reactionary crap

[rone]

I've been irked all day by thinking about how much of human progress has come out of a complete and opposite reaction against another movement or opinion in the fields of art, science, and politics.  The bloody pendulum swings from end to end and it all seems like a ridiculous waste of energy.  Hey, that's fine if you're 19, because at that age, energy is the only thing you aren't short on.  But for a race that's several millennia old, it seems a tad immature.  We too easily fall into black-and-white perception, either clinging to the old ways or utterly shunning them.

I know that sometimes it's necessary to completely step away from how things are done now to find a new direction.  But it should be a last resort.  I wonder if these childish 180° turns are just a subconscious panicky attempt to save face.

Comments

[asienieizi.livejournal.com]

Such "critical thinking" material isn't taught in the standard k-12 education most people receive

I wish it were. I don't remember ever being formally taught this either it was always just "there", something I'd been taught from an early age I guess and as such, that's the way we raised our kids so it's something they've always grown up with too. It's served them very well in dealing with just day to day problems in too many situations to mention.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Believe it or not, I actually had a brief course unit on that in the fifth or sixth grade. The teacher was sort of a free spirit, and it was the (late) Seventies. But there was a text and everything, about such things as what propaganda was, detecting emotionally loaded statements, name-calling, etc.

I remember hearing that attempts to introduce "critical thinking" curricula in some districts were highly controversial, because parents thought that evil secular humanistic moral relativism was being spread.

[asienieizi.livejournal.com]

That was a memory trigger. Roughly the same time frame in N.California
in the 4th or 5th grade we were shown a black and white photograph with a typical city street scene. We were asked to make observations and answer several questions such as the time of year it was. The discussion afterwards is still very clear. The time of year was determined by the trees, what people were wearing and observing the exhaust coming from the cars.