[LogoForum] Re: Perspective mode, tests for compliance, standards et al

The message below is being cross-posted from the LogoForum. Please
reply here at comp.lang.logo and it will be cross-posted back to the
LogoForum. The original author of this message is
genetheil@yahoo.nospam.ca.


Dear Gene(S),
In your reply to Dale Reed, you said:

"Got any more teacher-centred planning-centred tripe
to present?
Is the prevailing theme of this group `Logo' ... or
how to justify `essential planning', functionaries
called `teachers', or self-deluding mindsets in which
`essential planning' is, or seems, `necessary' and no
student -- of life or `Logo -- never ever under any
circumstances learns a single application, `practical'
or otherwise, without a tax-funded bureaucrat (is)
loitering in close proximity?"
------------------------------------------------------
I agree whole-heartedly with the attitude and position
you seem to take in this post. While I am not a
programmer or technician of any kind, nor an
educational professional either, I am a thinking (or,
so I hope) autodidact.

As such, my experience with learning has been coloured
by my past (largely negative) history with
institution-oriented learning. I could describe many
incidents, ranging from a fourth-grade teacher whose
teaching style centred on shameing anyone who dared to
argue with anything she said, to a professor of
psychology at Columbia U. whose amour propre was so
damaged when I tried to argue that his exposition of
the theories of B. F. Skinner could not possibly be
the whole story of human consciousness, since it
failed to include the feed-back loops necessary for
real-time self-control, that he tried (unsucessfully)
to have me removed from the course. Of course, most
people, including the teachers and other professionals
who post here, could produce such narratives, which
only supports my point.

Which, in case I haven't been plain, is that
"standards", compliance thereto, et al are acts of the
excercise of naked power. They, and not the putative
political definitions of "democracy" are what a
student learns in the typical classroom.

I suppose that this diatribe may, more properly,
belong to a forum on education at large, and not to
this forum, per se. If any one agrees, please let me
know. On the other hand, there are so many teachers
who post here that the topic is relevant though not
specific to Logo, either as a computer language, or as
an artifact/construct of human thought.

Gene(T)


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