Gary,
You offer lots of things to which to respond. Doing a little catch-up in
my office I finally advanced the pages of my Einstein calendar to August.
The July quotation seems appropriate here:
"Democracy, taken in its narrow, purely political sense, suffers from the
fact that those in economic or political power possess the means for
molding public opinion to serve their own class interests."
The producers of this annual calendar never seem to give references for the
quotes, but when I have gone looking I have found the quotations on the
whole to be accurately represented in some work of Einstein's.
While lately I have been finding more meaning in Dewey and Schon for
example, another source which speaks quite powerfully to me as an example
of what things could be is the monograph, the thirteenth yearbook of the
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, titled: "The Nature of Proof"
by Harold Fawcett. The person who initially hooked me up with xclass and
xlchc, Alan Schonfeld, also introduced me to Fawcett's work nearly a dozen
years ago. NCTM (Fawcett is$17US at http://www.nctm.org) recently
reprinted a number of the older yearbooks. Several are REAL gems,
Fawcett's in particular.
\Now that I've read Fawcett's monograph (from 1938!!!), at the same time I
am filled with hope and I sink with frustration. The hope comes from the
fact that here is one more example of school as education and not the
filtering and indoctrination system we have now. The frustration comes
from the fact that in spite of examples such as these from Fawcett or
others in math ed such as Les Steffe, Paul Cobb and their associates or
Cathy Fosnot and Deborah Shifter and others in science ed and other areas
or larger scale projects such as that by Benezet, there is NO EVIDENCE that
such EDUCATION is really what is promoted in the schools.
To a certain extent maybe the question is no what the liberal arts are or
are supposed to be, but what is EDUCATION supposed to be. Read Fawcett and
you will see a splendid example of my answer to the question.
Dewey
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Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr. Phone: (208)426-3105
Professor of Physics Dept: (208)426-3775
Department of Physics/MCF421/418 Fax: (208)426-4330
Boise State University dykstrad@email.boisestate.edu
1910 University Drive Boise Highlanders
Boise, ID 83725-1570 novice piper: GHB, Uilleann
"As a result of modern research in physics, the ambition and hope,
still cherished by most authorities of the last century, that physical
science could offer a photographic picture and true image of reality
had to be abandoned." --M. Jammer in Concepts of Force, 1957.
"If what we regard as real depends on our theory, how can we make
reality the basis of our philosophy? ...But we cannot distinguish
what is real about the universe without a theory...it makes no sense
to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what
reality is independent of a theory."--S. Hawking in Black Holes
and Baby Universes, 1993.
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