Ponder100

The following is the opening gambit of a recent book by Dana Villa on political education.

It is not a matter of indifference that the minds of the people be enlightened.

~ Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws

For the last week and more I’ve been pondering the following passage from an essay by Mortimer Adler, in which he’s arguing for the unprecedented problem of education in contemporary society.

You might know him from this guide, or from his defense of liberal education at the University of Chicago (my alma mater), or from his classic work on literary criticism. A couple days ago I re-discovered Wayne C. Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction on a bottom bookshelf. The book is an English professor and literary critic’s investigation of the problem of ethical criticism. Should there even be such a thing?

What do saints and warlords have in common, according to Graeber and Wengrow in Dawn of Everything? And how come we don’t “see” them in history?

Chapter 10 in Dawn of Everything presents Graeber and Wengrow’s theory of states. They assert three characteristics, in different combinations, that best describe various prehistoric cultures:

1) sovereignty, or violent power, e.g. of a king;

2) bureaucracy, involving special record-keeping or (possibly esoteric) knowledge;

3) charismatic or heroic leadership, in a competitive field.

I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to solve problems of curriculum and education — what to teach (learn), how, and why?

Particularly for autodidacts who must craft an educational journey beyond formal schooling, how might they organize their studies and materials?

Here’s the proposed scheme.

I’ve spent the last week getting back into David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book, The Dawn of Everything. It’s challenging to summarize such a complex project, but basically they are presenting a re-reading of archaeological and anthropological evidence to re-write an overly simplified (and politically stultifying, they think) version of human pre-history.

I had a good friend in college who was a math major. Mostly I had no idea what his courses were about, but one I remember was “Combinatorics.” I still have no idea what Combinatorics is exactly, in the mathematical sense, but I take it that the working assumption behind saving highlights to atomic notes, which can then be mixed and matched in pursuit of creativity in knowledge management, is entirely about recombination.

One collects and re-configures and re-connects bits and snippets in the pursuit of the novel, the serendipitous, the original, the new.

I didn't want to write about “meta” topics (“writing about writing”), but there's a tool issue, a workflow issue that really bothers me. It has to do with highlights.

“If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.” ~ Michel de Montaigne

Two other 100 Days of Writing projects caught my eye when planning my own.

The first is from a professor of architecture and design in Shanghai who has written more than 100 posts over many years about his teaching and writing craft. The quote from Montaigne guides his efforts to learn, to teach, and to write with reflection.