Category: the value of X

Another video and talk from Sir Ken Robinson on the need to change pretty much everything about education. The agrarian schedule and industrial management techniques are outmoded and do more harm than good. 

He gets off track pretty badly when he rails against ADHD meds, not realizing that they are not sedatives and do not desensitize the kids who take them: they’re stimulants. If they work, if they allow the person taking them to have better control of their brain’s executive function, to prioritize and manage themselves, they need them. If they make a kid (or adult) wiggly, they don’t need ‘em. What he should complain about is the overuse of adult-strength anti-psychotics and other behavior modifiers: those are dangerous. And their overuse is directly related to poor training, zealous marketing, and under-resourced school health departments and social services. 

a sketch

musical, that is.

It’s a snippet, about 45 seconds. The bass line came first and I was able to hold it in my head as I made my way downstairs. Found a simple drum kit to go with it, then added some delicately out of tune guitar. Can you tell the bass is not the instrument I play most often?

If this makes you want to rush to GarageBand and finish it (or wipe out the tracks, for the simple pleasure of it), the whole archive can be made available.

missing the point

“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers,” [Doris Lessing] said in her speech. “We never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new Internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.?”

As someone once said, specialization is for insects.

“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers,” [Doris Lessing] said in her speech. “We never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new Internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.?” [From Blog, Blug. To the Writer Doris Lessing, It’s Whatever. – New York Times]

The comments in response to this are hard to figure out: do they not realize how they might be proving her point, that increased specialization (or more pointedly, ignorance of the wider world) is not necessarily a Good Thing?

General knowledge is more important than ever, even if it means one has to swim against the tide of what current norms. We’re increasingly able to program our entertainment, our political content — whatever we like, someone has found a way to slice and dice it into pieces that reflect anyone’s taste. (This is, of course, all about segmenting the audience for advertising and sales purposes.)

This is a real problem that will become more prevalent in years to come, as today’s high-tech kids come of age with their own personal media bubble. They’ll be voting, either in the marketplace or in the voting booth, using information they have cherry-picked, often without realizing it.

And someone who writes at “Pinky’s Paperhaus” thinks One Laptop Per Child — a laudable idea but one that can easily be perverted into a more global instance of a problem we see in the developed world — is the solution?

Continue reading “missing the point”