I could choose almost any posting to the Digest and use it as a
vehicle for airing my interest in reconfiguring general education to enable
the next generation to deal in a more sophisticated and effective fashion
with the complexities of the human situation of the sort discussed on this
listserv.
And I'd do it if I weren't, to some degree, considerate of the
probable boredom-tolerance levels of most participants.
But once in awhile I have to prod a little those who take an active
interest in what the young aren't being taught , and a passing comment in
Keith Cowan's response to Donald Kerr provides this week's opening.
Keith says,
>. . . I would rather redefine the notion of system to encompass my view of
>multiple systems at work, some internal to a company but most external.
and,
>With this view, we can define systems at the root of most behaviour.
>Having said that, I would hasten to add that the choice of which system to
>try to change is a critical aspect to making systems thinking work . . .
Traditional schooling, focusing attention as it does on isolated
fragments of reality, does nothing to prepare students for this kind of
thinking. The systems which are meaningfully integrated are sociocultural
systems, and in our attempt to understand what's going on around us, we
invariably fail to take into account the nesting of or the intersecting of
the particular system we're interested in with all other relevant
sociocultural systems--family, religious, ethnic, occupational, regional,
social class, dominant culture, Western (maybe even to some degree a
"hard-wired" system common to all humans).
In education, we're stepping over dollars to pick up nickles. I
continue to think that students should bring a class action suit for
negligence against those of us in the establishment.
Marion
<mbrady@digital.net>
http://ddi.digital.net/~mbrady
--Marion Brady <mbrady@digital.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>