What I'm Actually Thinking

Logic. Math. Science. Consciousness. Integration. Music. The Thoughts I Love To Have.

It's been probably seven years since I purchased my copy of Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, but I am making a concerted effort to get through it this summer. Complete with highlighting and marginal notes, this book will be conquered--in the most cognitive sense.

I remember, in days past, when I wanted to be a snobby intellectual and sit around mahogany tables in a Enlightenment-era salon, discussing the nature of nature, the meaning of meaning, and the philosophy of...well, okay, you see. And perhaps, in a very childlike way, I still do. Sitting here in Library West, in front of my flat panel display and utilitarian office space, I have been browsing through an over-sized coffee table book called The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World. The book, oddly enough, was not very well written, but then again it's mostly full page pictures of old palatial biblioteks scattered throughout Europe. They held me entranced, these scholar's basilicas, temples dedicated to the collection of knowledge, filled with polished, wooden beauty in Vienna and Cambridge, Dublin and Manchester, Rome and Paris. It is a child's fantasy for me--was there ever such a time when people really worked to understand the higher thoughts of man? When people sought out knowledge purely and formed the great ideas that fill cracked pages? When men were strong and scholar's were scholarly? Ok, I jest. My woes are overwrought.

Academia has thoroughly disgusted me lately. The more I read about what it means to be a Ph.D. professor in the modern world, the more I realize that the system is broken. The system, which started in those dusty Cambridge halls, filled with aging books, has been applied and reapplied en masse to a demographic it was not designed for: the average people. Kings, Queens, court-appointed officials and scholars, the wealthy, the royal, and the holy--these were the original patrons of libraries and universities. These were the people who had time to devote to the act of writing, reading, and learning.

Perhaps this last fact should make me glad I was born when I was. What would've been the odds that I would be able to work amongst the "great thinkers" of the past? Had I been born into a family, say, even 100 years ago, which had (relatively) the same wealth as mine, I would have had a fairly slim chance to even know about some of things I can explore and learn about today. Indeed, the democratization of education has been a blessing in this respect. But there is no doubt that we've lost a great deal.

In the transition from regal/monstatic control to populous-based, "The University" has seen an enormous decline in quality. In some ways, I guess it should be expected. You try to stretch something too thin and it's integrity is compromised. Yet, I'd like to hold Western Civilization to a higher standard. Why should my university be run like a business or a trade school, where students come to learn rote skills for the 21st century's white collar work force and where the goal for professors is to keep writing archaic "scholarly" papers, which don't get read by anyone outside their ultra-specified field? The student, who initially came to University to gain a deeper and richer perspective of the world, now comes simply to gain a degree, a proof-of-purchase of an "education". Professors, whose jobs are so scarce, are rarely found breaking the corrupted mold, for they are just happy to have a job which, by all accounts of public opinion, shouldn't exist.

And that's the real problem, isn't it? That's why I'm really mad, why I'm really sitting here not focusing on Hofstadter's treatises on the Consistency of Formal Systems. It's because, in the democratization of education, we also democratized the standards. Instead of education being guided by our highest and most intelligent, the average became the norm. And this is not political democracy, but rather the egalitarian and all-mighty dollar which brought down higher learning. For what is the use of philosophy to business or history to an engineer? The answer is "A hell of a lot" but not in the short term, cause-and-effect sort of vision of our leaders. We want results. We want them now. So screw music and art, tear up the past and make way for the future.

Quintilian, an educator in 1st century (AD) Ancient Rome, wrote a book on the state of Roman Education. He spoke of the necessity for an integrated education, because our minds do not naturally work by compartmentalizing language from history, or music from math. Instead, to create great minds, we must foster the whole, united. This is what I want to do with my life. And, if this country, nay, if this society wants to progress, it has to look back and see.

Yes, yes, this mostly emotion, but it makes me feel better. And one day, when I give a speech on this, I promise all the logic will be there in full, spelled out in a Powerpoint. The question: who will listen?

That's my big question right now. Who would listen? Who would care? The key is to figuring out who is hurt by our failing education system? If nobody is, then nothing can happen, and I am stuck in a time and place where the things I value are not significant. My primary hope is the business community.

In another entry perhaps I will actually talk about the things I am thinking in an academic sense--the thoughts brought on by GEB--and perhaps will also delve into the topic of "Whole-Brain" thinking that I was introduced to in Daniel Pink's excellent work A Whole New Mind.