Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts - we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp, commoditised ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies and pre-packaged narratives, which, on occasion, has explosive consequences. Further, we seem unaware of this backward fitting - much as if tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit did so by surgically altering the limbs of their customers. For instance, few realise that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse.
Thursday, December 02, 2010
This is excellent ...
... Stretch of the imagination. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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I mostly agree.
ReplyDeleteBut then, I've been objecting to changing the brain chemistry of children to make them conform to school norms of behavior for decades. The over-prescription of mind-altering drugs given to schoolchildren began with Ritalin, long before anti-depressants appeared. It's an easy fix that school administrators and many parents alike seem to want to do: force the kid to fit into this mold, rather than finding the mold the kid actually fits into. It goes even further than drugs, of course, but all the way to learning styles.
This is one reason why I am grateful for the mostly free life I had growing up. Too many people nowadays seem to forget that they're raising children, not thoroughbreds.
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