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Originally Posted by Kilobyte  How does one teach reasoning, and encourage and enable the expanding of one's mind? |
• Show enthusiasm when kids share something they've discovered with you.
• Share things you're enthusiastic about with kids.
• Reward people finding out that they're wrong.
• Scale rewards heavily for multiple solutions to problems and uses for ideas or things.
• Don't teach pointless shit people can't do anything with.
It's a lot more complex than that but those would be my five big bullet points if I were asked to order the five most important things off the top of my head. There's a lot of refinement and little things we can do to get the niggles worked out and fit things for various personality types and so on, you could write books about the subject, but it's not a particularly complex problem to get a whole hell of a lot of improvement over how we do things at the moment.
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Originally Posted by Kilobyte Is knowledge really the end all, be all solution to our problems, or ethical and moral dilemmas? |
Yes, and much of the relevant knowledge in that sense is self-knowledge; which you have to gain by reason and experience. That's one of the reasons why teaching people rationality is so important, because no-one can tell them those things about themselves with any real authority.
Some people think that rationality is spiritually dead. But, on the contrary, rationality, when applied to morality and ethics has a lot to say about introspection and what, with your set of values and beliefs, it means to be a good person. How that interacts with the world and others beliefs.
Some of that's awfully hard won. Maybe you discover things about yourself that you're not entirely comfortable with. There's certainly a danger with spirituality that to whatever extent your exploration of it might make you a better person it can also make you a much worse person - so you should venture into it with the best tools available. I think that should be a warning given at the start of every first year ethics lecture in all honesty. A lot of the way that people teach moral philosophy these days, talking of right and wrong as moral absolutes, pretty much encourages apathy.
I suppose you're perhaps hinting at religion here, as the classical extreme counter-example. I took philosophy for my masters. And in all honesty main stream religions strike me as spiritually shallow by comparison to the history of analytical philosophy. There are a lot of people, in religions, imitating the surface behaviours of a set of beliefs that they don't actually feel themselves. When you ask them to explain it, it's rare to find someone that gives you back in return more than a list of commandments - someone who can speak about their love for things or their values or.... It's often done out of fear, or hope of some reward.
Oh how spiritual. Mere belief does not entail moral or ethical enlightenment. Which I would consider the heart of spirituality, in the sense that they're about the nature of being and identity.
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Originally Posted by Kilobyte Less knowledgeable groups seem to reproduce at a faster rate, limiting the amount of knowledge that can be taught to them easily, as knowledge seems to easier to teach to smaller groups than larger groups. Quantity vs Quality.
Even as the numbers of knowledgeable individuals increases, the number of less knowledgeable individuals increases that much more. This seems to ensure that the problem of education is always beyond our control. |
Knowledgeable or educated? They're not the same thing at all.
I think at the moment we make education very hard to get along with, in that sense we're already selecting for people who wouldn't be particularly likely to reproduce anyway.
Three possible types off the top of my head:
• People who have some motivation that drives them to tolerate it and that would likely occupy their lives regardless,
• or people who are messed up on the inside and have social problems that both limit their friends and thus increase the size of the education attractor relative to others and that would make family unpleasant,
• or people who are less attracted by immediate rewards (including sex) and thus have the ability to hold out for the eventual reward at the end of all that suffering....
With most of the things I can think of that would lead someone to educational success under our current system, it doesn't really surprise me that people who are highly educated wouldn't tend to fall into the attractors for having a lot of children.
But that's not necessarily always going to be the case. If we can make becoming knowledgeable more fun, if we can add more of a social aspect to learning - then perhaps we can turn that on its head. There doesn't seem to be anything innate about being knowledgeable that would lead you not to reproduce.
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