That is almost tautological irrespective of the type of critic.
What amazes me is the ease with which these "critics" absorb absolute rubbish and call it reality. We all know the effect of 12 years of indoctrination on children in Nazi Germany but at least their intellects weren't totally inhibited.
But after near 14 centuries of similar under the curse of the prophet I am starting to think that perhaps intelelctual gullibility is also ingrained genetically(conqueror's genes effect).
How do you know to condemn an opinion, unless first welcoming it for consideration?
The welcome of some opinions wears out quickly, very quickly...We are very fortunate that most opinions are not reality. Can you imagine the chaos, or lethargy, that would develop if everyones opinions were reality, every time? Stop the world, I want to get off...
In "Learning" Chapman articulated the theme he revisited in his other educational essays; the influences which undermine learning's pursuit. Paramount among those influences is commercialism. In a letter to his wife, Chapman explained the link between commercialism's power to corrupt character and its ability to control public opinion. "The hand of Commerce has been upon the brain of the United States. Our public life is debased by it, our literature ruined by it, our social life rendered ridiculous. It has been the suppression of the individual character involved in the development of our continent which has destroyed our public life. It has been the booksellers' rage to make money that has ruined our literature. That rage was developed by the commercialism of the era. The syndicating of literature is a part of the syndicating of opinion which commerce found it necessary to encourage in order to control politics." Writing in 1900, Chapman was one of the first critics to warn against the wedding of culture and capital that was beginning to occur within the academy. For Chapman, business's influence on education corrupted its purpose and distorted learning's meaning" The real evil that follows in the wake of a commercial dishonesty so general as ours is the intellectual dishonesty it generates. One need not mind stealing, but one must cry out at people whose minds are so befuddled that they do not know theft when they see it." Learning can be read as an opening salvo against the current trend towards corporatization of the university. In the ensuing century, the academic transformations Chapman observed have become more ubiquitous and stronger. He wrote, "It has thus come about in America that our universities are beginning to be run as business colleges. They advertise, they compete with each other, they pretend to give good value to their customers. They desire to increase their trade, they offer social advantages and business openings to their patrons. In some cases they boldly conduct intelligence offices, and guarantee that no hard work done by the student shall be done in vain: a record of work is kept during the student's college life, and the college undertakes to furnish him at any time thereafter with the references and a character which shall help him in the struggle for life."
Chapman's mission was not to demonize the business man nor to create elegies for America's pre-industrial past. His purpose was to illustrate the cost of allowing commercial values to dominate education and politics. The cost was to induce cultural amnesia. Americans afflicted with this memory loss cannot remember the values associated with learning before the bottom line became their culture's standard of worth -- values like curiosity, mutuality, precision, or imagination. Cultural amnesia, Chapman cautioned, created a society populated with half-men. "The dandy at Newport who conscientiously follows his leaders and observes the cab rule, the glove ordinance, and the mystery of the oyster fork, is governed by the law, is fettered by the same force, as the labor man who fears to tell his fellows that he approves of Waring's clean streets. Each is a half-man, each is afraid of his fellows, and for the same reason. Each is commercial, keeps his place by conciliatory methods, and will be punished for contumacy by the loss of his job. Neither of them has an independent opinion on any subject." Adding insult to injury, cultural amnesia was instigated and welcomed by those who suffered from it. Convinced that commercial values fermented progress and material well being, most of Chapman's compatriots considered it a waste of time to question whether this assumption was valid or whether other cultural values were needed to live the good life. As for academics, Chapman accused them of abdicating their responsibility for critically examining this assumption. "The natural custodians of education in any age are the learned men of the land, including the professors and schoolmasters. Now these men have, at the present time in America, no conception of their responsibility."
In 1900 Chapman warned that "learning recognized as a search for truth or the vehicle of spiritual expression" was fading from public consciousness.[12] He was particularly angered by educators who were all too eager to divorce learning from its intellectual tradition by acting as matchmakers -- smoothing the way for capital's courting of culture. He argued against the philosophy of learning they promoted. "The underlying philosophy of these men," Chapman wrote, "might be stated as follows: There is nothing in life nobler than for a man to improve his condition and the condition of his children. Learning is a means to this end." Reading this statement, today, most Americans would consider it an accurate description of education's purpose. A case could be made that by 1900 the description Chapman championed, "learning as a search for truth or the vehicle of spiritual expression," had already been relegated to a cultural curio. A high minded curio certainly, but hopelessly vague, exceedingly utopian, and laughingly impractical. Chapman's contemporaries, who advocated vocational training for workers, would argue that business values and practices like accountability, efficiency, reliance on quantifiable data and standards, brought learning down from Mt. Parnassus, where denizens endlessly contemplated the good life, to the classroom and shop floor, where students seriously pursued marketable skills.
By the start of the twentieth century, many would consider Chapman's definition of learning, "a search for truth or the vehicle of spiritual expression," fine for young ladies attending finishing schools but not for citizens building the modern state. Imagine Chapman defending his interpretation of learning at a gathering of contemporary educators. The response would be politely chilling. He would be cautioned not to make truth an absolute. As for the spiritual, well that gets into the whole church and state dilemma. Finally, truth and spiritual expression are niceties American education can ill afford, now that the Chinese are breathing down our economic necks. After listening to his critics, Chapman would remind them that his definition of learning makes it possible for an individual to ask, "What's in it for me?" and answer, "Nothing except life according to principle." He would then turn to his critics and ask if this answer would be possible for an individual who defined learning as they did, the means to improve his condition.
What defense did learning have against commercialism's dominance? For Chapman it was intellect. He defines intellect as "a living and intimate tradition." It is the tradition that creates the rules and standards by which the cultural contributions individual intelligences make are created and judged. In The House of Intellect Jacques Barzun provides Chapman's definition with more detail and analysis. Barzun explains, "Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion--a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand. " hapman's and Barzun's definitions enable us to identify those attributes that make intellect a bulwark against commercialism's co-option of learning; they are tradition, common knowledge, and unselfishness.
Intellect is a culture's tradition of mind; it illuminates the ways human beings, across the millenniums, have thought about and responded to the question, how shall I conduct my life? For that reason appreciation of intellect necessitates appreciation of the long view, the time frame most conducive to learning. It takes a life time for an individual to learn and to perfect the necessary skills that enable her to contribute to intellect's record or to acquaint herself with its content. Learning has a different relationship with time than business; it is not a short term investment yielding immediate returns. Study, the activity individuals undertake to stake their claims to an intellectual tradition, is an act of open and long duration. Externally imposed deadlines cannot determine the appropriate amount of time a student needs to answer the questions her curiosity and lived circumstances generate. Chapman makes this point in a letter to Dr. Samuel S. Drury, headmaster of St. Paul's School, he wrote: "Let 'em alone. Don't worry about them. Give them a chance but don't try to cram them-don't want to. This is the besetting sin of educators-to want to do too much-to think that they have got to do something and work over and pull wires in people."
"The natural custodians of education in any age are the learned men of the land, including the professors and schoolmasters. Now these men have, at the present time in America, no conception of their responsibility."
Unfortunately, the words of the grandson of Founding Father and first Chief Justice John Jay are equally accurate today.
John Jay Chapman, 1862-1933 - A Man Out of Season
That is almost tautological irrespective of the type of critic.
What amazes me is the ease with which these "critics" absorb absolute rubbish and call it reality. We all know the effect of 12 years of indoctrination on children in Nazi Germany but at least their intellects weren't totally inhibited.
But after near 14 centuries of similar under the curse of the prophet I am starting to think that perhaps intelelctual gullibility is also ingrained genetically(conqueror's genes effect).
How do you know to condemn an opinion, unless first welcoming it for consideration?
The welcome of some opinions wears out quickly, very quickly...We are very fortunate that most opinions are not reality. Can you imagine the chaos, or lethargy, that would develop if everyones opinions were reality, every time? Stop the world, I want to get off...
From the link given in the first posting above:
In "Learning" Chapman articulated the theme he revisited in his other educational essays; the influences which undermine learning's pursuit. Paramount among those influences is commercialism. In a letter to his wife, Chapman explained the link between commercialism's power to corrupt character and its ability to control public opinion. "The hand of Commerce has been upon the brain of the United States. Our public life is debased by it, our literature ruined by it, our social life rendered ridiculous. It has been the suppression of the individual character involved in the development of our continent which has destroyed our public life. It has been the booksellers' rage to make money that has ruined our literature. That rage was developed by the commercialism of the era. The syndicating of literature is a part of the syndicating of opinion which commerce found it necessary to encourage in order to control politics." Writing in 1900, Chapman was one of the first critics to warn against the wedding of culture and capital that was beginning to occur within the academy. For Chapman, business's influence on education corrupted its purpose and distorted learning's meaning" The real evil that follows in the wake of a commercial dishonesty so general as ours is the intellectual dishonesty it generates. One need not mind stealing, but one must cry out at people whose minds are so befuddled that they do not know theft when they see it." Learning can be read as an opening salvo against the current trend towards corporatization of the university. In the ensuing century, the academic transformations Chapman observed have become more ubiquitous and stronger. He wrote, "It has thus come about in America that our universities are beginning to be run as business colleges. They advertise, they compete with each other, they pretend to give good value to their customers. They desire to increase their trade, they offer social advantages and business openings to their patrons. In some cases they boldly conduct intelligence offices, and guarantee that no hard work done by the student shall be done in vain: a record of work is kept during the student's college life, and the college undertakes to furnish him at any time thereafter with the references and a character which shall help him in the struggle for life."
Chapman's mission was not to demonize the business man nor to create elegies for America's pre-industrial past. His purpose was to illustrate the cost of allowing commercial values to dominate education and politics. The cost was to induce cultural amnesia. Americans afflicted with this memory loss cannot remember the values associated with learning before the bottom line became their culture's standard of worth -- values like curiosity, mutuality, precision, or imagination. Cultural amnesia, Chapman cautioned, created a society populated with half-men. "The dandy at Newport who conscientiously follows his leaders and observes the cab rule, the glove ordinance, and the mystery of the oyster fork, is governed by the law, is fettered by the same force, as the labor man who fears to tell his fellows that he approves of Waring's clean streets. Each is a half-man, each is afraid of his fellows, and for the same reason. Each is commercial, keeps his place by conciliatory methods, and will be punished for contumacy by the loss of his job. Neither of them has an independent opinion on any subject." Adding insult to injury, cultural amnesia was instigated and welcomed by those who suffered from it. Convinced that commercial values fermented progress and material well being, most of Chapman's compatriots considered it a waste of time to question whether this assumption was valid or whether other cultural values were needed to live the good life. As for academics, Chapman accused them of abdicating their responsibility for critically examining this assumption. "The natural custodians of education in any age are the learned men of the land, including the professors and schoolmasters. Now these men have, at the present time in America, no conception of their responsibility."
In 1900 Chapman warned that "learning recognized as a search for truth or the vehicle of spiritual expression" was fading from public consciousness.[12] He was particularly angered by educators who were all too eager to divorce learning from its intellectual tradition by acting as matchmakers -- smoothing the way for capital's courting of culture. He argued against the philosophy of learning they promoted. "The underlying philosophy of these men," Chapman wrote, "might be stated as follows: There is nothing in life nobler than for a man to improve his condition and the condition of his children. Learning is a means to this end." Reading this statement, today, most Americans would consider it an accurate description of education's purpose. A case could be made that by 1900 the description Chapman championed, "learning as a search for truth or the vehicle of spiritual expression," had already been relegated to a cultural curio. A high minded curio certainly, but hopelessly vague, exceedingly utopian, and laughingly impractical. Chapman's contemporaries, who advocated vocational training for workers, would argue that business values and practices like accountability, efficiency, reliance on quantifiable data and standards, brought learning down from Mt. Parnassus, where denizens endlessly contemplated the good life, to the classroom and shop floor, where students seriously pursued marketable skills.
By the start of the twentieth century, many would consider Chapman's definition of learning, "a search for truth or the vehicle of spiritual expression," fine for young ladies attending finishing schools but not for citizens building the modern state. Imagine Chapman defending his interpretation of learning at a gathering of contemporary educators. The response would be politely chilling. He would be cautioned not to make truth an absolute. As for the spiritual, well that gets into the whole church and state dilemma. Finally, truth and spiritual expression are niceties American education can ill afford, now that the Chinese are breathing down our economic necks. After listening to his critics, Chapman would remind them that his definition of learning makes it possible for an individual to ask, "What's in it for me?" and answer, "Nothing except life according to principle." He would then turn to his critics and ask if this answer would be possible for an individual who defined learning as they did, the means to improve his condition.
What defense did learning have against commercialism's dominance? For Chapman it was intellect. He defines intellect as "a living and intimate tradition." It is the tradition that creates the rules and standards by which the cultural contributions individual intelligences make are created and judged. In The House of Intellect Jacques Barzun provides Chapman's definition with more detail and analysis. Barzun explains, "Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion--a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand. " hapman's and Barzun's definitions enable us to identify those attributes that make intellect a bulwark against commercialism's co-option of learning; they are tradition, common knowledge, and unselfishness.
Intellect is a culture's tradition of mind; it illuminates the ways human beings, across the millenniums, have thought about and responded to the question, how shall I conduct my life? For that reason appreciation of intellect necessitates appreciation of the long view, the time frame most conducive to learning. It takes a life time for an individual to learn and to perfect the necessary skills that enable her to contribute to intellect's record or to acquaint herself with its content. Learning has a different relationship with time than business; it is not a short term investment yielding immediate returns. Study, the activity individuals undertake to stake their claims to an intellectual tradition, is an act of open and long duration. Externally imposed deadlines cannot determine the appropriate amount of time a student needs to answer the questions her curiosity and lived circumstances generate. Chapman makes this point in a letter to Dr. Samuel S. Drury, headmaster of St. Paul's School, he wrote: "Let 'em alone. Don't worry about them. Give them a chance but don't try to cram them-don't want to. This is the besetting sin of educators-to want to do too much-to think that they have got to do something and work over and pull wires in people."
Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose
Unfortunately, the words of the grandson of Founding Father and first Chief Justice John Jay are equally accurate today.
I know nothing of J J Chapman, and based on this quote, I'm not missing anything.
Hugh,
Reading and digesting your post took effort, but it was worth it. Thanks for putting it up.