"Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of
quotations from the bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate,
journalistic dirty-mindedness."
--D.H.Lawrence, referring to James Joyce
There have been since 03
Dec 96
"Technology is neither good nor bad, nor even neutral. Technology is one part of
the complex of relationships that people form with each other and the world around
them; it simply cannot be understood outside of that context."
"Media philosphy rejects analytics in favor of communication. Explosive, outrageous
comunication is the lifeblood of hope in the world of simulacra, bureaucracy and
collapsing ecosystems."
"A thousand minds, a thousand arguments; a lively intermingling of questions,
problems, news of the latest happening, jokes; an inexhaustible play of language
and thought, a vibrant curiosity; the changeable temper of a thousand spirits by
whom every object of discussion is broken into an infinity of sense and
significations--all these spring into being, and then are spent. And this is the
pleasure of the Florentine public."
Richard Goodwin
from "The American Condition" qtd in The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg
"The real menace of barbarism is that it tends to be hidden behind a facade of
respectability, in institutions which are so taken for granted that the very idea of
subjecting them to criticism is received as an intolerable heresy."
"Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest
where a winner gets a prize, no[r] is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed
intellectual adventure."
Michael Oakeshott
"The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind"
"Inventive discourse shows itself to be rhetorical, different from rational discourse, for inventive speech originates in experience, in the pathos of the claim of Being that is different at each time."
Ernesto Grassi
Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism: Four Studies (33)
"If `learning from experience' is understood as what Peirce called `the endless process of learning from signs,' I think we can invent humane pedagogies which will endlessly create possibilities for teaching and learning."
Technology, along with the issues that surround its use in reading- and writing-intensive classrooms, both physically and intellectually disrupts the ways in which we make meaning--the ways in which we communicate. Computers change the ways in whic
h we read, construct, and interpret texts. In doing so, technology forces us to rethink what it means to be human. We need more problems like this.
"I want all the hands-on mud-slinging
art playing legos-building inet traveling all lumped together. I am greedy. I want a lifetime of kindergarten for all age levels. I want it
all."
"You people are wasting your lives!!! Who are you! Are you all such losers that you need to sit at a computer and type worthless quotes into a wacko site like this all day just so you can be in a state of mind that makes you feel as if you've contr
buted to America's youth??? I THINK I'M GOING TO BE SICK!!!"
"A fierce and sentimental addiction to forms makes us shudder at change. It is much easier to say that the system is all right--only the people need to be improved."
"Institutions that were once alive have been stuffed and preserved out of deference, honored for the service they once performed rather than for their present usefulness. It is likeness we admire. What would terrify us, if it were alive and functioning, is sleekly mounted on a pedestal and regarded with affectionate esteem all the greater because the object of our regard is safely dead. It is much simpler and easier to collect and caresss the trophies of our democratic inheritance than it is to fashion up-to-date tools with which to work on our current problems."
"Any attempt to disturb the deadly routine of instruction is looked upon as sabotage. And the notion that the aims and functions of education should be determined in the local community by a close and continuous discussion among students, faculty, administration, and citizens is so visionary that it is not even seriously considered."
I suggest that you preach truth and do righteousness as you have been taught, whereinsoever that teaching may commend itself to your consciences and your judgements.
For your consciences and your judgements we have not sought to bind; and see you to it that no other institution, no political party, no social circle, no religious organization, no pet
ambitions put such chains on you as would tempt you to sacrifice one iota of the moral freedom of your consciences or the intellectual freedom of your judgements.
The transgressive force of teaching does not lie
so much in matters of content as in the way pedagogy
can hold open the temporality of questioning so as
to resist being characterized as a transaction that
can be concluded, either with the giving of grades
or the granting of degrees.
The analysis of the university as an ideological
state apparatus, in Althusser's terms, is no longer
appropriate, since the university is no longer
primarily an ideological arm of the nation-state but
an autonomous coroporation.
The question posed to the University is thus not
how to turn the university into a haven for Thought
but how to think in an institution whose development
tends to make thought more and more difficult.
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the environment. Unresonable people adapt the environment to themselves. Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable people.
Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the
shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never-haves, then
listen close to me: anything can happen child, anything can be.
School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency.
"One would think that no sane being would ever stand on the
folding paint tray of a stepladder; but yes, they do. This is
evolution at work. We should not interfere with these people and
their destiny."
Jeff Taylor
Tools of the Trade: The Art and Craft of Carpentry
"When depth gives way to surface,
under-standing becomes inter
-standing. To comprehend
is no longer to grasp
what lies beneath
but to glimpse
what lies
"One adopts measures in keeping with his past training--and the very soundness of this training may lead him to adopt the wrong measures. People may be unfitted by being fit in an unfit fitness."
The only accurate charge I ever had made against me was the time I got arrested [at a mine strike] in 1934. They said I was "getting information and going back and teaching it." That's exactly what I was doing.
"Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technolo
gy has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in how it codifies the world, in which of our sensed it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards."
"Such is the temper of our age that most technologists would rather be called scientists than artists. Yet necessary as science is to analysis, just as necessary is art to invention. Even in today's scientific technology, the artistic component r
emains essential in the search for elegant solutions. Science will continue to influence technology, but it is art that will choose the specific shape of the future."
before long it began to seem to me
not only possible but maybe even desirable and perhaps even wonderful
that our children would develop into ignorant savages.