A Department of Edification
5th Year Program
(meta-disciplinary)
“Collaborative genius,” says Keith Sawyer, is
nurtured by an environment that encourages
failure—one that sees the liability of clarity:
how lucidity occludes the rest of a whole,
the remainder of the daze—the attention
deficiency that rides the underbelly of
attention efficiency.
As Richard Nixon would say repeatedly:
“Let me make one thing perfectly clear”
We have an addiction for it:
clarity.
Part of our Homeland Insecurity System.
You can see how diametrically if not
diabolically opposed a failure-encouraging,
clarity-suppressing environment would be to
institutionalized academia with its bias for
individual (rather than collaborative) genius.
Easy to test.
Stand up in faculty or staff forum.
Declare: “might we not be encouraging
a little more failure and less clarity so as
to nurture some local collaboration & the
mess & guess, trial & error and room for
play it takes to get better and good?
(At anything.)
Imagine.
Vision for Strategic Planning.
The questions might be:
how to sustain 2 incommensurate
learning environments without either
contaminating the other or dominating
the whole venture? How to encourage
failure and success, confusion and clarity?
These are environmental issues:
contextual, frame of mind-set,
attitudinal, meta-disciplinary
concerns. Primordial.
Fundamental.
&&&&&&&
Converse-Action
with my self
It’s ARGUING that counts.
My faculties that bray together,
stay together.
Daniel Pink claims I am shifting
from an Information Age to the
Age of Conceptualism.
Can I tell the difference?
Between information and
conceptualization? fact
and concept? Housekeeping
concerns and noggin notions?
No, seriously. Would I describe
my courses as essentially:
informational or
conceptual?
Resist the quick & easy talk
of “balance.” Sure: there’s an
ongoing daily relationship &
back & froth between fact
and idea; but in my mind
(and courses) which is boss?
Dominant Maitre D?
Master of my
domain:
Information or Concept?
I pretend there’s a grade-gun at
my temple and I’ve got to decide
(either/or) which rules my matrix:
Information or Conceptualism,
as captain of my soul.
It makes a difference that Makes
a Difference: the governance
of my organization, true?
(Do I mind my foe-dichotomizing?
Reducing complexity for the sake of
argument? I imagine a football game
without 2 teams—helter-skelter
scramble & brawl: gives “argument”
a bad name. No sense of shared
fundamental distinctions to turn up,
put in play, maintaining the parameters
like trying to compute without 0’s & 1’s,
no on’s and off’s. Slip sliding around.
The closer the destination, the more
I’m slip sliding around.
So I reduce: foe-dichotomize.
For the sake of argument.
A dubious clarity. Merely utilitarian.
Temporary, not eternal.
Back in the late 60’s a group of
Princeton students described their
learning agility as CEPT-ing, hot in
the media for awhile. IDEA is more
important than facts, they insisted.
Concepts: umbrella storage, mnemonic
capacity to focus on a “forest” without
short-changing “trees”
I know Einstein’s claim & I believe it:
imagination is more important than
knowledge. Same idea. Conceptualization
uber Information.
Forest/trees
Ideas/facts
Media/message
Form/content
Process/product
—a string of pearls.
With my immaculate conceptions
I fill-in my facts & nitty-nitty devilish
details: my “this’s” & “that’s”—tokens
manifesting fundamental and redundant
parts-to-wholes relationships.
Anyone can argue the opposite:
facts first, etc. I wish
you would Because I claim for the sake of argument
that it’s the ARGUING, actually, that is more
important than either: idea or fact, concept
or information ,imagination or knowledge.
Arguing Uber Alles. "I am a verb," says
Buckminster Fuller: challenging nominal
and noun-ish, static & status-seeking
states of mind
[[I.E. arg—argo: “the shine,” “shining,” “argent”
(Argentina: the Shining City; Jason and the Argonauts
sailing after the Golden Fleece). Argument is originally
edificational: building-up shared templates: reciprocal,
non-unilateral Collaborative Genius—complementary
yet hostile to, antithetical yet related & not to be collapsed
with individual genius—and why can’t they just as easily
get along? That is the be or not to be question.]]
GENIUS is the enemy of Genius, says Emerson
ARGUING trumps the tokens-of-argument, and
that’s why the idea of sustainable converse- action
across the curriculum is exciting to me as a possible
Environmental Characteristic, Feature and Quality
of Life of Mind minding here at Warren Wilson
along with our 25 miles of trails, free firewood,
international awareness, farm & forest, work
& service, quality of air concerns and the
possibility of wind power.
xxxooo, Sam
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