This was great!
This time, when I went silent for a while, there was no the radio silence we usually get. There was a set of THOUGHTS that set me to thinking. THAT is where we ae going!
You talked about BASICS.
When I come up with a thought, it often seems to me to be so obvious that I have trouble getting anybody but you to understand how long it took me to get it, and why no one would be likely to EVER come up with it.
One commenter talked about the basic w questions, who what where and why. You don’t get that in group which is trying to impress each other with how many details they know. And that means just about any discussion group I have ever seen.
We are engaged in a war in which all the detailed knowledge in the world won’t win. Pain and Simmons talked about knowledge versus wisdom. They concluded that our definition of Wisdom has nothing to do with the accepted version, which consists ENTIRELY of trying to impress people.
It occurs to me that one never grows up unless he goes through the Porch Talk phase.
A small child wants ANSWERS. He needs discipline and adults who ACT adult. But there comes a time when he begins to have to make his own decisions. As he gets into his teens he needs adults who will help HIM become adult. That means that the adult must stop dictating truth and begin to explain to the teen how he must begin to deal with a LACK of information.
In our society, that time never comes. I remember when I took some grad courses in 1992 I was amazed to see grad students sitting around CRAMMING for the exam. They were doing exactly what they had done during twelve years of grammar school and high school and four ears of college. The professor had done what the grammar school teacher does with pre-teens, putting together an exam to see if the kids could repeat what at they had heard.
I have said that a high-level executive should not HAVE a job description. He MAKES job descriptions. By the same token, no professor is ready to conduct a seminar if he must give an examination at the end of it. If fifty hours of open discussion can’t tell him how well a student is doing, he should go back to teaching grammar school.
#1 by shari on 04/19/2008 - 1:52 pm
That porch talk phase has been eliminated from so many lives, going back decades now. This is the most evil thing. It makes it difficult, and all too often impossible for the older generation to pass anything on. And now too many of the older generation don’t have anything TO Pass on.