Smoke Signals from the Cave

Smoke Signals from the Cave on a Windy Day
 
At the beginning of summer, Paula mentioned to me
the possibility of considering our Educational
Philosophy at the Retreat and asked me if I
 might  want to make a presentation.

I said no—that would scare me: on the spot right
there before colleagues. I couldn’t say enough; I’d
try to say it all. (But it's motivated my summer
spamology.)
 
I work in a bunker: tossing out what I hope are
improvised explosive devices but are mere rice-
at-a-rhino expostulations. Safe behind not immediate
mediating media. Mind on a screen. Can’t touch this.
Will of the Course Whisperer.
 
If I were to stand & deliver, it’d be merely sound-in-air
in one ear and another. Too  immediate the media.  I
prefer the spew from the cave: virtual if not viral reality
as a venue still fully to be tapped as community resource:
local food back available 24/7365.  Windmill power,
so to speak (green? tiny ecological foot print?)

But I transgress. 

It’s not that I don’t want to make a lasting impression.
But how?  I ask myself
 
2 Discussion-Type Questions for retreat,
if retreat were to be philosophical
( the P in our Phdegrees)
 
1. Was the kid who blew the whistle on the Emperor’s
so-called Innovative Clothing, a hero or a fool?
icon or enemy of the people?
 
2. Thoreau claimed he wouldn’t walk across the
street to save the world. Was he being humble
or arrogant?
 
Serious across-the-disciplines consideration of these
two questions might instigate, provoke,  move us toward
characterizing our learning environment and collective
frame of minding.
 
Not walking across the street to save the world?
Seriously: is Thoreau being humble or arrogant?.
There might be much to say on both sides.
 
As far as transparency in hire education is concerned:
what do we want revealed? What needs to be covered? 
This should not be obvious or easy: our shared
concealment-to-revelation ratios.
 
A collective frame-of-mind: right-minding  but not
like-minding  as Dr. Bradshaw says  lest it sound
totalitarian;  what do we hold solid-in-common that
allows for the diversity we celebrate?   The same
frame that contains our  infinite & appropriately
threatening and incommensurate variations?
 
Ok:  we’ll never agree on IT--either the
characterization or the dispute it takes to
characterize—and yet the disagreeing
and back &  forth that might could occur
would  be the chief  benefit of the  exercise.

Need we argue?

(Gymnasium – "naked training": the term for school
in Europe)
 
Coming to terms with being unable to come to terms:
a faculty that can bray together can stay together. .
Priceless.
 
Redundantly: In the business of General (as opposed
to Specific) Education,  process is what counts. Not
product.Especially because common sense assesses
and evaluates product as what counts, eclipsing the
value & benefit of the process that mothers it..
 
So Gen Ed needs to compensate for the common
& commodified industrialized and institutional
sense by turning up the  what-IT-takes to make
any sense at all, to  innovate: calling on counter-
intuition as well as intuition and tuition..
 
The emperor’s got to have “clothes.” Transparent, sure
—never sufficient to really cover-up the butt, but always
necessarily serving  our conspiracy  for convenience and
convention’s sake:  subject to change but not without
demoralization,  maybe without DEMORALIZATION ,
but never without demoralization.
 
Gen-Ed stuff. Not to be confused with the disciplines
and majors and minors.  But I should digress.
 
xxxooo, Sam