Colloquium at Stanford
The Unfinished Revolution

Memorandum

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 08:53:42 -0500

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

To: unrev-II@onelist.com

Subject:   Profound Thinking (but of questionable
rellevance to present DKR project)

I wouldn't write these things if I were to believe they are irrelevant. But I realize that they may not be quite in order at this point of the initial DKR development work. I must let others, especially the hard-working team leaders, be the judges.

My personal, principal reasons for having contributed the three "Letters to my Colleagues" items are:

  1. Look at the educational establishment as an organization badly in need of bootstrapping along with a personal-experience view where the nub of that bootstrapping process ought to be. Let me add something that should not be overlooked. The way I have written about education, including the direct reference to one particular institution, is not exactly socially acceptable. Thus I tend to bring out issues that many like to hide from public view and/or pooh-pooh. It is an approach, and an attitude from my side, that is not going to get the kind of co-operation that is the hallmark of the Session 6A presentations by Pie and Spohrer. In contrast, by writing my "letters," I was serving pretty hot potatoes and you can imagine what institutional reactions I had to be prepared for and which actually occurred. A fair number of people agreed in direct encounters, but hardly anyone publicly. In the end, I think (not "like to think," but truly think) that people tacitly agreed, but without perceptible effect.

  2. To address the point about self-learning. I don't wish to bring myself in the picture too much, but I have been very much an independent (and haphazard) learner as a consequence of the home environment in which I was raised, the Nazi occupation during my teenage years, and the "hunger winter" of 1944-45, to be followed within a few years by being drafted in the army. I simply did not have "normal" educational opportunities. I have enjoyed successes that have stood me in good stead and, looking back, I can also perceive, although not all that clearly, shortcomings. In short, I approach the subject of self-learning with caution, but without wishing to take a stance intolerant of other people's thoughts.

  3. To provide an example of what I believe, rightly or wrongly, to be a pretty pure and highly important example of bootstrapping. Accomodative learning, typically, is the acquisition of broader concepts that allow the acquisition of knowledge that would otherwise be impossible. It may require the destruction of fairly deeply held beliefs (and associated social habits), which can be an emotionally painful experience and threatening to self-esteem. It may upset in the learner a sense of comfort. School may conflict with home. Taking this thing to the extreme, we are looking, I believe, at things like religious conversions and turning creationists into evolutionists to say nothing of broad social phenomena like women's emancipation and accomodating (I mean: respecting, not merely assimilative accepting) the multihued society. The more common occurrences are the "we have always done it this way" and "if it was good enough for" syndromes. The acquired broader view, the expanded horizon, is one's very personal equivalent of "C." Or so I tend to think. And like sample "C" activities discussed, it requires co-operation where an outsider (or some special circumstance) shocks the learner into C-behavior. A C-change would normaly be a socially induced occurrence. (Thought: aren't the most dramatic books, plays, and movies B -> C conversions? Seeing the light? Epiphanies?) I very much welcome any deserved critical lambasting here because we are here at the heart of lifelong, 50-some-years personal education in a time of accelerating change.

    1. Personal bootstrapping may easily put one out of touch or in direct conflict with one's immediate environment, i.o.w. one risks a social cost and, consequently, an emotional cost. "Misfit" is a common word used in this connection. Especially harmful in family and child-rearing contexts.

    2. In a class by itself, it seems, is the apparent barrier to mental accomodation of natural phenomenon that have been surmized by calculations such as, for starters, particle-wave dualism. [Interesting anecdote: J.J. Thomson received a 1906 Nobel prize for elucidating properties of the particle known as electron (1906), properties that cannot be conceived as belonging to anything but a particle; his son, G.P. Thomson, received a 1937 Nobel prize for demonstrating the thingie is under certain circumstances best conceived as a wave phenomenon. A sad thing about some officially imposed curriculum is that there is hardly time nor the needed mental substrate to do full justice to the marvel of it all! It all gets reduced to the basest of assimilation in preparing for such moronic, plug-them-in exam question like "calculate the wavelength of an electron traveling at x% of the speed of light." Maybe the efforts reported by Pie and Spohrer have changed some of that.]

Sincerely,

Henry

Henry van Eyken
vaneyken@sympatico.ca


Post Script

I wonder how notes like the above would best find a suitable fit in a DKR. They do not represent such concrete knowledge as the properties of a screw that holds a tail to an airplane. They are not information anyone would be searching for in a knowledge container. How are they to be placed such that they do not contribute to info-overload for those consulting the DKR and still will come to the fore to be acted on (or replaced) at an appropriate instance? I still have to catch up with the Discussions, but isn't this the kind of issue our "DKR leaders" are now wrestling with? Fleabyte --

http://www.fleabyte.org

...is an evolving, experimental web-publication devoted to public computency, which, like common literacy, is regarded as essential to an environmentally healthy, democratic society.