Great Throughts Treasury

"Once you have learned how to ask questions?relevant and appropriate and substantial questions?you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning, whatever you want or need to know. Let us remind you, for a moment, of the process that characterizes school environments: what students are restricted to is the process of memorizing (partially and temporarily) someone else?s answers to somebody else?s questions. It is staggering to consider the implications of this fact. The most important intellectual ability man has yet developed?the art and science of asking questions?is not taught in school! It is doubtful if you think of many schools that include question asking? as part of their curriculum."

"Our engagement with language almost always has a moral dimension; language has a social dimension"

"Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship."

"Overwhelmed by information?.What can schools do for little Eva besides making still more information available?"

"People of a television culture need plain language both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience."

"People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."

"Perhaps we should abandon the whole idea of trying to make students intelligent and focus on the idea of making them less ignorant. Doctors do not generally concern themselves with health; they concentrate on sickness. And lawyers don't think too much about justice; they think about cases of injustice. Using this model in teaching would imply identifying and understanding various forms of ignorance and working to eliminate as many of them as we can."

"Pomposity is not an especially venal form of bullshit, although it is by no means harmless. There are plenty of people who are daily victimized by pomposity in that they are made to feel less worthy than they have a right to feel by people who use fancy titles, words, phrases, and sentences to obscure their own insufficiencies."

"Print also created new literary forms and altered ideas of literary style. Medieval poetry was conceived for the ear, and each poem had to stand the test of recitation. In addition, medieval audiences were not always interested in the poet himself, since his work was known to them only through the interpretations of minstrels, who frequently rephrased poems to suit their own image and images. The printed page changed these conditions. Slowly, the printed poet came into a new relationship with his reader. He learned not to be so repetitive as his predecessors since a reader could be depended upon to return as often as needed to uncompromised passages...After the flowering of dramatic poetry during the Elizabethan Age, the printed page substituted for the theater, and millions of children came to know Shakespeare only through this form."

"Print, in even more revolutionary ways than writing, changed the very form of civilization...the Protestant Revolution was contemporaneous with the invention of moving type...the printing and distribution of millions of Bibles made possible a more personal religion, as the Word of God rested on each man's kitchen table. The book, by isolating the reader and his responses, tended to separate him from the powerful oral influences of his family, teacher, and priest. Print thus created a new conception of self as well as of self-interest. At the same time, the printing press provided the wide circulation necessary to create national literatures and intense pride in one's native language. Print thus promoted individualism on one hand and nationalism on the other."

"Reflect on these questions ? and others that these can generate. Please do not merely react to them. [1] What do you worry most about? What are the causes of your worries? Can any of your worries be eliminated? How? Which of them might you deal with first? How do you decide? Are there other people with the same problems? How do you know? How can you find out? [3] What bothers you most about adults? Why? How do you want to be similar or different from adults you know when you become an adult? [4] What, if anything, seems to you to be worth dying for? How did you come to believe this? What seems worth living for? How did you come to believe this? [5] At the present moment, what would you most like to be ? or be able to do? Why? What would you have to know in order to be able to do it? What would you have to do in order to get to know it? [8] When you hear or read or observe something, how do you know what it means? Where does meaning "come from"? What does "meaning" mean? How can you tell what something "is" or whether it is? Where do words come from? Where do symbols come from? Why do symbols change? Where does knowledge come from? What do you think are some of man's most important ideas? Where did they come from? Why? How? Now what? What's a "good idea"? How do you know when a good or live idea becomes a bad or dead idea? Which of man's ideas would we be better off forgetting? How do you decide? What is "progress"? What is "change"? What are the most obvious causes of change? What are the least apparent? What conditions are necessary in order for change to occur? What kinds of change are going on right now? Which are important? How are they similar or different from other changes that have occurred? What are the relationships between new ideas and change? Where do new ideas come from? How come? So what? If you wanted to stop one of the changes going on right now (pick one), how would you go about it? What consequences would you have to consider? Of the important changes going on in our society, which should be considered and which resisted? Why? How? What are the most important changes that have occurred in the past ten years? twenty years? fifty years? In the last year? In the last six months? Last month? What will be the most important changes next month? Next year? Next decade? How can you tell? So what? What would you change if you could? How might you go about it? Of those changes which are about to occur, which would you stop, if you could? Why? How? So what? [9] Who do you think has the most important things to say today? To whom? How? Why? What are the dumbest and most dangerous ideas that are "popular" today? Why do you think so? Where did these ideas come from? [10] What are the conditions necessary for life to survive? Plants? Animals? Humans? Which of these conditions are necessary for all life? Which ones for plants? Which ones for animals? Which ones for humans? What are the greatest threats to all forms of life? To plants? To animals? To humans? What are some of the strategies living things use to survive? Which are unique to plants? Which are unique to animals? Which are unique to humans? What kinds of human survival strategies are (1) similar to those of animals and plants? (2) different from animals and plants? [11] What does man's language permit him to develop as survival strategies that animals cannot develop?How might man's survival strategies be different from what they are if he did not have languages? What other "languages" does man have besides those consisting of words? What functions do those languages serve? Why and how do they originate? Can you invent a new one? How might you start? What would happen, what difference would it make, what would man not be able to do if he had no number (mathematical) languages? How many symbol systems does man have? How come? So what? What are some good symbols? Some bad? What good symbols could we use that we do not have? What bad symbols do we have that we might be better without? [12] What's worth knowing? How do you decide? What are some ways to go about getting to know what's worth knowing?"

"Reflections on one?s mortality curiously makes one come alive to the incredible amounts of inanity and fanaticism that surround us, much of which is inflicted on us by ourselves. Which brings me to the next point, best stated as Postman?s Third Law:"

"School has never really been about individualized learning, but about how to be socialized as a citizen and as a human being, so that we, we have important rules in school, always emphasizing the fact that one is part of a group."

"Scientific language, which Korzybski used as his model of sane language, is almost exclusively extensional and denotative, or at least tries to be. The language of the mentally ill, most obviously "un-sane," is almost totally intensional and connotative. This is the language that does not correspond to anything "out there," and this is, in fact, how and perhaps even why the user is mentally ill. Korzybski's concern with keeping the conscious "connection" or correspondence between language and verifiable referents is, for all practical purposes, paralleled by the process of psychotherapy. In this process, which is largely "just talk," the purpose is to foster closer and more accurate correspondence between the patient's language and externally verifiable meanings. As a semanticist would say, the process of psychotherapy is aimed at shifting the patient's word choices from those having a highly intensional, connotative meanings to others carrying more denotative meanings. A person suffering from paranoid schizophrenia might use perfectly "correct" English in an unassailably "logical" way, but the problem with his language is that it does not correspond to anything "out there.""

"Since most subjects studied in school consist largely of theories... language education must include not only the serious study of what truth and falsehood mean in the context of a subject, but also what is meant by a fact, an inference, an assumption, a judgment, a generalization... In this way students will be learning both the language of a subject and the methods of inquiry in that subject, since inquiry consists of nothing else but the generation of questions, the invention of definitions and metaphors, the separation of facts from inferences, the forming of generalizations..."

"Since there is no such thing as complete knowledge of a subject, one is always working to improve one's reading, writing, etc., of a subject. As Thomas Henry Huxley said, "If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, is there anyone who knows so much as to be out of danger?" ... The problems of learning to read or write are inexhaustible."

"So you see, when it comes right down to it, crap-detection is something one does when he starts to become a certain type of person. Sensitivity to the phony uses of language requires, to some extent, knowledge of how to ask questions, how to validate answers, and certainly, how to assess meanings."

"Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. An so the priests of Technopoly call sin 'social deviance,' which is a statistical concept, and they call evil 'psychopathology,' which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts"

"Someone needs to mention what may be lost. Of course, one of the problems is that what I would judge to be a negative consequence, someone else might see as a positive consequence. For example, telephones in automobiles seem to me a very bad idea. So does spending a lot of hours "communicating" on the Internet when one could use that time reading Cervantes' Don Quixote."

"Suggestion for a final exam question: Describe five of the most significant errors scholars have made in history. Indicate why they were errors, who made them, and what persons are mainly responsible for correcting them."

"Superstition is ignorance presented in the cloak of authority. A superstition is a belief, usually expressed in authoritative terms for which there is no factual or scientific basis. Like, for instance, that the country in which you live is a finer place, all things considered, than other countries. Or that the religion into which you were born confers upon you some special standing with the cosmos that is denied other people. I will refrain from commenting further on that, except to say that when I hear such talk my own crap-detector achieves unparalleled spasms of activity."

"Suppose all of the syllabi and curricula and textbooks in the schools disappeared. Suppose all of the standardized tests ? city-wide, state-wide, and national ? were lost. In other words, suppose that the most common material impeding innovation in the schools simply did not exist. Then suppose that you decided to turn this "catastrophe" into an opportunity to increase the relevance of schools. What would you do? We have a possibility for you to consider: suppose that you decide to have the entire "curriculum" consist of questions. These questions would have to be worth seeking answers to not only from your point of view but, more importantly, from the point of view of the students. In order to get still closer to reality, add the requirement that the questions must help the students to develop and internalize concepts that will help them to survive in the rapidly changing world of the present and future...What questions would you have on your list? Take a pencil and list your questions..."

"Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean 'ecological' in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe. After television, the United States was not America plus television; television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry. And that is why the competition among media is so fierce. Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization -- not to mention their reason for being -- reflects the world-view promoted by the technology. Therefore, when an old technology is assaulted by a new one, institutions are threatened. When institutions are threatened, a culture finds itself in crisis. This is serious business, which is why we learn nothing when educators ask, Will students learn mathematics better by computers than by textbooks? Or when businessmen ask, Through which medium can we sell more products? Or when preachers ask, Can we reach more people through television than through radio? Or when politicians ask, How effective are messages sent through different media? Such questions have an immediate practical value to those who ask them, but they are diversionary. They direct our attention away from the serious social, intellectual, and institutional crises that new media foster."

"Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything."

"Technological competition ignites total war, which means it is not possible to contain the effects of a new technology to a limited sphere of human activity... What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how, in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school."

"Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way that Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible, and therefore irrelevant."

"Technopoly is a state of culture... state of mind... the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology... its satisfactions... its orders... This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs. Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity's superhuman achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which through its continued and uncontrolled production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and peace of mind. The fact that information does none of these things ? but quite the opposite ? seems to change few opinions, for unwavering beliefs are an inevitable product of the structure of Technopoly. In particular, Technopoly flourishes when the defenses against information break down."

"Television?s way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography?s way of knowing; that television?s conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase serious television is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice?the voice of entertainment"

"Terrence Moran, inherently prone to strengthen the image and part of the media can obtain a historical perspective, he is right on target. According to Moran and persistence context, the absence of a sense of the available pieces of information and cannot be combined to form a coherent whole. As we refuse to remember, recall also does not find it completely useless. Instead, according to remember assets are being removed. Because remember, if it's something more than nostalgia, if a contextual absolutely essential; of cases arranged for her models requires nothing can be deduced from it. If policy and news image snapshot does not offer such a context. A mirror reflects only what we wear today. What you wear is silent on yesterday. These assumptions there is a meaning, then at this point Orwell, at least in terms of Western democracy is wrong once again. Orwell foresaw the fall of history, but it would do government, the Ministry of Truth type of an organization in a systematic manner in the case of banning useless believed to delete the records of history. However, with Huxley's more accurate predictions, nothing will be needed to implement the rough roads. A public image, urgency and treatment policy aims to provide, seemingly auspicious as the technologies, since equally successful, perhaps even permanently, and no objection encounter can destroy."

"The basic function of all education, even in the most traditional sense, is to increase the survival prospects of the group. If this function is fulfilled, the group survives. If not, it doesn't. There have been times when this function was not fulfilled, and groups (some of them we even call "civilizations") disappeared. Generally, this resulted from changes in the kind of threats the group faced. The threats changed, but the education did not, and so the group, in a way, "disappeared itself" (to use a phrase from Catch-22). The tendency seems to be for most "educational" systems, from patterns of training in "primitive" tribal societies to school systems in technological societies, to fall imperceptibly into a role devoted exclusively to the conservation of old ideas, concepts, attitudes, skills, and perceptions. This happens largely because of the unconsciously held belief that these old ways of thinking and doing are necessary to the survival of the group?Survival in a stable environment depends almost entirely on remembering the strategies for survival that have been developed in the past, and so the conservation and transmission of these becomes the primary mission of education. But, a paradoxical situation develops when change becomes the primary characteristic of the environment. Then the task turns inside out ? survival in a rapidly changing environment depends almost entirely upon being able to identify which of the old concepts are relevant to the demands imposed by the new threats to survival, and which are not. Then a new educational task becomes critical: getting the group to unlearn (to "forget") the irrelevant concepts as a prior condition of learning. What we are saying is that the "selective forgetting" is necessary for survival."

"The Benedictine monks who invented the mechanical clock in the 12th and 13th centuries believed that such a clock would provide a precise regularity to the seven periods of devotion? here is a great paradox: the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; and it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose. ?Gutenberg thought his invention would advance the cause of the Holy Roman See, whereas in fact, it turned out to bring a revolution which destroyed the monopoly of the Church."

"The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation."

"The credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition."

"The dominant patterns of information within a culture -- the codes, the materials, the styles of interaction they require -- form a substantial part of the 'genes' of a culture. Like genes, information patterns produce in mysterious ways the general features of a culture, and in something approximating a predictable pattern. Like genes, information patterns are powerful but not entirely resistant to modification (or what's education for?). And like genes, information patterns do their work invisibly. We scarcely know they are there until a mutation occurs. It is only when a culture has undergone a restructuring of its information patterns that we can see on what its intellectual and social biases previously rested."

"The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable."

"The elimination of conventional tests ... is necessary because, as soon as they are used as judgment-making instruments, the whole process of schooling shifts from education to training intended to produce passing grades on tests."

"The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea."

"The key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are self-confirming... (some beliefs are) fanatical not because they are "false", but because they are expressed in such a way that they can never be shown to be false."

"The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. Knowing the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them."

"The meaning I have given here to "language education" represents it as a form of meta-education. That is, one learns a subject and, at the same time, learns what the subject is made of... If it be said that such learning will prevent students from assimilating the facts of a subject, my reply is that this is the only way by which the facts can truly be assimilated. For it is not education to teach students to repeat sentences they do not understand so that they may pass examinations. That is the way of the computer. I prefer the student to be a programmer."

"The means by which people communicate comprise an environment just as real and influential as the terrain on which they live... When there occurs a radical shift in the structure of that environment this must be followed by changes in social organizations, intellectual predispositions, and a sense of what is real and valuable... It is the business of the educator to assess the biases of the information environment with a view toward making them visible and keeping them under control. A society that is unaware of what its information environment is leading to may become overwhelmed by philosophers, priests, conquerors, or even explorers. Or it may forget how to remember. Or may confine its imagination only to what it can remember... It is the business of education, at all times, to monitor and adjust the information environment wherever possible so that its inherent biases and drift do not monopolize the intellect and character of our youth."

"The modern idea of testing a reader's comprehension, as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but comprehending?"

"The new education has as its purpose the development of a new kind of person, one who ? as a result of internalizing a different series of concepts ? is an actively inquiring, flexible, creative, innovative, tolerant, liberal personality who can face uncertainty and ambiguity without disorientation, who can formulate viable new meanings to meet changes in the environment which threaten individual and mutual survival. The new education, in sum, is new because it consists of having students use the concepts most appropriate to the world in which we all must live. All of these concepts constitute the dynamics of the quest-questioning, meaning-making process that can be called "learning how to learn.""

"The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with 'image.' But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare and deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. And therein lies one of the most powerful influences of the television commercial on political discourse."

"The pre-eminent reason for schooling. It may properly go by the name of the god of Economic Utility. If you pay attention in school? you will be rewarded with a well-paying job."

"The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form."

"The purpose of public education is to help the young transcend individual identity by finding inspiration in a story of humanity."

"The question is not, ?Does or doesn't public schooling create a public?? The question is, ?What kind of public does it create?? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling."

"The question, "How well does one read?" is a bad question... essentially unanswerable. A more proper question is "How well does one read poetry, or history, or science, or religion?" No one I have ever known is so brilliant as to have learned the languages of all fields of knowledge equally well. Most of us do not learn some of them at all."

"The reason for this is explained in Postman?s Fourth Law, which is; ?Almost nothing is about what you think it is about?including you.?"