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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (25031)	9/21/1998 9:21:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Alex, Serious or not, you're right. Facts are the building blocks out of which ideas are constructed. One of my great frustrations is hearing people proclaim that they have an idea, but can't express it. Nonsense. If you can't express it clearly to others, you can't express it clearly to yourself, and it isn't an idea at all. A shadow of an idea, perhaps, but not an idea. First we learn facts. Then we put facts together to create context. We add new facts and watch how the context changes. We observe the changes until we perceive patterns; to clarify and explain the patterns we create ideas. Trying to go straight to the idea before beginning with the facts is pretty futile. My own encounter with American public education was pretty appalling. My mother quit to raise kids after getting an MA; when I was in 6th grade she went back for the PhD and became a professor, but in the interim all her pedagogic impulses were vented on the offspring. I could read well by the age of 3, and was doing Jules Verne in kindergarten. We had 4000 books and no TV in the house. Adding this to an American public school created some difficulties; they had to bounce me out of a few grades. I also discovered that I knew more facts than most of the teachers, which I made no effort to conceal. I was, I now realize, an intolerably arrogant, mouthy little son of a bitch, and the teachers detested me so heartily that my younger brother had to be sent to a private school to escape the legacy. Various encounters with reality eventually removed a little (not much) of the mouthiness and arrogance, but I still wonder if the problem was with my upbringing or with the school system. I suspect the latter, but that may be the old tendencies reemerging... Steve