Like many parents, I not only have the regular problems of raising children, but as the years progress so does the added pressure from the media, social networking sites, peers and reality TV.
Actually that to me seems somewhat of an Oxymoron as there is little in the way of reality about it. And to top it off we are now training Actors to be reality TV Actors, doesn't that defeat the object a little. Suddenly a medium that is called reality, which, in fact has little to do with reality, now has Actors trained to be realistically....never mind, I’ve lost the thread.
A friend of mine posted this clip on facebook and I thought, especially for those who have daughters I would re-post it. Boys take a look also, this is what we have helped to turn women into.
A Question of Beauty
Saturday 28 August 2010
Sunday 22 August 2010
Context over Content?
You do not go to University to become more intelligent, you are either drawn in a direction which desires an aptitude for that intelligence, or you are not. You go to University to gain more information. You are either intelligent or you are not and who are we to judge the criteria for intelligence?
The problem is how we have come to measure intelligence. It would appear that one is intelligent based on what kind of degree you have and where it was earned. While no one would say that a plumber is not intelligent, it is taken for granted that it does not take the same kind of intelligence to be a plumber that it does to gain a Master Degree in Philosophy from a Russel Register or Ivy League University. Therein lies the issue though. While it does not take the same kind of intelligence, it does not take any less. It simply takes a different kind. A different way of thinking, a different aptitude and a different way of learning.
In an attempt to shift our thinking we might consider content over context. A crude analysis of the two might go like this: Content is the specifics. In a speech about law that would entail specific information as to how a law is judged. In a book it would be the subject, the grammar and the spelling. The Context is more in the direction of why something is done and not what is done. “I am writing this blog in the hope of inspiring the reader to shift their thinking a little and perhaps consider a different understanding of people.” The content of the blog is within the spelling, grammar and information.
When I was a young man in the Army (about a hundred years ago) sixteen years of age to be exact, we had to wait for seven weeks (half a term) to write home for the first time. Strangely enough we all looked quite forward to that, as technology had not taken hold. One of the young men wrote home to his mother who was an English Teacher. Like the rest of us he was excited to tell of the experiences he had in the last seven week. The thing we looked forward to of course, was receiving a letter in return. The mother of this poor young man sent the same letter back with all of the spelling and grammar corrected in red and nothing else. Needless to say, he was distraught. As far as we knew he never wrote back to his mother in the following two years of training. She missed the point of course by a mile; she should have been only concerned with the context in which her son had written and not with the content of the spelling and grammar.
The problem is that we do this with each other and we also do it when we are sending young people off to University. Firstly we try to cram everyone into the same content driven criteria and we forget to consider their context. Even if we do, we then place a value on the context of what people do rather than placing a value on the skills, service and knowledge they bring to society. Truthfully someone with a Phd in Philosophy is of little help when there is a leak in the water pipe, unless of course that Phd is also adept at plumbing. We have reached saturation point with the amount of young people who are leaving University with degrees in subjects, which, are of little use to them in today’s changing market and which they never wanted in the first place. What we need to do is nurture creativity and imagination (context) in young people, for it is that which will move us forward and out of this quagmire and not driving young people like so many cattle down the same one size fits all rout. Which incidentally, it does not. We need to make it okay for a young person to choose a context driven future and not necessarily a content driven one.
Think passionately, ask why!
The problem is how we have come to measure intelligence. It would appear that one is intelligent based on what kind of degree you have and where it was earned. While no one would say that a plumber is not intelligent, it is taken for granted that it does not take the same kind of intelligence to be a plumber that it does to gain a Master Degree in Philosophy from a Russel Register or Ivy League University. Therein lies the issue though. While it does not take the same kind of intelligence, it does not take any less. It simply takes a different kind. A different way of thinking, a different aptitude and a different way of learning.
In an attempt to shift our thinking we might consider content over context. A crude analysis of the two might go like this: Content is the specifics. In a speech about law that would entail specific information as to how a law is judged. In a book it would be the subject, the grammar and the spelling. The Context is more in the direction of why something is done and not what is done. “I am writing this blog in the hope of inspiring the reader to shift their thinking a little and perhaps consider a different understanding of people.” The content of the blog is within the spelling, grammar and information.
When I was a young man in the Army (about a hundred years ago) sixteen years of age to be exact, we had to wait for seven weeks (half a term) to write home for the first time. Strangely enough we all looked quite forward to that, as technology had not taken hold. One of the young men wrote home to his mother who was an English Teacher. Like the rest of us he was excited to tell of the experiences he had in the last seven week. The thing we looked forward to of course, was receiving a letter in return. The mother of this poor young man sent the same letter back with all of the spelling and grammar corrected in red and nothing else. Needless to say, he was distraught. As far as we knew he never wrote back to his mother in the following two years of training. She missed the point of course by a mile; she should have been only concerned with the context in which her son had written and not with the content of the spelling and grammar.
The problem is that we do this with each other and we also do it when we are sending young people off to University. Firstly we try to cram everyone into the same content driven criteria and we forget to consider their context. Even if we do, we then place a value on the context of what people do rather than placing a value on the skills, service and knowledge they bring to society. Truthfully someone with a Phd in Philosophy is of little help when there is a leak in the water pipe, unless of course that Phd is also adept at plumbing. We have reached saturation point with the amount of young people who are leaving University with degrees in subjects, which, are of little use to them in today’s changing market and which they never wanted in the first place. What we need to do is nurture creativity and imagination (context) in young people, for it is that which will move us forward and out of this quagmire and not driving young people like so many cattle down the same one size fits all rout. Which incidentally, it does not. We need to make it okay for a young person to choose a context driven future and not necessarily a content driven one.
Think passionately, ask why!
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