Monday, August 31, 2009

Intelligent Discussion Is Hard To Come By

I'm reading a book called "Why Don't Students Like School" and let me tell you, it really has me thinking. I haven't gotten very far, seeing as I'm in the middle of moving out and have no time for reading, but the first couple of pages that I've read are fascinating!

It basically explains that humans don't like thinking. It's slow, takes up lots of energy, and rarely leads you to the correct answer. When I think about it like that it almost makes me feel bad for people who seem ignorant...
For example, I overheard a conversation about talent. Most of the people were arguing that talent is something you have to work for, while only ONE person was arguing that it was inherent. Now, this may just be semantics, but the definition of talent according to Princeton's website is:

"A person who possesses unusual innate ability in some field or activity"

Uh... Innate ability? Do you have to work for that? It seems fairly ridiculous that people don't even think about the very definition of the word when they're arguing about it, but even more ridiculous to think that the person arguing for innateness didn't even use that argument!

It seems as though my outrage with the world will not come to an end until we genetically modify ourselves to be more efficient thinking machines. For now, I will have to endure living in the minuscule minority.

1 comment:

Daniel Schneider said...

Have you seen this video of Sir Ken Robinson talking about the Western public school system being a single-minded, creativity-crushing entity?

Not the same tip as this post's riding, albeit a similar one...