Thread: How rather than What—to Think

How rather than What—to Think

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” Socrates

"To create the power of competence without creating a corresponding sense of moral direction to guide the use of that power is bad education." Unknown

Our educational system is designed to teach us what to think; it is designed to do this in an efficient manner. It seems to fail often in the understanding aspect but does seem to inculcate us with “useful knowledge”.

Our educational system helps us accumulate knowledge about our self and our world. But we are creatures who seek meaning and purpose for our life. How do we extrapolate from knowledge of important fundamental things to developing a meaningful life with purpose that will fill our natural need for self-esteem?

I think that comprehension is a hierarchy and can be usefully thought of as like a pyramid. At the base of the comprehension pyramid is awareness, which is followed by consciousness (awareness plus attention). Knowledge follows consciousness and understanding is at the pinnacle of the comprehension pyramid. We are aware of many more things than we are conscious of and that sort of ratio follows all the way up to understanding at the pinnacle.

Understanding is a far step beyond knowing and is significantly different from knowing. Knowledge seeks truth whereas understanding seeks meaning.

I think a real question is if education should be to give people the knowedge for their job, and give them good work habbit, or is it to give people wisdom.

I don't feel that school can make people wise and that is why the focus should be on academic standards and work habits. To gain any of that deeper knowedge, it needs to be learned by experience of actually doing things in the real world.

Philosophy classes are usefull, but that really isn't the purpose or the best way to use the power of school.

Originally Posted by coberst

How rather than What—to Think
“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” Socrates

Who am I to argue with Socrates?

I'm Oftencold of course, and certainly up to the task.

However, in this case I can accept the old Greek's poetic imagery.

Originally Posted by coberst

"To create the power of competence without creating a corresponding sense of moral direction to guide the use of that power is bad education." Unknown

It is not up to a public education system to instill any but the most banal morality. If it does otherwise, it is an indoctrination system.

Originally Posted by coberst

Our educational system is designed to teach us what to think; it is designed to do this in an efficient manner. It seems to fail often in the understanding aspect but does seem to inculcate us with “useful knowledge”.

The public education system is increasingly designed to teach students not to think at all.

The "useful knowledge" is largely questionable as well. Reading, composition, logic, mathematics, vocational skills,rudimentary science, geography and a few other disiplines are fairly useful. Anything outside this purview is probably propaganda.

Originally Posted by coberst

. . . But we are creatures who seek meaning and purpose for our life.

We are? All of us? I tell you truly that most people's idea of meaning is the next round of gratification. Some small proportion of humans seek higher truths, and many in the process delude themselves into thinking that this is a common shared goal.

I would suggest an evening in an inner city bar to bring your vision of the philosophical hunger of most of your brethren into line with the tragic reality.

Originally Posted by coberst

How do we extrapolate from knowledge of important fundamental things to developing a meaningful life with purpose that will fill our natural need for self-esteem?

Ah. "Self Esteem." Marx would have us believe that Religion is the "opiate of the masses," but I, being wiser than Marx submit that it is the pablum of self-esteem as conceived by Moderns.

Why should anyone have self-esteem unearned? Should not a bum, lying drunken in the gutter know himself for what he is? Should not a schoolchild accept the fact of their own ignorance and seek to remedy that situation?

What good, to encourage self-esteem in the useless, the base, the ignorant, the criminal, or the depraved?

Far more important to instill, in fact, to demand self-respect in all of the examples I've given, indeed in all people.

Self-respect will lead one to self-esteem where warranted, and will reject it where not.

Originally Posted by coberst

I think that comprehension is a hierarchy and can be usefully thought of as like a pyramid. At the base of the comprehension pyramid is awareness, which is followed by consciousness (awareness plus attention). Knowledge follows consciousness and understanding is at the pinnacle of the comprehension pyramid. We are aware of many more things than we are conscious of and that sort of ratio follows all the way up to understanding at the pinnacle.

I can accept this model on condition that you include the undeniable fact that what most people, perhaps all people, know, comprehend and understand is wrong, distorted, incomplete, or adulterated by untruth.

Originally Posted by coberst

Understanding is a far step beyond knowing and is significantly different from knowing. Knowledge seeks truth whereas understanding seeks meaning.

Knowledge and understanding are inert, they seek truth no more than a corpse seeks sustenance.

The quest for knowledge, understating and meaning are all born of passion. A passion that will accept suffering, fatigue, the ridicule of the foolish, sacrifice and pain. It is a passion unsuitable in any significant quantity for all but the most stalwart of persons.

We Are Meaning Creating Creatures

The great truth of human nature is that wo/man strives for meaning. S/he imposes on raw experience symbolic categories of thought, and does so with conceptual structures of thought. “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul.”—Otto Rank

In the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of opposition paradigms, science faced the dilemma: if we make wo/man to be totally an object of science, to be as this object merely a conglomeration of atoms and wheels then where is there a place for freedom? How can such a collection of mere atoms be happy, and fashion the Good Life?

The best thinkers of the Enlightenment followed by the best of the nineteenth century were caught in the dilemma of a materialistic psychology. Does not the inner wo/man disappear when humans are made into an object of science? On the other hand if we succumb to the mode of the middle Ages, when the Church kept man firmly under the wraps of medieval superstitions, do we not give up all hope for self-determined man?

“Yet, we want man to be the embodiment of free, undetermined subjectivity, because this is the only thing that keeps him interesting in all of nature…It sums up the whole tragedy of the Enlightenment vision of science.” There are still those who would willingly surrender wo/man to Science because of their fear of an ever encroaching superstitious enemy.

Kant broke open this frustrating dilemma. By showing that sapiens could not know nature in its stark reality, that sapiens had no intellectual access to the thing-in-itself, that humans could never know a nature that transcended their epistemology, Kant “defeated materialistic psychology, even while keeping its gains. He centered nature on man, and so made psychology subjective; but he also showed the limitations of human perceptions in nature, and so he could be objective about them, and about man himself. In a word man was at once, limited creature, and bottomless mystery, object and subject…Thus it kept the best of materialism, and guaranteed more than materialism ever could: the protection of man’s freedom, and the preservation of his inner mystery.”

After Kant, Schilling illuminated the uniqueness of man’s ideas, and the limitations from any ideal within nature. Schilling gave us modern wo/man. Materialism and idealism was conjoined. Wo/man functioned under the aegis of whole ideas, just as the idealists wanted, and thus man became an object of science while maintaining freedom of self-determination.

The great truth of the nineteenth century was that produced by William Dilthey, which was what wo/man constantly strived for. “It was “meaning” said Dilthey, meaning is the great truth about human nature. Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience…Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience.” Man does not do this drawing together on the basis of simple experience but on the basis of concepts. Man imposes symbolic categories of thought on raw experience. His conception of life determines the manner in which s/he values all of its parts.

Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.”

Does it make sense to you that “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul”??

Quotes and ideas from “Beyond Alienation” Becker

Thanks so very much for taking your time to create this very useful and informative site. I have learned a lot from your site. Thanks!!0 ------ Bobby Jones (retro jordans).

I would dispute your thesis here. How can knowledge seek 'truth' when knowledge itself cannot verify truth from fact? What is knowledge? Is it to know? Or is it to know what is perceived? Or is it to know the general? And then again, we consider 'understanding'. How can you differentiate the two? Can you even convert information to knowledge without understanding? Aren't the then interlinked as a singular process of cognitive thoughts?

You take information, you understand it and then convert it to knowledge. If you need to understand information for knowledge, where does the difference come in then? Understanding does not merely seek meaning, as knowledge doesn't seek 'truth'. Understanding is the father of knowledge where without conceiving with information, knowledge cannot exist, but considering learning - a new term in this discussion, you break the cycle. You don't need to understand or be knowledgeable to 'learn'. You can learn without understanding, thus breaking the cycle.

In which case again, meaning doesn't exist too because to seek meaning is to co-relate information with knowledge, in which case, it then breaks the cycle once again! So we then rely on vague 'understanding' which then proceeds to convert assumed knowledge, which disputes the 'truth' argument. Because then, knowledge is not related to truth but our vague assessment of 'understanding' what is assumed to be the meaning of our understanding, since knowledge may still be needed to 'understand'.