Reading Postmodern Metaphysics by Christos Yannaras. What an amazing reassessment!
We assess everything using modernist (enlightenment) assumptions, and it ruins everything it touches. Yannaras points out that
our perception of reality can change in accordance with our instruments or our method of observation. Observed reality can be transformed by the fact of observing it: Measurement chooses one or more of the possible states which exist originally within a system, and after the measurement the system remains not in its original state but in that which the measurement has chosen.
No big deal, perhaps, in industry. But apply that statement to economics, or even more, to child-rearing or education. We alter by assessing! We need to be more humble and responsible.
Nine pages later:
Measurement is possible only when the measure is appropriate to the object measured.
The reason so much education in the modern world is either a scam or a self-deception is because they measure it with devices that they actually believe (some of them) are objective – i.e. detached and not harmful. Those who don’t believe the measures are objective play along because the system demands it.
That has created a whole vast system of schools that sustain themselves with an error so fundamental the system cannot possibly succeed except within its own self-referential delusion.
Which is fine for a closed system. But the schools are not a closed system. They are the leading cause of the destruction of freedom and responsibility in America.
If only I could level that charge exclusively against the state run schools…
