Politics and Beliefs
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Friday, October 14 2005 00:58
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Oh, yes. Because we all know that lots of technological progress was made in the Middle Ages. :P -------------------- My BoE Page Bandwagons are fun! Roots Hunted! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Triad Mage
Member # 7
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written Friday, October 14 2005 02:54
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quote:My point is that even though public schooling might be flawed, private schools are just as flawed, if not moreso. What benefits over public schools do they have, and how can those benefits be given to all students? The answer has to either be in modifying public schools or in drastically cutting taxes. What is your solution to the problem? -------------------- "At times discretion should be thrown aside, and with the foolish we should play the fool." - Menander ==== Drakefyre's Demesne - Happy Happy Joy Joy desperance.net - We're Everywhere ==== You can take my Mac when you pry my cold, dead fingers off the mouse! Posts: 9436 | Registered: Wednesday, September 19 2001 07:00 |
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Infiltrator
Member # 4256
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written Friday, October 14 2005 04:31
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quote:Do stable societies not need politically powerful institutions? Does it matter if its called the church, the feds, or 'yore mamma'? Almost any form of stability is arguably better then anarchy. Besides, even if the church hadn't stepped into the power vacuum, something else would have, and quite possibly wouldn't have done as good a job. If Galileo had to be out working the fields, because all human resources needed to be devoted to survival, he wouldn't have been able to do his research. He also 'stood on the shoulders of giants', but of the economic and cultural type, rather then scientific, or technological ones. And yes the churches were centers of learning, but rarely was anything 'new' learned. It was more of a center of propagation for that which was already known. Basic skills like reading or writing could easily have died out all together in that part of the world. Nothing 'glamorous' but very essential skills like this are needed as a basis for any scientific research. Posts: 564 | Registered: Wednesday, April 14 2004 07:00 |
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Friday, October 14 2005 05:42
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quote:So? What's the worst that can happen? When the Roman Empire fell, it only took a few centuries for civilisation to be restored to a level of technological and cultural advancement comparable to what it was. That's barely even the blink of an eye in geological time. You can't give the church all that much credit for merely holding onto something when plenty of other institutions could have done the same, and when what was being held onto could so easily have been redeveloped even if it were completely lost. If your goal is to see a society progress as far as possible, then progressing at all times is essential; staying in one place just leaves more time for unfortunate political accidents that require the whole process to start over. Political bodies are strange little slime molds that dwell upon the surface of this earth, and we are their cells. Individual organisms coalesce, divide or fragment, but in the long run it all evens out. A church here, a monarchy there; it doesn't matter. A church is as good as a monarchy is as good as an empire, and anarchy is just a temporary setback. The only significant change that could be made to human civilisation in the long term would be to bring about human extinction, and I suspect our species is better at surviving than most of us give ourselves credit for. Perhaps that's why I've never found human history all that interesting: there's been so little of it so far. [ Friday, October 14, 2005 06:03: Message edited by: Thuryl ] -------------------- My BoE Page Bandwagons are fun! Roots Hunted! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Infiltrator
Member # 4256
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written Friday, October 14 2005 06:05
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quote:True, but you also can't decredit the church for doing what it did. What other institutions could have done this? I'm not so sure that writing and an appreciation for learning could have been so easily regained though. quote:If thats what you all are saying, then I'm really arguing against nothing. I make no pretenses that the church was the ideal institution, the best that was theoretically possible. It was often quite corrupt, evil, and highly destructive to the better aims of humanity. At the same time, it didn't do any worse then most other control forms would have done. As a slight disclaimer, I personally believe that the church shouldn't be a control form, but rather(as its purpose is biblically set forth) a 'light', a helper, support... not a political institution. Unfortunately what the church should be, and what the church was, and often still tries to be, are two different things. quote:This is where it can get sticky. Define what needs to be changed, and you will find almost everyone disagrees. I believe that some of the things others call 'progress' are more akin to regress. If your goal is to see a society progress as far as possible, then progressing at all times in essential; going backwards is even more dangerous then staying still, it tends to snowball and leave you at square one... again. [ Friday, October 14, 2005 06:27: Message edited by: AxB ] Posts: 564 | Registered: Wednesday, April 14 2004 07:00 |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 4557
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written Friday, October 14 2005 06:17
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quote:Forget about private schools; I have no real first hand experience with them so I don't want to draw any conclusions about them. If I did in my other posts, I did not mean to. quote:The lacking in public schools, and perhaps in other places, is the lack of teaching that encourages a continuation of the educational process after high school. While this is effectively overturned in most colleges, it decreases the value of public schooling as a whole. Schools should not primarily explain what students need to know, but how they may learn it. In english classes, literary analysis is considered uniform. Students are goaded and lured into "learning" the interpretations dictated by the curriculum. In science classes, the scientific process is considered unimportant, and inhibiting to high school minds. Labs dole out specific steps, and require no development of experimental design; fundamental scientific principles are ignored. Originality as a whole is lost in the vast amounts of bureaucratic paper shuffling. quote:Taxes have very little to do with this. If more/less money is distributed, more/less money will end up in areas of superfluous nature. Modifying the system is out of the question as well. Public schooling is too administrative and is ruled by the tax payers; "those who recieved education are those who give it." (From Body and Mind, by John Dewey) Change in this manner is too slow, and has a tendency to swing to one extreme and stagnate. The only way to alleviate this problem, is through some external force powerful enough to create certain opportunities. Of course, this does not mean that certain forces should create private schools, or institutions that teach in their own fasion, as this creates the concern of indoctrination. In the end the only way to escape this concern is to emphasize the individualism inherent in the process of learning. Learning is a process whose primary purpose is to create growth in the individual. It is "the continuous reconstruction of experience," (From Reconstruction in Philosophy, John Dewey) and is completely subjective. As such, teachers cannot create learning, they can only attempt to induce it. Learning is the sole responsibility of the individual, and whether they want to or not, they will have to learn. So it falls to society to create enough "experience" for its students to draw upon. External forces (whoever they may be), must create places, from without or within, in which learning can be sought independently. Perhaps laboratories where valid, thought-provoking, lab work is given. Or perhaps free, valid online sites with a collection of primary documents and interpretations of them, for those immersed in history. In the case of the second, it has already started to come to reality through services such as the Wikimedia Foundation, and Project Gutenburg. Unfortunately most of these projects, not the ones mentioned, have their own interests and/or are underfunded to some degree. The government must take a more active role for this approach to flourish, but this will not happen for some time, and it allows for the danger that the government will take an administrative role in this approach as well. [ Friday, October 14, 2005 19:03: Message edited by: KernelKnowledge12 ] Posts: 264 | Registered: Wednesday, June 16 2004 07:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 247
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written Friday, October 14 2005 14:26
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Thuryl I disagree that in only a few centuries society was restored following the fall of Rome. The so called date the Empire ceased to exist was 476 with Romulus Augustulus being deposed. I realise this is not an absolute the Empire had been fading for years and still survived somewhat past this date. However, from 500-1150 is hardly a short timeline. Yes if we use the geological time scale it is short. But an average human may live 80 years. So the 650 years that passed from the fall of Rome to revolution of thought and technology is hardly a short period of time. I suppose its all relative though. (we need better smilies) :( [ Friday, October 14, 2005 14:28: Message edited by: VCH ] -------------------- I stop rubber at 160km/h, five times a week. CANUCKS RESPEK! My Style The Knight Between Posts. Posts: 2395 | Registered: Friday, November 2 2001 08:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Friday, October 14 2005 14:32
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I'm inclined to put the return of comparable advancement in the Renaissance, not in the High Middle Ages. That's more than 800 years after the collapse. -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Friday, October 14 2005 17:20
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Well, "a few" was an intentionally vague term. It's certainly taken us less than 2000 years to get further than Rome ever did. As for how you define progress, well, doing things that no society in recorded history has done before is a good start. Maybe some lines of progress are dead ends, and maybe some of those dead ends are disastrous. But there's no way of knowing in advance, so you may as well try messing around with the fabric of society in new and creative ways and see what happens. I've always felt that it's rather unfortunate that the phrase "social experiment" has negative connotations; if you don't experiment, you don't learn anything. Giving up on creating new social structures because of Nazi Germany or the USSR is like giving up on researching new drugs because of thalidomide or Vioxx. [ Friday, October 14, 2005 17:29: Message edited by: Thuryl ] -------------------- My BoE Page Bandwagons are fun! Roots Hunted! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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? Man, ? Amazing
Member # 5755
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written Friday, October 14 2005 22:34
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You're gettin' a little feisty Thuryl. Next you'll be saying that repression of certain documents by a certain church may have caused the stagnation in the post Roman era. Now that would be controversial... *this message sponsored by sikorsky* Posts: 4114 | Registered: Monday, April 25 2005 07:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 2984
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written Saturday, October 15 2005 03:22
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quote:Yes, it's not like fundamentalist dogmatism set civilization back by well over half a millennium or anything, right? :P -------------------- The Encyclopaedia Ermariana <-- Now a Wiki! "Polaris leers down from the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey." --- HP Lovecraft. "I single Aran out due to his nasty temperament, and his superior intellect." --- SupaNik Posts: 8752 | Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00 |