Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter
if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own
common sense.
Quotable: Siddhartha Gautama
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Category Archives: Quotable
Quotable: Carl Sagan
Quotable: Paolo Soleri
To cultivate one’s soul is then the quest that will back up the skills of the eyes, the ears, the hands and the body with the synthetic power of the mind and ultimately will cast aside the cages of separateness. Separateness is a peculiar invention of man and it is a menace to his position within the evolving universe. Small or large, the individual work is a contribution toward or an inquiry on the body of the species. The responsibility is personal and awesome and the punishment 1s as intrinsic to the performance as much as are the rewards. Each of us is a universal man or woman because we all are of the universe. To neglect this is purely to neglect oneself, a neglect that kills.
(Matter Becomes Spirit, p.224-5)
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Quotable: John Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed
John Dewey My Pedagogic Creed:
I believe that this educational process has two sides – one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following. Of these two sides, the psychological is the basis. The child’s own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, indeed, give certain external results but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child’s activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature.
Quotable: Rollins on selling out
This is how I remember Rollins (not the gym guy with a massive neck). Image link.
A miscellaneous Henry Rollins quote that surfaced on the Web like digital driftwood on the cybernetic beach. Here he discusses “selling out” a major theme from the punk days that essentially defined ones legitimacy within the scene. I wrote an essay about the issue entitled, A Community is Not a Demographic. Anyhow, I think he makes some good points, but was surprised to see that he is a fan of punk music in commercials. From Mother Jones:
HR: [Punk] gave music back to people. For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16 and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that. Me and [Minor Threat and Fugazi vocalist] Ian MacKaye would go to these concerts, and it was fun. You know, seeing Led Zeppelin did not suck, in the least. And then punk rock came along and all of a sudden you are standing five feet away from Dee Dee Ramone or the Bad Brains, or you’re carrying in the gear with the band, or now you’re in the band, and so music became this very immediate thing to me, where I could experience it from a very close-up vantage point instead of bringing binoculars, which I literally did to see Led Zeppelin. So I think it actualized music for a lot of young people. If you wrote the band, they would write back. You could meet the band. It became this thing that was a part of your life, not this thing that you paid a ticket for and through peanuts at. And that to me was huge. I think a lot of people became very inspired by that ethic of, you know, I’m gonna confront authority and really see what that’s all about, and question authority, read between the lines, and be suspicious. And I never heard that in a Ted Nugent record.
Where did it fail? I don’t know that it failed, I think it kind of just got absorbed into popular mainstream. When you hear a Stooges track or a Buzzcocks track or a Ramones track or a track by the Fall, or what have you, in a car ad, some people, whenever that happens, I get a letter saying “What a sellout.” And I say “no man, we’ve arrived.” The person making that ad grew up on that music. You’re no longer confined to interstitial, instrumental music, you’re gonna get Iggy Pop and the Teddy Bears singing I’m a punk rocker to sell a car. What would you rather hear? Some wanky keyboard or Iggy and the Teddy Bears? I know which one I’d rather hear, and I just hope they get paid quickly and double scale, because it’s about time. I don’t so much see the failure in as much as that anything that has been around for 30 years or more.
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Quotable: John Taylor Gatto
One of my favorite education critics, John Tayor Gatto. From “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”:
“School, as it was built, is an essential support system for a model of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control. School is an artifice that makes such a pyrimidical social order seem inevitable, even though such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution.” (p.13)
I also highly recommend:
“The Underground History of American Education” (John Taylor Gatto)
Quotable: Sir Ken Robinson
H/T to DK of MediaSnackers for turning me on to Sir Ken Robinson whose views on education and creativity mirror my own. Fortunately he is more articulate than I am, so when you watch him give his TED talk he can explain this big darn mess in much simpler language than I. Click here for his home page.
“We are educating people out of their creativity.”
Technorati Tags: education, Ken Robinson, TED
Quotable: Derrick de Kerckhove
An Interview with Derrick de Kerckhove, director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, and author of one of my favorite books on media, The Skin of Culture. He discusses the impact of new technologies on the way we perceive and act in the world.
de Kerckhove Interview – Communication in Evolution – Social and Technological Transformation:
AB: We have left the “global village”, we surf the Web of Webs but the technical abilities of the average citizen are not much greater than those of a Neanderthal. Beneath the veneer of culture, what sort of human being is this digital culture creating?
DdeK: The average citizen is always in Neanderthal mode. That is why we get such Neanderthalian politicians. The digital culture is the cognitive phase of electricity. Just as we took the muscular phase (heat, light and energy) for granted, we are taking this new phase for granted. Most people only worry about how their body works when they have a backache, or about their car when they have to bring it to the garage. And even then, they don’t want to know. But there is hope. The transformation is happening just as surely and unconsciously as it did at the time of the council of Trent when wise people were trying to put an old order into a religion that was being rapidly undermined by a totally new conception of man. Today, we are literally run over by the globalized and connective condition of humankind without the slightest moment of doubt.
Technorati Tags: Derrick de Kerckhove, McLuhan
New Mediacology feature: quoatable
Because there are so many incredible books that I love containing wisdom worth sharing, I’ll periodically post a quote from a favorite read. If you have any suggestions, please pass them along. This week features a quote from David Orr‘s Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect.
This quote is from the chapter, “The Coming Biophilia Revolution”:
For our politics to work as they now do, a large number of people must not like any nature that cannot be repackaged and sold back to them. They must be ecologically illiterate and ecologically incompetent, and they must believe that this is not only inevitable but desirable. Furthermore, they must be ignorant of the basis of their dependency. They must come to see their bondage as freedom and their discontents as commercially solvable problems. The drift toward a biophobic society, as George Orwell and C. S. Lewis foresaw decades ago, requires the replacement of nature and human nature by technology and the replacement of real democracy by a technological tyranny now looming on the horizon. (p. 136)
The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
This is an good thought form:
The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community:
Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unraveling, when profligate consumption exceeded Earth’s capacity to sustain and led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental systems, violent competition for what remained of the planet’s resources, and a dramatic dieback of the human population? Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the time of the Great Turning, when their forebears embraced the higher-order potential of their human nature, turned crisis into opportunity, and learned to live in creative partnership with one another and Earth?