Magnus Berg (qmgb@bull.se)
Tue, 3 Mar 1998 04:58:28 +0100
Hi Maggie
No kicking back from me. Let me first say that I admire what
you're doing. I haven't really found my way of practicing MoQ in
everyday life, although "Machine beauty" was an inspiration. Thanks
Jason and Platt.
What I will do, is to offer a little different perspective on how
to interpret people and their interactions with other people in
terms of SPoV. I've talked about it before and much is also in my
Classicist essay but I'll try to apply it on your circumstances.
I see that you are talking about the static ladder as one-
dimensional, and of course it is, I'm not stating otherwise.
What I do think, is that humans fit into that ladder in more
than one way. The most common way is to view each human as
biological SPoV in a social SPoV and that this society supports
intellectual SPoV.
Another view is that each human is a society of biological SPoV
and that it is this human society that supports individual
intellectual SPoV. We had some discussions about this in the
early history of the squad and a "IMNASHO" applies to this second
view. (In My Not Always So Humble Opinion :)
The first view results in something like Gaia, you would see
the earth as some kind of global intellect with which an
alien species could communicate. The other enables all of us
to have intellect independent of other humans and would account
for the independence of the movers and shakers you mentioned.
Note that these two views are not mutually exclusive, it is
sometimes quite helpful to change perspective to get an
explanation of some mysterious observation. In your case
this would mean that when the educational system is kicked
back into the biological/social struggle, this might not be
as bad as it seems. I might have misunderstood your description
but I guess that the intention of setting the students free
from social rituals was to let them climb up the static ladder
and indulge in intellectual adventures. But the result seems to
be a plunge into the biological swamp, but this is only the
case if the first view is applied. If the other view is applied
however, there's very little difference between a climb to
intellectual movers and shakers activities and biological
decadence. Both are equally hostile to the social structure
from which they came.
In ZMM, Pirsig describes his vision of a future, or maybe
a long gone, educational system. A student dropped out of
school to do something he really liked to do. In time however,
he wanted to know more about what he was doing, so he went
back to school out of pure interest. Note that the final
goal is not to make everyone come back to school to pursue
their intellectual education, but to enable dynamic diversity.
Dropping out of school today is not socially acceptable, and
I don't think it will be for a long time, so maybe this is not
very helpful.
What the educational system needs first, is a way to keep all
students within the school anyway. Maybe a step by step expansion
of the school's limits in terms of what is allowed to do. The
end goal would be to allow everyone to pursue whatever they
liked, a distant but dynamic goal.
I hope I haven't caused too much confusion. The educational
system, and the Kentucky one in particular, is not my domain.
So catch me if I stumbled somewhere.
Magnus
-- "I'm so full of what is right, I can't see what is good" N. Peart - Rush-- post message - mailto:lilasqd@hkg.com unsubscribe/queries - mailto:diana@asiantravel.com homepage - http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4670
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