Colloquium at Stanford
The Unfinished Revolution

Memorandum


Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 07:49:54 -0500

From: Henry van Eyken Reply-To: unrev-II@onelist.com

To: unrev-II@onelist.com

Subject:   Improving education

Thanks, Eric, for positive, uplifting language. We ABSOLUTELY need to apply the principles of this colloquium to education and, through that, to society at large. And if anything is urgent, that is!

Most of those (us) coming through the school system today have their minds cast in forms they (we) are stuck with for a lifetime in the world community. Here we are graduating, say, 50 years of not only huge waste in the "Collective IQ," but hard-to-bend minds are mountainous obstacles to progress. And I don't care how well educated and how intelligent everybody on this forum is, we all have much waste and pollution between the ears. (Yes, I know, I know, who is to dictate what is waste and what is pollution?)

Just to validate your comments about appropriate books, I happen to have some family history here that ought permit an anectotical sketch on the subject. Which brings up a point.

I hope that when the ten weeks of our colloquium are up, this experience will be prolog. As for a societal DKR, I perceive (for now!) something encyclopedic in core set-up, but with "formal" subject areas in some form of authorative (but not autocratic) control of appropriate bodies, with a means of updating that makes for efficient (easy, pleasurable) use, with some graded approach to accomodate readers' "learning sets" (i.e. what they already have in their very own mental kits), etc., etc.

I hope that there will be enough binding and mutual patience in our group to continue on. This, of course, means attracting other people to the group to at least replace those who go on with other things. Ms Christine Peterson of Foresight reminded us of numbers of people required to get the kind of things we are thinking about over the top. This means that we must cast the fundamental subject matter in a form that can be readily digested by interested, middle-of-the-road intelligentia at large. Bootstrapping must become a household word, one whose meaning must be clearly understood and preserved within society at large so as to permit public policy to be tied to it. (Extreme example of a household word going awry: "quantum leap" has come to denore precisely the opposite of what it is, the tiniest actions that move and shake nature.)

Eric, you are just about to start me off, but today I better attend to Session 6. The sooner I catch up, the sooner I shall be less of a nuisance to other participants and, perhaps, more productive.

Thanks again,

Eric Armstrong wrote:

From: Eric Armstrong

My comment on the situation you observed, etc. ...

... a number of important things.

Sincerely,

Henry

Henry van Eyken