KMUD: 11-20-15 Steiner Schools And Education

Dan W

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A nice change of pace this month with a discussion on education. You'll also learn about Peat's favorite comic strips.



Partway through there's a nervous-sounding caller with delayed audio. I could tell that he's dangerously good-looking and had a bowl of liver and mushrooms in front of him during the call.

I like the end of the episode, you can tell Peat's been enthusiastic about mushrooms lately.
 

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Lightbringer

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Dan Wich said:
post 110446 A nice change of pace this month with a discussion on education. You'll also learn about Peat's favorite comic strips.



Partway through there's a nervous-sounding caller with delayed audio. I could tell that he's dangerously good-looking and had a bowl of liver and mushrooms in front of him during the call.

I like the end of the episode, you can tell Peat's been enthusiastic about mushrooms lately.

Ha! I somehow had an inkling that the smart sounding guy calling in was from the forum. On point, precise and sounding like a younger peat himself :P Its great that you kept your question to the topic under discussion.

In my opinion, this interview won't make Andrew's top 10 list. Good to hear about the mushrooms again. I think Danny mentioned that the next newsletter references mushrooms as well. So prepare for mushroom pprices to rise soon :lol:
 
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goodandevil

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Dan Wich said:
A nice change of pace this month with a discussion on education. You'll also learn about Peat's favorite comic strips.



Partway through there's a nervous-sounding caller with delayed audio. I could tell that he's dangerously good-looking and had a bowl of liver and mushrooms in front of him during the call.

I like the end of the episode, you can tell Peat's been enthusiastic about mushrooms lately.

Excellent
 

bodacious

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Ray's experiences sound so close to Robert M Pirsig's education experiments, as described in Zen and the Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance

He’d been innovating extensively. He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say.

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.
That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything...from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.


The student’s biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and- whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don’t whip me, I won’t work." He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.
... The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.

This surprising result supported a hunch he had had for a long time: that the brighter, more serious students were the least desirous of grades, possibly because they were more interested in the subject matter of the course, whereas the dull or lazy students were the most desirous of grades, possibly because grades told them if they were getting by.
 

dfspcc20

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@bodacious I love Robert Pirsig. ZatAMM was probably the 1st book I read "for fun". Really turned me on to the idea of science as a creative process.

I saw recently that Pirsig went to the Blake School in Minneapolis. I thought that was a really "Peaty" coincidence, but turns out it was founded by a different William Blake.
 

bodacious

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I saw recently that Pirsig went to the Blake School in Minneapolis. I thought that was a really "Peaty" coincidence, but turns out it was founded by a different William Blake.

Yea, I nearly wet myself when I read that a few weeks ago.

Pirsig is a wonder. I literally locked myself away to read that book. Couldn't put it down :)
 

dfspcc20

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Apparently (according to Wikipedia), Pirsig's "Gumption Trap" is associated with Seligman's Learned Helplessness. I never made that connection before.
 
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