## Metadata - Author: [[Kieran Egan]] - Full Title: The Educated Mind - Category: #books ## Highlights - The prime source of postmodern distrust of binary oppositions was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). He persistently attacked people's generation of oppositions in their thinking and language, asserting that people see phenomena in terms of oppositions that they invent and then assume the oppositions are a product of the phenomena rather than of their thinking. "There are no opposites: only from those of logic do we derive the concept of opposites-and falsely transfer it to things" ([Location 551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=551)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Why should binary structuring be a necessary consequence of language development? Because "[l]ogically, we express ... elementary differentiation in the form of contradictories, A and not-A, and it is certainly true that the ability to distinguish, together with the ability to perceive resemblances, is basic to all cognitive processes" (Hallpike, 1979, pp. 224-25). ([Location 560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=560)) - Organizing ones conceptual grasp on the physical world by initially forming binary structures-hot/cold, big/little, soft/hard, crooked/straight, sweet/sour-allows an initial orientation over a range of otherwise bewilderingly complex phenomena: ([Location 582](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=582)) - As I mentioned in the introduction, our bodies are our primary "mediators" of meaning, and some of the earliest discriminations we make are in terms of ourbodies-so "wet" means wetter than my body and "dry" means drier than my body, "hard" means harder than my body and "soft" means softer than my body, "big" means bigger, "small" means smaller, and so on. ([Location 591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=591)) - Binary structuring is a feature of language and minds, not of the world, as Nietzsche so insistently argued. The world is not structured in binary terms, but our initial grasp on it can efficiently reduce it to binary terms. The process of learning involves elaborating the mind's terms to conform more truly with the complexity of reality. ([Location 623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=623)) - The mind's terms-language significantly-arealways inadequate to the task of raiding the inarticulate, but the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings that slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision is central to education. So the educational point is not to teach binary concepts, nor to teach that the world is structured in binary terms, but always to lead toward mediation, elaboration, and conscious recognition of the initial structuring concepts. Some initial grasp is required, however, or there is nothing secure to elaborate, and binary structures are one kind of effective grasper of new meaning. ([Location 625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=625)) - Hayek suggests that what we mean by abstractions might be better thought of as "operations of the mind" rather than as concepts. Abstractions become conscious, become concepts, as a result of the mind's reflecting on itself. The formation of abstract concepts, then, is not the outcome of some conscious process but rather the discovery of something that already has guided the mind's operations. ([Location 709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=709)) - Piaget's theory, and its extensions in more recent neo-Piagetian research (e.g., Case, 1985, 1991; Fischer, 1980), deals only with a limited range of children's thinking. It focuses on what has been called logico-mathematical thinking, or essentially numerical competence. Even when the object of study is dreams, play, or more recently, emotions or art, the researchers locate their central concern "in the human sensitivity to number, numbers, and numerical relations" ([Location 736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=736)) - The problem for education has come from the generally uncritical acceptance of Piaget's theory as a description of the totality of children's thinking. There is no good reason to believe that what may be true about the development of number competence is also true of metaphorical competence, or that what may he the case about logico-mathematical thinking is also true of the imagination. ([Location 740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=740)) - The belief that young children are generally concrete thinkers has meant shunning content that seems to involve abstractions, instead focusing on "active doing" and practical manipulation that has made the typical elementary classroom less intellectually rich than it should be. ([Location 746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=746)) - Current dogma asserts that the practical activity is crucial, to the point that other intellectual capacities that children have for grasping meaning are depreciated. I think the practical activity is certainly useful, but it can best support meaningful learning in a context of powerful abstractions; it is within the abstract context that the concrete content makes sense. ([Location 773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=773)) - More generally, the pervasive influence of the ideas of the young child as learning best and first "how to do," and of being a "concrete thinker," along with the considerable focus on logico-mathematical thinking, has had a peculiar and destructive effect on early education. Enormous emphasis has been placed on those intellectual skills that young children manage leastwell and develop only slowly-computational, logico-mathematical skills -with an equivalent neglect of what children do best-metaphoric, imaginative thinking. ([Location 777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=777)) - In teaching and curriculum planning, then, we might still hold to the principle that our understanding moves "from the known to the unknown," but we would do well to think of the "known" in terms of powerful abstractions and the "unknown" as anything that can be tied to them. When we begin to think of telling or teaching children something, we might sensibly begin with what set of binary abstractions it can be built on. ([Location 786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=786)) - Winner (1988) has reported an extensive series of studies of the genesis and growth of metaphoric competence. Among the early and, to the experimenters, more unexpected findings was the prodigal production of metaphors by some very young children. Also, in comparative tests of recognizing appropriate metaphors, it was discovered that the "highest number of appropriate metaphors was secured from the pre-school children, who even exceeded college students; ([Location 806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=806)) - Metaphors do not so much work by recognizing similarities between things; rather "it would be more illuminating . . . to say that metaphor creates the similarity than to say it formulates some similarity antecedently existing" (Black, 1962, p. 83). ([Location 813](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=813)) - Tags: [[metaphor]] - The social and educational importance of developing the capacityfor metaphor relies both on the empowerment of the individual and on the notion that the quality of any culture is in large part the quality of the… ([Location 824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=824)) - Cassirer makes the point that metaphor is one implication of language development, but that language carries with it the further implication of logic. As we become increasingly conscious of language-and the most potent instrument for increasing awareness of language has been writing-logic becomes more prominent. We see the network of logical relationships implicit in language and can begin to make them explicit, because… ([Location 831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=831)) - Such theories as Piaget's are "hierarchically integrative" -that is, later stages encompass the achievements of the earlier stages. They recognize only gains in cognitive competence, not losses. In particular, they do not recognize that in recapitulating the process of Western intellectual development,… ([Location 842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=842)) - Metaphoric capacity, in some respects, declines as children become older. Synapse development peaks in humans between nine months and two years, at which point the child has 50 percent more synapses than the adult. Metabolic activity in the brain reaches adult levels by nine or ten months and soon exceeds it, peaking around age four. Massive numbers of neurons die in utero, and the dying continues during the early years, leveling off at about seven years. Synapses wither from the age of two through the rest of childhood and into adolescence, when the brains metabolic rate falls back to adult levels. Pinker infers from such observations that "[lianguage development, then, could be on a maturational timetable, like teeth" (1994, p. 289). Given the close connection between language… ([Location 844](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=844)) - What we need to sort out, then, if we are to get a clear grasp of Mythic understanding, is those important intellectual functions in which children are typically superior to adults. Then, we must decide what on earth we are to do about them. If, for an overly crude example, some degree of metaphoric fluency and imaginative vivacity is necessarily to be sacrificed for literacy, what should be done? Well, this is too gross and dramatic an example,of course, but it brings out precisely the kind of trade-off that I think is a part of education. We will always want to preserve as much as possible and lose as little as possible, but the current bland and comfortable belief that any skill gain comes at no cost, at no potential loss, just cannot any longer be sustained. If we fail to recognize potential or actual… ([Location 852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=852)) - The larger trick is attaching the rhythms inherent in languages to the more general, peripatetic pattern of everyday life-hope and despair, fear and relief, oppression, resentment, and revolt, youth and age, the rising emotions of comedy and the pity and fear of tragedy, and on and on. The elaboration of linguistic rhythms… ([Location 870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=870)) - It is well to remember Barbara Hardy's celebrated observation: "We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct,… ([Location 876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=876)) - These observations about rhythm and narrative have some significant implications for teaching and the curriculum. They would, for example, support my earlier suggestion that a rich and dramatic world history program be introduced in the early years, and they suggest additional reasons why such a program is educationally important. The rhythmic patterns of our emotional lives find analogs in history: an action "becomes intelligibleby finding its place in a narrative" (Maclntyre, 1981, p. 190). Our lives have a place in larger narratives, prominent among which is human history. "The defining characteristic of narrative is that the whole gives meaning… ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=881)) - Images allow us in a limited but very real sense to extend our grasp on the world. Affective images do not need to reduce the content being taught; rather, they provide a means for the child to "incorporate" it. This helps them to see that mathematics, history, and science are not made up of alien knowledge, something out there apart from them. By imaginatively grasping knowledge, children make it, rcciprocally, become a part of them. So children discover that they are mathematical, historical, and scientific beings. ([Location 916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=916)) - Each of us is born with a unique consciousness, with a unique "take" on reality. Language is a conventional, shared, limiting shaper of our consciousness. The first educational task, then, is to ensure that children learn fluid and flexible language use so that it can become a means of expressing their unique perceptions and consciousness. ([Location 1003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1003)) - The second educational task is to ensure not only that language serve as a tool for expressing one's perceptions and consciousness, or for communicating them, or for reflecting reality, but that the child recognize that language has a distinct, dynamic life of its own. It is not only a medium into which or through which our experience can be expressed, but is itself an extension and enlargement of our experience. ([Location 1007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1007)) - The third educational task is to teach children the varied conventions for using language successfully as a means of communication with other isolated, unique consciousnesses similar to but not the same as their own. ([Location 1010](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1010)) - The first educational implication of Mythic understanding, then, is that young children be encouraged to become fluent and effective users of varied language; this is accomplished through evoking, stimulating, and developingthe capacities for forming binary oppositions and mediating them, for abstract thinking, metaphor, rhythm and narrative, images, stories and affective meaning, humor, and no doubt a number of other capacities language development implies. ([Location 1019](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1019)) - Fluent literacy is not simply a matter of thinking and then writing the product of one's thoughts, the writing, rather, becomes a part of the process of thinking. Extended discursive writing is not an external copy of a kind of thinking that goes on in the head; it represents a distinctive kind of literate thinking. ([Location 1122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1122)) - The mixture of the mythic with the rational constitutes the central defining feature of Romantic understanding. ([Location 1203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1203)) - European Romanticism is notoriously the object of rather disparate descriptions, but no one can omit its "preoccupation with otherness, with what is different, remote, mysterious, inaccessible, exotic, even bizarre" (Ong, 1971, p. 255). ([Location 1239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1239)) - Why are the contents of The Guinness Book of Records so much more engaging than the typical math or geography textbook to the average ten-year-old? Why is the average ten-year-old so interested in who was the tallest person who ever lived? (The average ten-year-old male slightly, but only slightly, more interested than the average ten-year-old female, according to my informal surveys.) One answer is that such facts are more romantic; they tell about the wonders of the world, the most extreme experiences, the limitsof reality, the greatest achievements, the most exotic forms of life, the most amazing events. The Guinness Book of Records is one of the most accessible collections of erga for children. For the literate student faced with a seemingly infinite autonomous reality, the records provide a very neat summary of the range and extent of reality, with the associated security that reality isn't infinite in all regards.If this autonomous reality were infinitely extensive, we would be infinitely insignificant. By discovering the real limits of the world and of human experience, we form a context that enables us to establish sonic security and to establish proportionate meaning within it. ([Location 1250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1250)) - The traditional conception represents learning as building understanding by composing it bit by bit, rather the way a jigsaw puts together a picture of something. The "romantic" alternative conception represents learning as building understanding by gradually clarifying a picture the way the pieces of a holographic plate work. ([Location 1271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1271)) - I discuss these at greater length elsewhere (Egan, 1990), but here we might note the often passionate drive to complete a set or to enlarge and organize, or constantly reorganize, a collection. The collection may be of stones, shells, stamps, dolls' outfits, comics-almost anything. The hobbies may be equally varied. This drive in Western culture typically begins with literacy, peaks at about age eleven, and fades away by about fifteen.What is going on here? Well, we can recognize collecting and hobbies as an engagement with reality that is in one regard like the pursuit of the exotic and extreme. By collecting the set, or by mastering in great detail some area of the world, one gains the assurance that reality is not limitless, that one can grasp it. By learning about something exhaustively, one gains the security that the world is in principle knowable. ([Location 1288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1288)) - Put simplistically, literacy generates conceptions ofreality, and the mind explores reality by trying to grasp its limits and extremes-, ([Location 1303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1303)) - When we are ten, we are eery much at the mercy of the world around us. We are typically subject to endless rules and regulations-parental, societal, and, not least, natural. The person, institution, or team that the child associates with usually gives clear clues to the constraints found most problematic. The immensely rich, decadent, dirty rock star offers one kind of hero, the skillful soccer player another, and likewise the successful writer, the outrageous singer or actor, the powerful hockey or football Learn. The tension characteristic of romance comes from the desire to transcend a threatening reality while seeking to secure ones identity within it. ([Location 1335](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1335)) - A characteristic of Romantic understanding, then, is its ready association with transcendent human qualities, or human qualities exercised to transcendent degree. This observation is important for the education of children from about eight to fifteen because almost any curriculum material can be made understandable if students can associate -romantically" with such qualities within it. ([Location 1339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1339)) - A. N. Whitehead characterizes romance as an "excitement" following on the "vividness of novelty" and the "unexplored connections with possibilities half-disclosed by glimpses and half-concealed by the wealth of material.... Romantic emotion is essentially the excitement consequent on the transition from the bare facts to the first realisations of the import of their unexplored relationships" (1967, pp. 17-18). He adds that this "great romance is the flood which bears on the child towards the life of the spirit" (p. 22). ([Location 1354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1354)) - When we test students' educational achievement in terms of what they remember of the knowledge taught them-which remains by far the commonest form of evaluation-we reinforce the image of the textbook, encyclopedia, or dictionary as the paradigm of the successful knower (de Castell, Luke, and Luke, 1989). It becomes important in such a climate of opinion to emphasize that books do not store knowledge. They contain symbolic codes that can serve us as external mnemonics for knowledge. Knowledge can exist only in living human minds.No sensible aim of education can include making human minds mimictextbooks, yet we see constant examples of just this. The alternative educational task is to teach students how to revivify the symbolic codes by transmuting them into human understanding, reconstituting the inert codes as living human knowledge. ([Location 1388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1388)) - Everything we know was discovered or invented or authored by somebody. We have taken some pride in abstracting the hard-won fragments of knowledge from the lives of its makers and laying them out in textbooks, encyclopedias, atlases, and dictionaries. These are wonderfully convenient devices for retrieval purposes. But for first access to knowledge during this layer of educational development, we would do better to rc-embed it in the lives of its makers. That way students can also feel why someone might care about the structure of the universe, the behavior of insects, the interactions of chemicals, and so on. ([Location 1399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1399)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - "We all know by now that many scientific and mathematical hypotheses start their lives as little stories or metaphors, but they reach their scientific maturity by a process of conversion into verifiability, formal and empirical, and their power at maturity does not rest on their dramatic origins" (Bruner, 1980, p. 12). ([Location 1424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1424)) - Once one can write, one can try to describe in various extensive forms the concrete particularity of the world. Subsequent inquirers can observe the world and previous descriptions of the world and then match their observations against those descriptions. They can then construct their descriptions to match more closely their sense of reality (Gombrich, 1900). The making/matching process can lead to increasingly precise representations of reality, in pictures, maps, and written descriptions. It is a rational process that can be quite un-theoreticor nonscientific. It is a form of "romantic" rational activity that is common, focused on the particular, and also prerequisite to theoretic scientific thinking. ([Location 1436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1436)) - Thus we might want to see whether certain forms of rational inquiry can be devised for the middle school years that stimulate and develop Romantic understanding and do not prematurely try to exercise a kind of theoretic thinking for which the prerequisites are not developed. Much of our failure in encouraging mathematical and scientific understanding in schools may stem from the general failure to distinguish Romantic understanding and its distinctive ways of engaging and making rational sense of the world as prerequisite to theoretic thinking. ([Location 1441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1441)) - In developing more realistic and practically efficacious intellectual tools we run the danger, in Wordsworth's terms, of giving "our hearts away." The sense of alienation that comes with the recognition of an autonomous reality is largely an alienation from the earlier sense of participating in nature. ([Location 1455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1455)) - Plato had long ago expressed his concerns about the potential losses that came along with literacy. He puts his caution, significantly, in a story. Socrates tells his young friend Phaedrus the old Egyptian legend about Thoth, the god-king of ancient Naucratis. Thoth was the inventor of draughts, dice, arithmetic, astronomy, and much else, including writing. Then Thoth took his inventions to Thamus, the god-king of all Egypt-perhaps looking for venture capital to get astronomy off the ground and the dice rolling. Thamus was impressed with many of them, but he had no time for what Thoth considered his greatest invention, writing. He expressed his objection thus:The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learner's souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. Your invention is not an aid to memory.... You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will he hearers of many things and will have learned nothing. (Plato, Phaed) us) ([Location 1459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1459)) - The idea that we can lose more than we gain in the process of education is, I realize, an odd notion in a culture that takes even the most superficial trappings of rationality as constituting vast superiority over traditionalmythic forms of thinking. The "binary opposite" perception that superficial rationality and literacy provide only a marginal utility at the enormous expense ofa wisdom and harmony of mythic consciousness has become a fashionable position. The fashionable alternative also tends to value traditional oral cultural forms of thinking as superior to even the most sophisticated Western forms, inescapably enmeshed as they are supposed to be in patriarchal, racist, or sexist epistemologies. The fashionable alternative does, however, help to point out that a literate intellectual life bounded by sensationalist papers, TV sports, tourism, Hollywood movies, and joyless material consumerism is not an obvious advance in understanding the world and experience over what is provided in many traditional oral cultures. ([Location 1485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1485)) - This is the danger of schooling during the intermediate years: decontex- tualizing literacy, numeracy, and rationality undermine Mythic understanding but are so inadequately introduced that Romantic understanding does not develop to the point where it provides a coherence, security, and meaningfulness equal to what has been displaced. Herein he the roots of alienation. The better path is to recognize Romantic understanding as a somewhat distinctive kind of understanding and to shape teaching and the curriculum during the middle school years in order to stimulate and develop it. ([Location 1516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1516)) - Working with the "tools" of oral language leads to the set of characteristics-the perspective on the world and experience, the style of sense-making, the kind of understanding-I am calling Mythic. Oral-language use is by far the most prominent influence on, or shaper of, that kind of understanding. The Romantic layer is a little more complicated; I have identified it not simply with the "tool" of alphabetic literacy but with a cluster of further, related social and cultural developments in ancient Greece. This Philosophic layer is shaped by an even more diffuse "tool," or "mediational means"; it requires not only a sophisticated language and literacy but also a particular kind of communication that in turn requires particular kinds of communities or institutions to support and sustain it. The central feature of Philosophicunderstanding is systematic theoretic thinking and an insistent belief that Truth can only be expressed in its terms. ([Location 1535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1535)) - But cultural development has come, in Ong's phrase, "not in the hollow of men's minds but in the density of history" ([Location 1736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1736)) - Earlier we saw Snell',; argument that developments in the Greek language were prerequisite to abstract, theoretic thinking. So, too, in early modern Europe we find significant shifts in language preceding and accompanyingthe period when the philosophes' and scientists' programs were getting underway. Lucien Febvre (1878-1956), co-founder of the French Annales school of historians, pointed out that the sixteenth-century French language lacked words for "absolute," "relative," "abstract," "concrete," "intentional," "inherent," "transcendental," "causality," "regularity," "concept," "criterion," "analysis," "synthesis," "deduction," "induction," "coordination," "classification," "system," and a range of terms that the Philosophic programs of the next century would use prominently. ([Location 1753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1753)) - The vocabulary of late adolescents engaged in academic work commonly begins to sprout "portmanteau" concepts, including many of those mentioned above. Ong emphasizes that such terms cannot be generated, however, without a significant accumulation of detailed knowledge (1978). Sometimes we find words students had long known and could have defined, such as "society," quite suddenly emerge into their everyday serious discourse with energy and prominence. Clearly the word has taken on a new and more precise meaning; some referent of the word has come into focus. "Society" is no longer a vague term used by adults to refer to an amorphous, indistinct concatenation of houses and services and politicians but becomes the name for the general entity that encompasses all those bits and pieces. It is as though an object has been discovered-a very complex one, but one that can be grasped by means of the portmanteau term. We can commonly note words like "nature," "culture," "the… ([Location 1769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1769)) - The Philosophic mind focuses on the connections among things, constructing theories, laws, ideologies, and metaphysical schemes to tie together the facts available to the student. The student then begins to acquire the knowledge necessary for rounding out the scheme. Take, for example, a discussion stimulated by local political candidates' lawn and window signs during a current election campaign. The Romantic child asks whose side "we" are on, why the different parties use the colors they do, and so on. The Philosophic fifteen-year-old wants to know details of the process that accounts for the electioneering signs' presence on lawns or in windows. Do the parties or candidates pay to rent space on the lawns, like advertising, or do people pay the party to get the signs? Do they have to pay more for a big one than for a small one? How many people… ([Location 1793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1793)) - It has long been evident to those attempting to attract adolescents to some ideological position that intense commitment can be generated by convincing them of the truth of the view of the world it represents. Consider the way typical nation states enlist the commitment of the young by the presentation of their national story; in liberal and pluralist states the result is typically a commitment to liberal pluralism, in more determinedly indoctrinating states, such as Nazi Germany, the result can be a passionate dedication, evident in the fervor of… ([Location 1811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1811)) - Mary Warnock notes how "Imagination can stretch out towards what imagination cannot comprehend" (1976, p. 58). One of the things it "stretches out towards" is what used to be called, during the Romantic period, the Sublime. The mind was filled with somewhat inchoate but… ([Location 1824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1824)) - Recall my earlier representation of the Romantic exploration of a hill town as in the fashion of a tourist, first seeking out the main square, thewalls, and the most dramatic features. The Philosophic exploration might be represented as that of a map maker, for whom all the features are… ([Location 1830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1830)) - Educational development, I am suggesting, is a process whose focus of interest and intellectual engagement begins with a myth-like construction of the world, then -romantically" establishes the boundaries and extent of reality, and then "philosophically" maps the major features of the world with organizing grids. ([Location 1864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1864)) - When students accumulate only a relatively small amount of knowledge, or too specialized a knowledge, by the time they enter communities that stimulate and support Philosophic thinking, they are able to generate only rather crude and simple general schemes. The problem is not that a crude, simple scheme does not organize enough knowledge but that it can comfortably organize anything. Simple forms of fundamentalist religious beliefs are a common example. If it is crude enough, everything becomes evidence to support it, and nothing challenges it. ([Location 1933](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001BFPKQM&location=1933)) - Tags: [[favorite]]