The shortcomings of the cultural, let alone academic, pedagogy

The shortcomings of the cultural, let alone academic, pedagogy

Also at: https://www.patreon.com/posts/15105546  

For the sake of clarity:

Pedagogy-the means by which knowledge is transferred

Academic pedagogy-the formalized institutional methods of knowledge transference

Cultural pedagogy-the intra and cross generational means of passing on social mores and its component knowledge

A more important point is whether our education systems are teaching us just more sophisticated ways of 'moving the deck chair seating-priorities on the Titanic' , instead of questioning the meaning and purpose for the 'Titanic' and its alternate utility and legacy. Where education is not accentuated because of voluntary and involuntary circumstances, then the skills sought for having some substance and security degrade away from the individual and onto other agencies of support-human and otherwise. Education, being the indoctrinated acculturation, at the least, of individual's to the present social paradigm becomes a two-edged sword of is it the the egg (the cultural pedagogy system) or the chicken (the recipient, aka student) who is defective? Or is the education a reflection of a historical social order for which the results are intended for the present status quo- for better or worse? Does that social order reach an inflexible inertia moving towards entropy: ‘Entropy-a system that reaches its maximum point for its algorithmic design (mostly unintended), and goes into increasing inefficiencies of results into its inevitable decline..’.  

One of the present shortcomings of the educational system is that it's done for the sake of the statistical measure on the administration and the faculty, than as a diagnostic aid for the potential learner .. So curves are implemented to raise grades to the bureaucratic standard, leaving the child with a hollow miseducation and a ‘participation-trophy' as a certificate

Seeing that Nature has its own geologic renewal and deterioration cycles for the perennial seasons to geologic time, which before humanistic dominance was working pretty well for several billion years, are the cycles of rise and decline a human the blind spot in its social order construct ?

As a Math-phile, I learned that the process, NOT THE ANSWER-per se, was the meaningfulness of the drill. Seeing the architecture of the gauntlets of logic one has to traverse to come to a definable end is the training than any of the superficialities and atmospherics of that architecture's discovery. Cognitive tools developed from prior experiences (aka, social background) effect the apprehension of other tools. Speaking as one AA-person of the 50's and 60's, plus w/contacts w/kids from working class to upwardly mobile and affluent households; where there was some form of intangible organized focus in routine, the willing child was able to comprehend the logic (aka 'cultural skewed bias') more intuitively than those for whom process of organization in routine was more random and not as important as the utility of the result

What of the opinions of the suitability of math and science courses as perpetuating white privilege? The uses to which math studies are directed has a naturally winnowing set of qualifications for their end use, for which only a certain percentage of the population would have an aesthetic or a facility to pursue. Yet there are aspects of math, whose applications branch into the arts-visual, auditory, tactile-that could be taught. The author of the article would need to be a pioneer in the alternative methods of understanding math applications, than be making a pointless critique on the aspect being taught for its present ends.

IQ is the result of (non)learned habitual cognitive responses. If it is the result of  a person who has an impediment, short of a diagnostic medical one, that will affect their level of learning, whatever emotional handicap, be it their immaturity or the 'lessons' they do and can grasp for utilitarian expediency-as well as the many intangibles mentioned- will determine if a person decides to make a living at the Highway Interchanges, panhandling for hand to mouth OR have the learned organization and discipline to follow a regimen they are familiar with for a greater achievement..

It's MORE THAN just WILL, but the trainings to be familiar with what one's applied will can achieve. As others have noted,".. enabl[ing]e one to make valuable contributions to a modern civilization with[in] a computerized economy." makes my argument about education being a fabricated product and result of an arbitrary (social) condition.. Some are better conditioned by contemporaneous social circumstances to do such.. Change the circumstances, you change the result

Knowing kids who've had little to no exposure to numbers besides money-change given them, there is a disadvantage to kids in two ways 1) they have probably been passed-on because their test grades, not their full comprehension of the subject matter was competent. (I took Math Fusion over in summer school after 9th grade because the teacher just pushed the material too fast for me to comprehend-obtw, I got 90+ in summer school). 2) teaching to the test skips the minutiae details that are essential for the less familiar/skilled students.

Learning, as you may know, is based on the proficiency with which you are familiar with precursor tools by which the knowledge foundation is built. If, there are reasons other than a lack of will for the absence of those foundational tool proficiency. An opinion writer, who has a beef with the pedagogy, which could very well be outdated for the demographic she must teach at the prescribed standards didn't take account for previous possible deficiencies, but only account for the median knowledge which previous lapses, including the two I mentioned here and earlier (sensory reception noise and the general social conditions) have not been accounted. My high school chemistry teacher was superb at humanizing the developments of the paradigms and protocols of chemistry. Those characterizations were the hook by which I distinguished for learning the different chemical concepts and processes-earning me a 96 on the final exam. The PROCESS was the focus and the persons were coincidental beneficiaries of that initial serendipity of the PROCESS.

As for the family environment: 'De facto parents', parents by adverse circumstances (not the traditional courtship by way of PLANNED and ORGANIZED-but what is part of the spontaneous social milieu). You know, as I know: How many times is something that's spontaneous-on trivial things-ever becomes a long term benefit? Thus, with environments that enable such random spontaneity... there ya go! Concerning "...a little thought and a lot of caring." What non-didactic, not formally taught, fertile and horny guy or gal (take a look around at the titillations in our present media environment!!) at 13-17 years is going to be thinking or caring about what happens after the burning urge has been satisfied? What teen ager or school drop-out (excluding Steve Jobs, etc) has the skills, let alone moxy to make it in this economy or just have the access to reliable knowledge for good guidance and advice? It is a vicious cycle of a lack of skills compounded by the consequences of the lack of skills (Learned!)

What about when the 'parents' are barely out of their adolescence ? OR when parents are the extensions of their vocational or detentional economic absence, with the kids being latchkey agents of self-parenting?  The parents, beyond the nominal names on a birth certificate: if the 'parent' is unprepared to be a parent, then there is no such thing as the 'parenting' to talk about. That lack of preparation can come from immaturity, involuntary circumstances (not medical) and medical circumstances... There is a context beyond the individuals-for most conscientious persons where those few classic cases of negligence exist that is conscious negligence.   

Another way of viewing intelligence: How well would a high IQ or 700+ SAT/ACT person do in the street-life.. A whole different set of skills and knowledge.. With luck and a good mentor, their native skills could get them by. Without such social support, they be as lost as a kid who hasn't read more than one book per year prior to 1st grade.

Only those so insecure to prove their superiority or deflect any projections of inferiority digress or divert the point of the PROCESS to such secondary trivialities of ethnic ownership, as far as discussion of IQ is concerned.

This is good a place to posit this theorem on intelligence,civilization and their rise and fall as it applies to 'education'

Why is it that those advanced (LITERATE, MATHEMATICALLY ADVANCED) 'civilizations' declined-from the Babylonian-Egyptian-Greek/Persian-Roman (and now Western Civ.). Most theories put the onus on the degeneration (entropy?) of the ruling class and the expansion of an increasingly ungovernable illiterate class. I think this theory takes a tangential slice of the entire picture. Since the wonders of those civilizations had to have been done by insightful minds (sans alien help).  Then why did those cultures whose mental capacities allowed them to reach the ability to have those achievements deteriorate?

My conclusion is that from the first inspirational insight, the actor had a cleared mental-emotional field for the processing of associated connections to come to their 'Eureka!'-moment. As these person with that serendipity had also the status or patronage to leverage these fundamental insights of development, they were able to train others who to a lesser, the same, or greater degree, depending on the mental and space they were PRIVILEGED to acquire, achieved a comparable positions of influence within their cultural group. The more advanced and nuanced the training, the need for institutions and the criteria for entry into those institutions. As has been noted elsewhere, earlier phases had the demographic space and utility for the new initiates. At the same time, those who had apprehended or achieved at a lesser level found whatever compensatory 'rewards' in the mental and emotional derivations from that level; creating a de facto caste for themselves.

A guy has a book out with a theorem that at a certain point of being self-consciously 'knowledgeable', people decide that further knowledge is not necessary, since they have been certified by past grades, certificates, etc.. As those heterodoxies for different mental and emotional contentment of their ambience became more distinct from the those with a more focused mental and less diffuse emotional attentiveness to the by-products of the original 'Eureka!' insight, there becomes a supportive and consuming classes of cohorts along this line of separation. Those operating with a more cleared mental and emotional sensory field in contrast to those who actively sought or were involuntarily exposed to a more cluttered mental and distractive emotional field as part of their normal routine, branch off to a different level of cognitive perception.

I suspect that at the apogee of this kind of development there were those few with the privilege of space and time, probably patronaged, if not supported by the authorities as their logistical-financial support, to have the access to the training and development of skills wanted by those in control-politically, economically, and culturally. All the rest of the populations served in a minor support capacity to the political-economic-cultural patrons. 'The rest', without some fortuity of circumstance became more disposable as tangible commodities and devalued as intangible beings. As long as 'the rest' had some modicum of material and emotional security, they were quite smugly content with their level of self-reflection that dealt with the heterodoxies of thought and feeling for their aesthetic castes.

When the means to acquire the benefits of 'the good life' became more narrow and seemingly rationed to those at the top of the official and informal patronage hierarchy, and those means for acquisition became so nuanced in their technical skills; then those who were on the ancillary branches of the patronage support, plus those totally outside that support system, became expendable to a corruptible mental and emotional degree-further degrading the character of the holistic whole.  At this point those of the Eureka!-class mindset were no longer one of the people adding to the general knowledge and well-being of the clan or tribe, but had become the instruments for their patrons' privileged position and wants. Thus 'knowledge' had become the prostitute of need, than the offspring of inquiry. Schools of thought, from formal institutions to populist cults had their own operational code.. That code was for whatever level of compensatory satiation, NOT the well-being of the whole, which had outgrown its functional capacity to be of general use to the whole, but, primarily, to the predisposed or fortunate few of status or condition. The rest of the populace's mental and emotional space was preoccupied with mostly the tactics and few strategies for finding and getting whatever for their near-term horizons-NOT the original free,uncluttered, and abstracted-minded individual of the original 'Eureka!'.

With the degradation of a general, public, academic pedagogy that could be utilized by a diversity of the mental and emotional heterodoxies of short-term thinking (6-mos to 5 years), let alone the hand-to-mouth level existence of the most marginal; there became not only the lack of coherence, but the lack of adherence to any commonality of society, and increasingly less for the pillars of social order for that society.

Civilizations, as we speak of them as the humanistic achievement of sophisticated intelligence, could very well be more like the tip of the iceberg above water, while beneath the surface are (to mix metaphors) the evidence of the dysfunctionally of the limited potential of the distribution of shared, disseminated, knowledge. From that lack of addressing those not privileged to be existing in a sensory zone of minimal mental and emotional noise, the 'iceberg' has been weighing itself down, by not having a varied and versatile enough numbers of uplifting channels of educational means to allow the flow of thought to be assimilated throughout its body to the various branches which support its apex above the surface (of comfort).

'Intelligence' is, mostly, the acculturation and training for the skills desired for the socio-economic system, and the advantage would go to those who have or find access to the tools for those skills; circling back to the acculturation and training."

The technological civilization, which has dominated the world until this postmodern era, required a different set of cognitive skills that were derived from the needed and inspired tools developed from necessity and off-shoots of necessity. That other peoples didn't acquire or use (the Chinese with gunpowder) these tools in the way the technological (finding adaptations for accomplishing of tasks not provided by nature) oriented societies had is talking about two types of intelligences, as you now see documentaries of people from technological societies going to 'the bush' to find nature based medicines of the non-technological, so-called primitive peoples.

There's a Charlie Rose (charlierose.com) interview w/Tom Friedman of the NYTimes. The interview focused on the reactionary, near-term cathartic reaction in present day (Trumpian) US policy that are related to the 'Win'-results than the affected processes for that resulting 'win'. The mental disposition for having or being given something w/o the fore-actions of an organized, methodical discipline run parallel with lack of 'academic achievement'. Without the social disciplines of organization, the mental perceptions and general cognizance of the phenomena would be densely obtuse and obscure, if not entirely unknown.

The Tom Friedman interview: https://charlierose.com/videos/31104?autoplay=true

This interview provides an allegory and an analogy to what happens when by social conditions, individuals (Trump) or groups have been conditioned by their historical environment to take a mental perspective that is within their accumulated skill set of operational tools. Their behavior (exhibited intelligence) can be tied to past social influences and conditions that have enabled their responses. Trump, for all his material advantages, acts in affirmative hubris as a person beyond the natural physics of consequences on which others of the 'Bell Curve' would be subject. Though Trump may view his Presidency as a validation of his 'intelligence' it is a train-wreck amplification of recklessness (with authority). Put this in a micro-context with 'sub-intelligent' groups and you have the same, possibly more short-term reckonings of adverse consequences that we are serial-viewing with the Trump regime.

This link is a relevant piece done on PBS Newshour tonight https://www.pbs.org/newshour/econom...e-american-dream-may-depend-on-where-you-live. How one’s surrounding environment influences the horizons of one’s way of perceiving potential phenomena

Take-away: Intelligence is not a signifier of any genetic superiority, as it is the efficiency of the use of whatever level of resource tools one has gained in their interactions with their social environment. An example: If any two pair have the same 'pedigree' of background along with similar training I would expect at the worst a 60/40-40/60 series of results. When there is a wide discrepancy and social-historical forces are not included in the analysis, then the data for reaching what would be a genetic deduction would be faulty.

The pedagogy that has driven education allows for the tolerance of learning castes by the reliance for learning on a state of mind for which sensory noise disturbance needs to be at a minimum. But the modern social order has an over-saturation of environmental sensory noise for the general populace, leaving a wide swath, particularly with historically marginal groups, denied assimilation and acculturation to the tools of learning for economic competence and sustenance. Those groups are left to fabricate their own paradigms of learning, creating dysfunctions to social adhesion and coherence that lead to dystopian and nihilist groups as a consequence of those reactive, organic heterodox alternatives in those subsets from the more detached and insular pedagogical status quo.