However, meaningful relationships, creativity, and the experience of other positives that are not "trivial" for countless sentient beings do not deserve to be prevented simply because nobody is capable of asking for them before they exist. You would once again say that nobody is deprived from their absence, but this misses the point entirely because, as I have mentioned ad nauseum if the lack of bads can be good sans any conscious feeling of satisfaction, the absence of the goods is necessarily bad. — DA671
Maybe we should exterminate whole existence all together. Exactly that is what we are heading for, so you will be served at back and call! Or shall we provide everyone with effective means to be shot into oblivion? Is the only way out collective suicide? — Raymond
The only thing we the existing can do is commiserate.. but we can't.. WORK HAS TO GET DONE. Don't you see? Things decay. — schopenhauer1
. I simply advocate not continuing other existence by passively not procreating. — schopenhauer1
The only thing we the existing can do is commiserate.. but we can't.. WORK HAS TO GET DONE — schopenhauer1
I hope that they would not have a need to do so! — DA671
What I wanna know is when's the next ice age due? — Agent Smith
Here you seem to take my position: Enlightenment philosophy hasn't yet trickled down to the rabble.
The Enlightenment was acceptance of what science could do for us and what we have achieved is far beyond what anyone imagined at the time of the enlightenment.
— Athena
Here, again, "we" is used too broadly. What a significant proportion of "we" has achieved is total rejection of science and scientific values. — ZzzoneiroCosm
The Enlightenment left us with a belief in the value of learning, of the comprehensive role and scope of education and of its fundamental role in society. Its DNA includes critical thinking and free debate. Over generations, the mission of education developed around those principles.Jul 26, 2016 — Wikipedia
Thomas Jefferson was very clear that only if our republic was defended in the classroom, would it be defended. He devoted his life to everyone having that education. We no longer know what the education was unless we make the effort to know that. It is easy enough to know. Just look up classical or liberal education. Or education for the enlightenment. — Athena
No, preventing happiness can certainly be bad if preventing harm can be good. — DA671
The lack of the positives leads to the negatives and vice versa. — DA671
If the absence of all does not matter, then one could also say that the lack of harm does not matter unless it benefits an actual person. — DA671
But if we consider the lack of suffering to be ethically preferable, the absence of all good cannot be deemed desirable. — DA671
Creating life also creates happiness (real good that is ethically relevant). — DA671
My "scenario" is concerned with consistency, and so it only cares about existing people. It isn't my worldview that suggests that applies unjustified double standards such as the absence of suffering being good without any actual benefit but the lack of happiness not being problematic by the same token. — DA671
Sentimental needs for preventing all life cannot be a valid excuse for preventing all value. — DA671
The point is that not creating a person also does not commit any good other than fulfilling the needs of those who do not want life to exist due to a flawed idea of what constitutes a solution (since if the lack of happiness is not bad, then neither is the lack of harm preferable), and this does not justify ceasing the possibility of ineffable goods that did not deserve to be prevented., even if the people putting forward these proposals have good intentons. — DA671
Co-existence with nature is surely essential. If we do manage to do so, we can experience the majesty of the mountains, the beauty of the twilight, and the eternally ethereal gale that has the potential to light up our darkest of hours. Love and knowledge cannot exist if one is constantly engaged in conflict and mindless competition for "growth". Our current work culture does seem to lead many people to their bubbles, with altruism being relegated to the sidelines. However, such a system is not tenable in the long term. We depend on each other, and the relationship is not merely an economical one. Hopefully, the popularity of suffering-focused ethics will help raise awareness regarding the need for compassion and cooperation. — DA671
You are assuming many classrooms can even HAVE this debate. Most are just trying to get by with the worst behavior problems (mainly in inner cities).. Education is wasted on the youth (mostly). I don't know how many people have told me that they hated history as a kid and it was only as an adult did they actually come to appreciate the understanding it brings to study it. Same with almost everything else..
But you are very right.. The US education system seems to essentially sift out the STEM students.. and tries to nurture them.. They will be the next engineering/science/doctor class used by the corporate overlords to dole out more technology. I have no doubt there was a concerted effort to promote this idea during the Cold War as a policy level decision.
That beings said.. federal decisions on education are usually at the level of funding, not so much curriculum It's up to the states and school boards to actually adopt any national recommendation. However, if they reject the recommendations, it's at their peril of losing funding probably. — schopenhauer1
The reason I said that you should pick your battles was not because of qualms with you over this subject. It was through your connection of it to Biden's foreign policy. I respect your knowledge on the education system and that is why I honestly asked you for sources so I could inform myself with them, which you graciously gave. Your claims about Biden being undemocratic I found unconvincing and therefore I told you so. Your connection of them in my view weakens the strength of your argument and I think it is also a field in which you are less at home, but I may be wrong. Of course feel free to ignore them. I noticed something else as well, namely that when we breach a topic such as environmentalism and its Manichean roots we somehow ended up talking about education. That happened earlier as well as I recall. — Tobias
Anyway, I respect you very much on this particular topic. I did not wish to come off condescending, if so I apologize. On the other hand I also do not find your statement that I should be on topic very fair. I also did not use that line against you when you broached the subject of environmentalism and the question of Manichean religion. I like to explore this topic of education with you and rest assured I respect you knowledge.
That said there are some reasons to think you paint an overly dark and indeed Manichean picture of the former US system and the Prussian system of education. Certainly, the education system developed in Prussia was aimed at nation building. It was also aimed at giving the populace the skills to survive in a very rapidly changing world in which bureaucracy and industrialization became driving forces. The German society in the 18th century was nothing like it is now. Illiteracy was rampant, petty princes ruled petty kingdoms, the population lived in conditions of serfdom, also mentioned on the wikipedia page you gave as a source. There was no such thing as mass education. thinking for oneself was at the time always only done by an elite of either merchant classes or nobility. It is easy to criticize a system of mass schooling from the luxury of the modern day world, but I would reckon the access to reading and writing for the population was a big step up from what it had been.
Moreover the idea of nation-building in the way described in the video is abhorrent to us of course and especially with the second world war in mind the video becomes even more ominous. However seen in the light of the history of Germany it was not such a silly idea. In the 17th century Germany has fought one of the most ruthless civil wars in history that depopulated much of the country and led to 30 years of warfare in which the German realms (it was not a country back than) tore themselves apart. Germany faced powerful and colonial neighbors in France and Russia. Seen from the perspective of the European history of incessant warfare, the German goals become understandable. The picture of emperor Frederick also deserves a bit of nuance. He was seen as an enlightenment figure in correspondence with Voltaire and a benefactor of the arts and sciences. that goes to show again that your appeal to enlightenment ideals is not as straightforward as you expect them to be. enlightenment ideals value order, progress and mastery of the natural world through education and technology. How they turn out in practice is much more difficult to predict. They may also be used by an emperor who rules despotically.
There are also reasons to view the youtube clip with a bit of suspicion. Firstly it cherry picks among the quotes of Fichte. The wikipedia page for instance gives this as a Fichte quote: "Fichte asked for shaping of the personality of students: "The citizens should be made able and willing to use their own minds to achieve higher goals in the framework of a future unified German nation state"." Now that sounds very different already.
The second reason is a look at the one of the most 'command and control' institutions there is, the military. Prussian military tactics and later German military tactics were base on a combination of obedience and creativity. The adoption of a much more flexible approach to warfare based on objectives to be reached, but leeway to the commanders in the field as to how to reach them, required creativity and independent thinking. These abilities led to Germany being able to take on much more powerful foes 'on paper'. this actually mirrors the German research university, which also fosters creative, if specialized research. What I see in sociological terms is the bureaucratization an professionalization of education Now of course all for the greater glory of the nation, but they were regrettably very nationalistic times. We are talking about the age of colonialism, a very dark age in European history.
The third reason is that the video draws a straight line from Prussian education to Hitler and calls Fichte (Not pronounced 'Fitcht', or something but Fi'h'te) the father of modern neo-nazism. That claim is just silly. Why not simply nazism but neo-nazism? Those are different people from different cultural eras. The Prussian educational system might well be conducive to creating a law and order mentality that benefited Hitler's rise but it totally forgets the Weimar era in Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic
If state and science are separated a big first step will be made. — Raymond
Anyway I think there is more than meets the eye. We need a new type of education, one that moves towards questioning and investigation and towards interdisciplinarity instead of specialization. More and more it becomes clear we need to see problems not in specialistic isolation but in a holistic way, leaving space for uncertainty and complexity. It will ask a lot of us, because the old model is the one we use still even thought it may well be out dated. In that we can shake hands (if the pandemic would not prevent it...) — Tobias
Once it were state and God going hand in hand. Today, Science has taken His place. — Raymond
While the Enlightenment was intended to set people free from the evil and madness done in the name of God, it essentially does the same what God was doing back then.
I'm not attacking science (a modern sin! A taboo even. It's not spoken about and even the thought against science seems off...so...) but only pointing to the position it seems to have assigned to itself. On a global scale it is legally enforced to learn its principles, approach to problems, its view on nature, etc. while long before its advent people managed to live life on different principles and the irony is that these ways of life are now almost whiped away from the surface of the world by a world calling itself the free first world, while in fact it's a power hungry latecomer.
That's not the solution. Who we do it for then? For nature's sake? — Raymond
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