Another sentence that doesn’t mean anything. — apokrisis

I will try this one more time.

The question above was a reference to my slave analogy. The point is that you would be abstracting about freedom, as you are abstracting about education now. So the logical question to ask is, since your position is in the negative, did freedom exist in the world at the time of slavery? Likewise, the question to ask now, since your unsupported claim is in the negative, do quality educated people exist anywhere in the world?

....do quality educated people exist anywhere in the world? — JerseyFlight

I asked what would be your criteria? That’s pretty vague. And the context provided by your OP suggested you hadn’t thought about the matter with sufficient depth to give a useful answer.

Generally all your replies in this thread have been irrational and emotional. So you can try one last time to remedy this fault.

I asked what would be your criteria? — apokrisis

Don't you think we first need to establish as to whether or not such a thing even exists? My argument, again, is based on the fact that educated people do exist. There are real people that have knowledge and they can be distinguished from those who don't. The simple point is that this quality needs to be extended. This is neither a sophistical argument or a false one. I am happy to discuss criteria, but I would never do it without looking at people who already possessed high ability in this area (that is why I spoke of reverse engineering the process). That is also why I referenced psychological development. However, what we know is that this does exist and that it is possible, we just have to figure out how to expand it.

Two points of order are required here.

Quoting you: "And the context provided by your OP suggested you hadn’t thought about the matter with sufficient depth to give a useful answer. Generally all your replies in this thread have been irrational and emotional."

These are actually poisoning of the well fallacies. Your replies are littered with them. "Poisoning the well (or attempting to poison the well) is a type of informal fallacy where adverse information about a target is preemptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing something that the target person is about to say." You are attempting to characterize my position in a negative light so that you don't actually have to engage it. And I must say, you are exceedingly good at doing this, which is not a compliment, I don't think I've ever encountered a person more skilled at administering this fallacy.

The second point is that a claim has been resolved. I said, 'you are ignoring the concrete fact that the positive fruit of these categories already exists...'

You said:

"You call the fruits positive. That is the presumption I have challenged you to justify."

My point was exactly that you must confess to the existence of quality educated people in the world. This validates the category.

This claim has been justified. But it is not worth it to discourse with you. One hardly gets anywhere. I had to reason much just to get to the point that quality educated people exist. And maybe we are not even there, maybe your ego still wants to deny it? I am content to leave you to it. This is not, and cannot be, a sign of high intelligence. An exchange with you isn't worth the effort or time. Maybe others can get more from your discourse, but I find it to be dishonest, dodgy and riddled with fallacies.

...humans are not consciously promoting an advanced species because they do not understand that individual quality is the result of social quality, most specifically universal access and opportunity to a comprehensive education. — JerseyFlight

Hi. I am very interested in education and developmental psychology, but I am struggling to understand your thesis in this thread. The above seems to be a historical claim that I cannot reconcile with my general understanding of history. Education has always been a privilege, and always, the privileged have invested heavily in the education of their children. Up until very recent times, there has always been a heavy burden of physical labour involved in mere survival as well as in the processes and materials of education. So the universality of education is necessarily a recent affair. One cannot educate children properly if one needs them to work in the coal mines or herding the sheep. Nevertheless, a reverence for books and writing has been widespread for a long time.

Perhaps what we might more agree on is that we are now at a stage of social transition, where we have the economic capacity to invest in universal education, but we have yet to adjust our societies from a graduated privilege based one to a fully universal one.

As to what I said about producing healthy humans, see Allan Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. What happens to a human in the process of development, and how it happens, is not idealism but has empirical verification. — JerseyFlight

I'm not familiar with your reference, but a very quick glance suggests to me that it relates quite closely to other material connected to the ACE questionnaire and work on childhood trauma. But I wonder if it wouldn't be better to explore this separately from the question of education? I can see the connection of course, as someone who found his own childhood education rather traumatic. But I think two threads are better than one in this case.

I am struggling to understand your thesis in this thread. — unenlightened

How does a person come to possess knowledge? Is it a matter of will power?

Perhaps what we might more agree on is that we are now at a stage of social transition, where we have the economic capacity to invest in universal education, but we have yet to adjust our societies from a graduated privilege based one to a fully universal one. — unenlightened

I agree with this, and it is implied by my post.

How does a person come to possess knowledge? Is it a matter of will power? — JerseyFlight

I don't like to talk about knowledge as a possession. I give freely what knowledge I have and in that relationship I learn.

Will has no power, but is the expression of conflict.

Exemplum: I used to habitually smoke tobacco, and had the idea that i wanted to stop. But I could not manage it and said I didn't have enough will power to overcome the addiction. Then one day I had an insight, that it is the easiest thing in the world to not do something one does not want to do. The difficulty was that I didn't want not to smoke because it made me uncomfortable. Seeing the simplicity of it, I decided that actually I did want to stop smoking and suffer the discomfort, so I stopped. No will required, just an end to the conflict between what I want and what I don't want.

As if one goes to the shop to buy something, and finds it costs more than one wants to pay. And by an act of will power one hands over the money and buys the thing. No, knowledge is not accumulated by frowning deeply and thrusting out one's jaw. Hear a song, sing along, and before you know it, you know it. Not a possession so much as something one ia absorbed by and that one absorbs in turn.

But this tells us something. What does it mean that knowledge is really a product of cultural access and privilege? One thing it means is that humans are not consciously promoting an advanced species because they do not understand that individual quality is the result of social quality, most specifically universal access and opportunity to a comprehensive education. — JerseyFlight

Yes, these are precisely the sentiments of John Dewey. He believes that the true role and function of education is the perpetuation and gradual perfection of culture. That all genuine social life is educative. And that formal education should create a simplified, idealized and balanced environment to that end.

"As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society."

~Dewey, Democracy and Education

I don't like to talk about knowledge as a possession. — unenlightened

But some people have it and others don't. We cannot be indifferent to this.

I give freely what knowledge — unenlightened

Yes, my friend, this is the point. To figure out a way to expand knowledge freely.

"Knowing that knowledge is a privileged enterprise empowers us to create a more intelligent species.

I don’t follow this reasoning and skimming through the responses to date doesn’t help. — praxis

We don't think of knowledge as something privileged, we think of it as something either given through genetics or something that is the result of will power, but we do not think of it as it is in reality, that it is the result of social beneficence. Knowing this is important because it allows us to stop focusing on the error of individual will power, and instead focus on the cultivation of the social conditions that produce knowledge. It means we are no longer shooting in the dark, but can begin to direct our course. As I said, this knowledge empowers us to create a more intelligent species. Exactly how we do this has to be worked out through intelligence, but knowing that this is the direction we must go is the important thing, and that is my point.

But some people have it and others don't. We cannot be indifferent to this. — JerseyFlight

Indeed.

this is the point. To figure out a way to expand knowledge freely. — JerseyFlight

Well I have been involved with the Free school movement and the home education movement and in my dotage I involve myself here and elsewhere online. There is wiki, there are free online courses, I'm not sure that figuring is going to do much without some action.

We are all subject to zero-sum thinking, and I think this reflects in the notion of knowledge as privilege, specifically the idea that one man’s inability to access information (the Syrian), is another man’s privilege (the westerner).

We should indeed champion universal free thought and speech for everyone, but I do not think it is a privilege that another is denied access to such information, because it robs us all of the chance to get his opinion of it. This is true of all injustice and ill-treatment. We are all worse off, not privileged, because of another’s lack of access to information and education.

If I'm following correctly you're saying that we can't blame people for not being intelligent because intelligence is a privilege. I get that but I don't get how this realization empowers the promotion of not making it a privilege. Call me a cynic but typically when people realize that they have an advantage or privilege, they fight tooth and nail to keep it.

I'm not sure that figuring is going to do much without some action. — unenlightened

I raised this issue in the course of this thread: 'I can put it in simpler terms, is it even a matter of asking questions, or is it a matter of action at this point? We have completed so much theory, there is no point in reinventing the wheel. This is one reason I would never write a text on Critical Thinking, it would be useless, I know of several masterpieces in this area. What this allows us to do is use this material to better society.'

The real point from all of this is that intelligence takes us in the direction of trying to figure out how to increase knowledge in society. Philosophy takes us in the direction of society! My exposition is both a rebuke and plea. Philosophers are lost in a world of theory, and many intellectuals posture away from their responsibility by fallaciously deferring to abstraction. This is because they feel safe in the realm of theory. But we do not get to pick and choose where thought drives us.

If you read my exchanges with apokrisis in this thread you will see that I was exposing and combating this elitism. Where praxis is logically concluded there the elitist intellectual tries to subvert it, he tries to force praxis back into the domain of theory. This makes him feel that he is engaged in a hierarchy of relevance and that his responsibility is nothing other than theory.

If I'm following correctly you're saying that we can't blame people for not being intelligent because intelligence is a privilege. I get that but I don't get how this realization empowers the promotion of not making it a privilege. — praxis

Because we don't think of intelligence in terms of social process, because we think of it in terms of individual effort, therefore as a society we focus on the individual as though his intelligence were a product of chance or predestined genetics. This is materially false. If we don't possess the correct ontology of knowledge's formation, then we will not be able to focus on its replication. Knowing that intelligence is the material result of a social process provides us with the accurate information to begin its replication. The world is still living in the dark ages here.