is the
fundamental threat presented by NCLB and this cyclic return to thoughtless
oversimplification represented by the "I-It" crowd. Sometimes, I think that
the "kmowledge transference" clan is filled with fear which they project
onto the process of education because it makes things so much easier to talk
about. Such clean numbers, such polished data, such nothing-butness, such
pseudo objectivity, such efficiency, such bureaucratic compartmentalization,
such assembly line utility, such utter simplicity. Anyway, thank you for
your posting.