Ana;
No need to apologize for sarcasm.
1st of all let me ask, "What's wrong with us learning from those who haven't
fit our educational molds?"
But more clearly the direction I am going with this is that by the age of 16
a person has been able to navigate something in their life successfully, why
as a society have we decided that it needs to be learning information from a
book? What is so wrong if some people can't read Tolstoy or Salinger or
Paulson or Eliot or Wordsworth or etc. etc? What is so wrong with some
people not knowing what a haiku is or how to explain Bernouli's principle or
Boile's law? You don't have to understand engineering in order to build a
dam, you merely have to stop the water.
Writing is one form of abstract thought but even before writing people had
abstract thought, they just portrayed it in a different way. In today's
educational driven field we appear to be stuck on the idea that everybody
needs to represent their abstract thought in the same way, this is just
unfair and I see first hand the damage this does to very valuable people.
So let's reframe the question; how do we measure abstract thought besides
using reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic?
eric
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