Link and Quotation: Louise Cowan on education

"...[J]ust as putting a Band-Aid on someone’s injured finger doesn’t make one a doctor, so giving direction in the normal skills and activities of daily living doesn’t make one a teacher. Schools have a unique purpose — the formation of citizens who are knowledgeable and wise enough to govern themselves.

And this is one of the things wrong with our educational philosophy. We’ve made teaching more like behavioral instruction (like the training of young animals) than the drawing out of noble aspects in rational and imaginative beings. We’ve neglected the elevating metaphors — those bundles of symbolic content revealing nobility that would otherwise remain hidden. We have become almost completely fact- and skill-centered, and our incessant testing is only one evidence of such reduction.

A teacher is not really needed for the mastery of facts and skills. To gain this sort of information something simply has to capture a student’s attention long enough for bits of data to sink in. A film, a cellphone, a game, an iPad — these are adequate vehicles for the acquisition of information and skills. And for almost a century now we have increasingly reduced education to this sort of robotic learning and are beginning, in all areas of our national life, to face the consequences. For facts are mere information, and skills are mere habits of behavior. Neither is necessarily related to principles and virtues needing to be instilled in our young if democracy is to survive. "

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On Aging and Medicine

"The job of any doctor, Bludau later told me, is to support quality of life, by which he meant two things: as much freedom from the ravages of disease as possible, and the retention of enough function for active engagement in the world. Most doctors treat disease, and figure that the rest will take care of itself. And if it doesn’t—if a patient is becoming infirm and heading toward a nursing home—well, that isn’t really a medical problem, is it?

"...In the story of Jean Gavrilles and her geriatrician, there’s a lesson about frailty. Decline remains our fate; death will come. But, until that last backup system inside each of us fails, decline can occur in two ways. One is early and precipitately, with an old age of enfeeblement and dependence, sustained primarily by nursing homes and hospitals. The other way is more gradual, preserving, for as long as possible, your ability to control your own life.

"Good medical care can influence which direction a person’s old age will take. Most of us in medicine, however, don’t know how to think about decline. We’re good at addressing specific, individual problems: colon cancer, high blood pressure, arthritic knees. Give us a disease, and we can do something about it. But give us an elderly woman with colon cancer, high blood pressure, arthritic knees, and various other ailments besides—an elderly woman at risk of losing the life she enjoys—and we are not sure what to do."

The Way We Age Now
Atul Gawande, for The New Yorker

I like the balance here, between science-y statistics and personal descriptions. My own family's story bears out his analysis: doctors who treat the elderly need to refocus their treatment less on curing specific diseases and more on managing the decline. In our experience, the only people capable of managing treatment have been the folks in the Hospice program - a system usually reserved for those with less than six months to live - which is why my grandmother has been put on Hospice care four times in the last year and a half. 

The Science of Shopping

The more time you spend with Paco's videos, though, the less scary they seem. After an hour or so, it's no longer clear whether simply by watching people shop-and analyzing their every move-you can learn how to control them. The shopper that emerges from the videos is not pliable or manipulable. The screen shows people filtering in and out of stores, petting and moving on, abandoning their merchandise because checkout lines are too long, or leaving a store empty-handed because they couldn't fit their stroller into the aisle between two shirt racks. Paco's shoppers are fickle and headstrong, and are quite unwilling to buy anything unless conditions are perfect-unless the belt is presented at exactly the right moment. His theories of the butt-brush and petting and the Decompression Zone and the Invariant Right seek not to make shoppers conform to the desires of sellers but to make sellers conform to the desires of shoppers. What Paco is teaching his clients is a kind of slavish devotion to the shopper's every whim. He is teaching them humility.

The Science of Shopping
Malcolm Gladwell

On dancing

...Successful dancing is 99 percent the face you make. If you’re at a wedding reception and you’re dancing like a maniac on the dance floor? As long as you’re making the right face, no one will fault you. If you’re taking yourself too seriously, that’s when you can look like a jackass. Even then, I would highly recommend making a jackass of yourself over sitting at your table wishing you were working it out to Kool & the Gang.

-Nick Offerman

Self Esteem

I think that this statement:

Is refuted by this one:

 (the backstory is incredible. Read it)

Reformation

This paradoxical figure (Luther) revived the Christian consciousness of Europe . . . . Religion became again a dominant factor even in politics for another century and a half. Men cared enough for the faith to die for it and to kill for it. If there is any sense remaining of Christian civilization in the West, this man Luther in no small measure deserves the credit.

~Roland Bainton, Here I Stand