tjameswhite.com

On lunch at work I’ve began reading Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller. I think it going to be rather interesting to see his predictions from 1969, considering he says his “long-distance thinking” is really only good for something on order of 50 years.

So, a couple of quotes from chapter one “Comprehensive Propensities”:

All universities have been preogressively organized for ever finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever-expanding inventory of experiences.

He continues,

Of course, we are beginning to learn a little in the behavioral sciences regarding how little we know about children and the educational processes. We had assumes the child to be an empty brain receptacle into which we could inject our methodically-gained wisdom until that child, too, became educated. In the light of modern behavioral science experiments that was not a good working assumption.

Inasmuch as the new life always manifests comprehensive propensities I would like to know why it is that we have disregarded all children’s significantly spontaneous and comprehensive curiosity and in our formal education have deliberately instituted processes leading only to narrow specialization. …

I’m not sure what it is about those passage that struck me. Probably because I’m watching my child grow, discover and learn, and because I’m married to a high school teacher. It seems Mr. Fuller understood the problem with “traditional” education — read, memorize, regurgitate — yet our education system, some 30 years later, is still stuck in that paradigm. The school my wife teaches at was originally based on the idea of breaking this model, and yet I’ve watched as that has been slowly crushed and beat back into the traditional model.

At any rate, there it is for you to consider.

R. Buckminster Fuller. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Pocket Books, 1970, pp. 13, 14.