Thursday, February 05, 2015

Scientism--what a great word

I linked to this post earlier today:

The Problem of Scientism in Conventional Education, by Jason Barney, at the Circe Institute Blog. "Educational schools have become labs, where white-coated practitioners test the latest theories on the thousands of children scattered in their suburban and inner-city habitats across America. The best teachers read the educational journals and carefully follow the latest research on how to most effectively manipulate the environments of their subjects in order to attain society’s desired ends. Scientism listens to evidence and data, not to history or philosophy."

In Norms and Nobility, David V. Hicks says this (page 8):

"Man's lust for power, not truth, feeds modern education. But this fact does not worry the educator....[the new way] better suits his scientific problem-solving approach....the the old self asserting a knowledge of man derived from the transcendent ideas and inherited truths of religion, art, and letters, and the new self insisting that man can know himself only by examining the composition of the material universe and drawing his inferences from that."
"I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them. But they answered: “Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?” My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grownups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained." ~~ Antoine de Saint-ExupĂ©ry, The Little Prince

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