[Vision2020] Health Education: A Conspiracy? A bit off the subject now though

[Kenneth Marcy]

On Friday 26 November 2010 07:31:18 Joe Campbell wrote:
> <[snip]> ... but likely in the near future the MA program will be cut and
> I'll have undergraduate "readers" instead. <[snip]>

Even if the MA in Philosophy is shelved until better economic times return, I 
wonder whether there may be opportunity for applied philosophy efforts to keep 
the Philosophy Department reasonably intact. For example, undergraduate and 
graduate courses in business ethics for the business curricula, economic 
philosophy for the economics programs, and political philosophy for the 
political science and public administration programs. These traditional areas 
could (continue to) be augmented with environmental philosophy, and a newer 
look at educational philosophy.

On the latter topic I wonder whether we ought not examine the plebeian 
assumption that personal educational responsibility to society ends when one 
is able to drop out of high school, and that personal efforts beyond that are 
optional. Perhaps a better notion is that there exists some basic minimum of 
expected educational achievement and ongoing competence that should be 
expected of all adult citizens throughout their lives. As the decades roll by, 
the contents of that minimum may change, and with those changes, citizens are 
then obligated to meet those new standards, preferably, perhaps, with at least 
some minimal assistance to do so. For discussion purposes, I take the minimum 
standard to be the current requirements for public high school graduation.
 
> Also, I think it is a mistake to think that a lack of logic or critical
> thinking skills is at fault. My own view is that the fault lies with the
> increase in private education and isolationism

While it may be the case that pedagogical pandering to bygone ages of frontier 
foraging and farming may attempt to evoke rugged individualism and libertarian 
license, observation of contemporary circumstances suggests explanations that 
require less conscious and coordinated effort to attain the status quo. Simple 
inertia against continuing personal educational work, lethargy and laziness, 
combined with  mindsets disinclined toward ideas and theory, and wanting to 
get on with the practical realities of life, keep the majority away from not 
only post-secondary education but from revisiting or reviewing what they 
should have learned, and should still remember, from their high school years.  

> but my guess is that most
> private schools teach as much or more logic and critical thinking as they
> do in public schools. Logic is analogous to computer hardware; even the
> best is only as good as the input. As they say, "garbage in, garbage out"
> but also quality in, quality out. What counts as garbage and what counts
> as quality? That's where things get tricky.

Well, sure. Must we require a two-value, forced-choice, true-false logic, or 
may we consider other logics without their middles excluded? Some sets of 
circumstances suggest that maybe or neither or don't know to be more 
appropriate answers than true or false.

And, heretical as it may be to the core of Western logic, I wonder whether 
logic and its interactions through various linguistic pathways within the 
brains resident in various cultures may not have variations that are functions 
of the cultures within which it resides. Different logics in different cultures, 
however slight may be the differences, may result in different conclusions that, 
unexamined, lurk near the cores of some of our more intractable international 
discussions. 

> What counts as evidence? What
> counts as sound reasoning? Some answers are easy: empirical findings,
> classical logic, and mathematics. But that alone won't get you far.
> Unfortunately, after that point we start doing philosophy, where
> reasonable disagreement is par for the course. If the answers were easy,
> we'd all agree. But we don't, so they're not.

Not only are unresolved philosophical questions problematical, but so are the 
continually troubled communications, or lack thereof, between C.P. Snow's two 
cultures, the scientists and the aesthetes, the left and the right brained.

Newton demonstrated that effort is necessary to overcome inertia, and that 
effort is what is required to get some of us out of the bag of chips, off the 
couch, and into more active, energetic, and educationally accomplishing lives.


Ken