[lbo-talk] Thought's on Doug's interview with Ayers

[Tayssir John Gabbour]

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 2:40 AM, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
> For my buddy A., once No Child Left Behind hit the district, that was
> the end of any discussion on developing broad concepts like
> mathematical thinking. Fuck it, here's your fractions homework. The
> panopticon was re-modeled and made far more effective.
>
> The right and especially the neocons have an absolute genius for
> creating these prisions of the mind. I don't know how they do it.

You might like "A Russian teacher in America," full of disturbing
observations from Russian and US educations:

    "And I understood that these poor devils, who had always learned

    under the lash of grades, never from natural curiosity, really

    could not imagine that an abstraction might be beautiful."

    -- http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/articles/engeduc/

(Just saw it on reddit today...)

Also, Lee Smolin's very readable book "The Trouble with Physics"
mentioned something interesting from Grothendieck, about learning for
yourself what concepts like "area" mean, rather than what "everyone
says" it is.

Tayssir