"You are Unique."

Today in a third grade class, the unit for reading and ELD (the books have parallel content) focused on being unique, and using one's uniqueness to achieve (or be the first to do something). The ELD discussion centered on George Washington Carver, and the lesson was that scientists (and the students) seek to be the first to have original or unique "thoughts" which lead to discoveries. I read that and made a face, and one of the kids saw me. It is wrong on so many levels: (1) the promotion of an exaggerated sense of self-esteem, (2) the shoddy epistemology with its affinity to idealism. True scientific discovery does not happen in vacuo -- it is through being shaped in tradition by good teachers, and it is an increase in what we already know. It is not completely "new," but a reduction of potency to act. (This is something that would be covered in an intro philosophy class by our reading or Plato's dialogues, maybe St. Augustine, and Aristotle's Prior Analytics.)

How serious are these errors, and does it make a difference at what age students are being indoctrinated in them? Someone who objected to these parts of the texts could just skip them over and not tell anyone else that they did. (No one would be keeping track.) By themselves they may not be sufficient reasons for one to swear off the system and avoid a regular teaching job. But there are other problems as well...

Nicholas Carr at the Commonwealth Club

June 23, 2010
Nicholas Carr: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Commonwealth Club



In his article in The Atlantic, Mr. Carr writes:

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

Socrates might respond that Google (and the whole Encyclopediast project) has not served to spread knowledge and enlightenement, but merely confirmed people in their ignorance as they continue to be deluded in their belief that they have knowledge rather than opinion. It's all about definitions -- what Socrates (and the Socratics) meant by knowledge is probably different from what Nicholas Carr means. I suspect Carr follows certain moderns in understanding knowledge as justified belief.