Thursday, August 09, 2007

Legislation to Close the American Mind

The most important change Rupert Murdoch can make to the Wall Street Journal is the banning of useages like 'notwithstanding', 'misconstruing', 'bent on' and 'hewing to'. Once this pompous thicket has been hacked away, some very good features will emerge like this one (this link might be stymied by he subscription mechanism). Basically, Congress has passed the America Competes Act, which will increase funding the teaching of science, technology, engineering and maths, the STEM subjects. This, everybody seems to believe, is the way to make America more competitive. Of course, as the WSJ writers point out, it won't. Making more geeks is futile because geekery is precisely the sort of thing that India and China can do better and cheaper. What they can't do - yet - is produce an iPod as that requires imagination, design genius and a subtle grasp of human aspirations. These are attributes that can only be nurtured by what used to be called a liberal education. Reading Thomas Hardy will make you more competitive than writing code (it will also free your mind of pompous useages). Technophile politicians - Blair was just the same - simply cannot grasp this and, as a result, the imaginative and the cultured are in danger of becoming extinct species.

9 comments:

  1. And your posts were getting sooo hopeful these last few days. Must be the Hardy. A chap who could make the blood boil, but hardly one of Natures half-full types.

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  2. Perhaps such modifications to education will produce more people with both a broader and deeper understanding of all the things that matter, rather than just (as you put it) more geeks.

    Best regards

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  3. "imagination, design genius and a subtle grasp of human aspirations"

    You're presumably talking about the advertising industry.

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  4. advertising i think is more about persuading the consumer that the product has desirable qualities, whether or not it does - usually by associating the product with these qualities in some underhand way, e.g. unhealthy food being eaten by glowingly healthy young people, so we 'think', 'ah, it must be healthy'.

    i think what the Yard's talking about is making products that have these qualities regardless of marketing. Having used a Mac laptop, i feel you could market it as a functional, useful tool and nothing more, and people would still respond to the innate aesthetics, that which one doesn't 'need', but is so much part of the pleasure - in a sense, to be human is to need what one doesn't need: beauty, harmony, stockings, spankings, that kind of thing. Because these 'extras' aren't reducible to data - too elusive, various, changeable, profound - people who are trained in quantitative disciplines can't grasp them, they've not been exposed to qualitative determinations, such as 'how beautiful is this?' i feel this is true of the geeks i've known to some degree, and it seems the case in Bill Gates, if The Yard's article about him is accurate.

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  5. Just a small point, but I'm not sure reading Thomas Hardy will discourage pompous usages. A great writer, but as a stylist...
    And I see another Nige has joined our merry band - hello, Nige!

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  6. Imagination also comes from 'differentness', and standing back from the crowd a while - both things modern culture encourages us not to be or do.

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  7. Sound point, Nige. And, perhaps I'm weird, but I find Hardy exhilarating in a fill up my glass now kind of way.

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  8. More please on the need for cultured, creative and imaginative minds and how we nurture them. The whole of the arts sector is on tenterhooks awaiting the outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review, and is acting as if it has already received a Gordonian body blow.

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  9. i don't think you can really argue for culture & arts education in a way that would mean anything to the average politician. That doesn't mean there is no value to culture or education, just that it isn't susceptible to dissection & reasoned analysis. It's like the Zen saying about how you know a cup of water is cold: "I know in myself that the water is cold", if you have some sympathy for & understanding of art & arts education, you won't need persuading, and if you don't, it's all just hippy bullshit.

    From the evidence of how money is dished out for education, grants, exhibitions, etc., the people in charge have f-all understanding or sympathy, they have the souls of pig farmers. Look at that bullshit Tony Blair masterminded, that Millenium Dome crap, Jesus Christ, what a load of shit, fat chance of people like that being swayed by even the most cogent & pragmatic argument for culture.

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