Okay so you're of the camp that that says we are all whiners involved in a mental recession. I'm making the point that you can have all the education you want, but circumstances outside any individual may develop that will prevent the exercise of that learning. The individual can choose to learn, but they can also choose to act improperly with all that education, and conditions outside the human being also have an impact on what they choose to learn and how they act. My point about Cambodia is that those conditions can be manipulated both internally and externally. You want to keep the argument limited to only what the individual can do.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hutch
What you're not choosing to see is that we really agree more than we disagree. Your field of view is smaller or narrower than mine. This is a discussion about a spectrum of behavior and no one person can be extracted from the influences of the whole society they live in. If we acknowledge that perhaps some outside agent can influence individual behavior, then the Cambodian example is the most extreme one I can offer of how a society can exterminate education and suppress behavior. Complete social engineering and reworking the entire educational system of a society will not eliminate the individual mind, but it certainly curtails freedom to act by that individual. It's a very simple example of what you want to deny, that forces outside a person can affect how they learn and act.
It's not as complicated as trying to make the same point by showing how the content of textbooks limits learning choices or say, school prayers, regardless of cosmology, are really the expectation of regimented corporate behavior, as in a showing of public cooperation. Or that attendance in school everyday, on time, eyes open, ears on, is somehow more important to learning than what is going on in their heads. Those are more subtle and a little closer to home.
