What Can You Believe? Whom Can You Trust?

edited 1/14/19

"There's a sucker born every minute" -- a phrase often credited to P. T. Barnum (1810–1891), American showman

Should you believe a person who tells you that the moon landings were faked on a Hollywood production lot? Why or why not?

Can you trust anyone who tells you he talks with the dead? Why or why not?

Honesty and truth are not necessarily connected. Honest people may promote falsehoods, believing them to be true. Dishonest people may, on many an occasion, tell truths -- for various reasons, usually because they have no stake in it. Involved are two different dimensions of judgment, intention vs. facticity.

These are not particularly deep issues; but some careful thought may be needed to sort out those people we can trust or not, from the reliability of the information we get from them.

A whole lot depends on what they present as evidence. How might you evaluate it?

To continue the discussion, see Can Anyone Talk to the Dead? Assessing Evidential Burdens..

Cordially
-- EGR

Should Schools be Clone Factories?

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. -- James Madison

Many of us seem to long for the deep excitement, the sense of mission, the pervasive invigoration that was provided by the Cold War. Lacking the imminent threat of "mass participation in that Grand Incineration" that gave such cogency to our duck-and-cover drills, we miss the struggle against a world Communism that gave so much meaning to life and so much federal funding to U. S. industry and education.

So we dig up Frankenstein, Body Snatchers, and the Manchurian Candidate! We worry about WMD’s, terrorists, polygamists, militias, and other harbingers of the apocalypse. And we fuss and fret about cloning. We express apprehension, vexation, or reservation about the possibility of creating genetic duplicates of humans.

In reality, we have been cloning, or at least, trying to clone, educated minds for millennia. What do religious leaders want? Doctrinal clones. What do political leaders want? Political clones. What do ethnic leaders want? Ethnic clones. What do parents want? Clones of themselves.

To examine these issues further, see Cloning Student Voice

Cordially,
-- EGR

The Ideal School: What should it be like?

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
-- Abraham Lincoln

In the United States people have been disagreeing for over 150 years what public schools should be, what they should teach, and how they should teach it. These controversies have persisted in the face of concerted effort by intelligent people to address them. People disagree as to what public schools should be because they have different expectations of them.

These expectations can be understood in terms of people's having three different images of the school, the Temple, the Factory and the Town Meeting. Conflicting images generate conflicting expectations. They imply different costs and benefits. These conflicting expectations maintain school controversies.

-- EGR
For more on this and a link to a survey with which you can evaluate your own expectations, see School Image: Expectations & Controversies.