Erros

Diz Ayn Rand em Atlas Shrugged (Quem é John Galt? em Português) que uma falsidade aceita autonomamente vale mais do que dez verdades aceitas pela fé. O erro você pode corrigir depois.

Evaluation

Evaluation

Changing subjects a bit to speak about evaluation.

In relation to complex subjects, involving a large number of variables, many of them not well defined, as is the case with education and/or human development, what is important to evaluate is often impossible to evaluate by precise and objective criteria, and what is possible to evaluate by precise and objective criteria is often not so important.

The United Nations Development Program created a Human Development Index (HDI) to help member nations evaluate their status in relation to human development. It is certainly important to evaluate human development at the individual, national and even global level. However, it is not easy to do so. So, indicators are defined that will hopefully allow us to evaluate the status of human development in a nation by precise and objective criteria. The indicators are percentage of children in school, life expectancy at birth and per capita income.

However, what guarantee is there that a larger number of years of schooling correlates positively with more and better learning and education? What guarantee is there that a longer life is a happier life? What guarantee is there that a larger income makes people more humanly developed, helps them actualize their human potentials better?

Science and the School

Science and the School

I remembered something else that is related to this.

Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method, argues that we should separate the school from science -- break the monopoly that science has on the school, so that black magic, voodoo, etc. could also be taught as enterprises as legitimate, from the point of view of the school, as science is.

This is going too far, since what gives science (as it ought to be pursued - see Popper) its credentials is rationality itself. Feyerabend's suggestion is tantamount to claiming that there is no valid distinction between reason and unreason, rationality and irrationality -- which is a view he holds, I believe.

Science and the State

Science and the State

After writing the previous post I remembered another important separation that should take place.

Ayn Rand, in Atlas Shrugged, argues that "Free Scientific Inquiry" is a pleonasm -- and that, therefore, "National Science Foundation" is a contradiction.

Let us also separate science from the state.

Education and Schools

Education and Schools

This is my first post to this blog. It is, therefore, experimental.

I am toying with the idea (suggested by Ivan Illich) that, in the same way that faith and church had to separate one day, education and schools have to part their ways. The school has become an obstacle to education, much the same way the church has become an obstacle to faith.

Although the church and the schools can be controlled by the state (even though it is arguable that they ought not), faith and education ought not -- because they cannot.

I strongly recommend a book that deals with this question from a historical and philosophical point of view: E. G. West, Education and the State (Third Edition, Revised and Expanded, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1994).