Missive #430

Although I found myself strongly disagreeing with roughly half his theses (mostly due to the semi-mystical refrain) and enthusiastically agreeing with the other half, At least half of these essays were published in previous books. Those that were not were most likely written by Huxley in his ‘later years’ when he became mystical, experimented with mescaline and LSD and became an advisor to Timothy Leary. and the writing was delightful throughout.

Always intelligent and often challenging. Topics all over the place, from the destruction of nature to 16th century madrigal music. Not the easiest read and not a book I would read again, but a very interesting mind to get a glimpse into. Customer Reviews @ goodreads.com

I did find a couple of quotes that were understandable which I agreed with. For me, there was a lot that did not pass either test.

The possession and wide dissemination of a great deal of correct, specialized knowledge has become a prime condition of national survival. In the United States, during the last twenty or thirty years, this fact seems to have been forgotten. Professional educationists have taken John Dewey’s theories of “learning through doing” and of “education as life-adjustment,” and have applied them in such a way that, in many American schools, there is now doing without learning, along with courses in adjustment to everything except the basic twentieth-century fact that we live in a world where ignorance of science and its methods is the surest, shortest road to national disaster. During the past half century every other nation has made great efforts to impart more knowledge to more young people.

In the United States professional educationists have chosen the opposite course. At the turn of the century fifty-six per cent of the pupils in American high schools studied algebra; today less than a quarter of them are so much as introduced to the subject. In 1955 eleven per cent of American boys and girls were studying geometry; fifty years ago the figure was twenty-seven per cent. Four per cent of them now take physics, as against nineteen per cent in 1900. Fifty per cent of American high schools offer no courses in chemistry, fifty-three per cent no courses in physics. This headlong decline in knowledge has not been accompanied by any increase in understanding; for it goes without saying that high school courses in life adjustment do not teach understanding. They teach only conformity to current conventions of personal and collective behavior.

There is no substitute for correct knowledge, and in the process of acquiring correct knowledge there is no substitute for concentration and prolonged practice. Except for the unusually gifted, learning, by whatever method, must always be hard work. Unfortunately there are many professional educationists who seem to think that children should never be required to work hard. Wherever educational methods are based on this assumption, children will not in fact acquire much knowledge; and if the methods are followed for a generation or two, the society which tolerates them will find itself in full decline.

But in other contexts than the scientific — in the context, for example, of politics — we continue to take our verbal symbols with the same disastrous seriousness as was displayed by our crusading and persecuting ancestors. For both parties, the people on the other side of the Iron Curtain are not human beings, but merely the embodiments of the pejorative phrases coined by propagandists.

My trip to town on Friday did not work as planned. It started out fine with a stop at Mornings Café for breakfast although the price had gone up a couple of dollars. It was at the laundry that the plan fell apart; it was closed for repairs. The possible hair cut did not happen eiither. There was a barber shop in the same complex of buildings that I went to my last laundry trip and asked what hours they were open. I was told then that they were moving to a new location closer to the laundry the first of January but I did not see where they had moved.

So I went to Safeway, got groceries and returned to the Campground. There are two washers and two dryers in the ‘clubhouse’ there where I was able to get my laundry done.

Another week of walking has me well on my my across the virtual state of OR. Start at 32.544246, -117.029877 and then 43.445441, -123.305741 for the destination. My daily walks have been a bit more off and on with some less distances for the past few weeks but I’m still making progress. Maybe three more weeks until I’m in WA with the end of Interstate 5 in sight.