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September 18, 2011
What if... "antimanipulation" were part of the local curriculum?
Atlantic Yards Report
A marvelous New York Times Magazine article today, My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling, concerns the experience of three American siblings, children of a Times correspondent, in attending an experimental school in Moscow where instruction is only in Russian:
New Humanitarian had standard subjects, like history and math, and Danya had many hours of homework a week. But [school founder Vasiliy Georgievich Bogin added courses like antimanipulation, which was intended to give children tools to decipher commercial or political messages. He taught a required class called myshleniye, which means “thinking,” as in critical thinking. It was based in part on the work of a dissident Soviet educational philosopher named Georgy Shchedrovitsky, who argued that there were three ways of thinking: abstract, verbal and representational. To comprehend the meaning of something, you had to use all three.
When I asked Bogin to explain Shchedrovitsky, he asked a question. “Does 2 + 2 = 4? No! Because two cats plus two sausages is what? Two cats. Two drops of water plus two drops of water? One drop of water.”
NoLandGrab: "Sulu, are you getting sensor readings from Atlantic Yards?" "B.S. detectors are on, Captain, and the readings are off the scale."
Posted by steve at September 18, 2011 10:51 PM