Re: Education

dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
Thu, 8 Jan 1998 09:24:53 -0800 (PST)


On Thu, 8 Jan 1998, Harvey Newstrom wrote:

> David A Musick wrote:
> >
> > Abraham Moses Genen wrote that we need an educational system "focused on
> > an understanding that society functions best when placed ahead of the
> > self."
> >
> > Actually, we need an educational system that teaches, among the other
> > things he listed, that the self benefits greatly by helping other people.
>
> I respectfully disagree with both of you. No matter how much I may
> agree with your views, they are political. You are trying to instill
> religious (even if Extropian) *values*. Education should teach
> knowledge and skills that can be used by the individual. Training an
> individual how they should behave in society is not education. It is
> programming and brainwashing.

Education *always* instills values, *always* is a kind of indoctrination.
There is no such thing as "knowledge and skills" without valuation
attached. Determining which among the indefinitely many skills and
knowledges on offer will be the ones taught, let alone determining what
will *count* as "useful" in the first place will inevitably be practices
that resonate with beliefs about what society should look like and how
people should behave in it. Given this, the values that I would emphasise
in an properly extropian pedagogy would be responsibility, criticism, and
respect for diversity. Best, Dale