Professors without Answers

Interesting article about where the ultimate responsibility of character development lies in contemporary education
:shrug:

http://www.wie.org/j35/professors.asp?ifr=hp-art

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I'm not shelling out 30 grand a year to hear some liberal preacher moralize about bullshit. I'm there to learn science.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

It is common for faculty to teach at separate institutions. One religious, another secular. For some it pays the bills.

The students expressed an interest in developing their personal values. Admirable.

But the professors not interested in hurting somebody's feelings declined to share their personal opinions in order to keep their jobs. The other faculty, seeing an opportunity to indoctrinate their views engaged in another kind of education in this case, and the ones who are simply honest about what they feel is right, are the ones who would prefer to actually say what they mean in regards to morality.

But ultimately, if the student wants to explore the "deeper meaning" of life" and develope "meaningful relationships" to "understand themselves", they should do it on their own or seek out a source that they can consider. It is after all a highly personal undertaking and one which requires time and effort. Not anything like a college course. It requires much more effort. But treat it with a logical mind. If it doesn't "ring" right, chances are it isn't right. one can learn to recognize it after a while.

I agree with Roman. Go to college to learn about science. After all, it's what they really know. Can't combine the two worlds because they simply don't mix, at least in the way we think they should.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I can remember when merely growing up in the real world and getting on with your life, job and studies was sufficient to develop "personal values, self-understanding, and maturity".

Oh mores, oh tempora!

 

in recent historical eras there wasn't such a high number of ridiculous court cases and misrepresentation of bastions of character, thus things were more integrated


ROMAN

just consider the problems of nuclear energy
do we have problems with it because we don't have enough people who know how to manufacture it properly or do we have problems with it because we don't have enough people who know how to use it properly?

 

isn't it slightly scary, particularly in the light of what can be achieved with contemporary science in terms of world destruction/suffering, that there is
no impetus (even though the importance is perceived by both students and teachers alike) for value based education?

 

And and true, yet values can be treacherous when in the hands of the individual...because they can very well be manufactured items of ulterior motive designed to represent the "good" in a person, when the "good" is actually only beneficial to the creator or adopter of said values, which are applied to fulfill their own desires. Most abused values are related to ego based initiatives, but some are worse in their manifestation...such as values that lead to genocide, (Hitler, et al) control based fiasco's that cannot be "contained" and subsequently self-destruct like one-liner (or one-verser) religious groups following a man with a mantra, and other examples. Renegade value abusers cause others to shy away from pursuing perfectly noble ambitions, because character assassination and associative black eyes are epidemic.

Thus you have the deficit in an impetus for value based education. especially in times like these.

Values have their own virtue and by themselves are nothing more than harmless entities with a definition; but how those values are applied by the individual is the crux of the matter. Yet the individual is often too distracted by straw dummyism to be able to separate issues and find out where the flaw is.

This is conceptualized in the well-known analogy that "a little leaven leavens the whole lump" and where the term "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" comes from.
Man has always had a devil of a time separating the good stuff from the bad so that it can be applied appropriately.

 

after i've heard some of the name calling here it's no damned wonder.

 

this is how precisely how people learn values in the absence of norms for regulating such learning

wouldn't the lack of personalities in the public eye who are outstanding representatives of values indicate a lack of education in the field of values of the public ("Hey!! well I tell ya if he was lucky enough to get a leg over that supermodel for 2 years behind his wife's back he certainly gets my vote")

in other words the absence of value based education enables personalities like hitler to rise to power

teaching values is slightly different from teaching theory or even prac.
discerning the nature of flaws is what value based knowledge addresses

and the unsurpassed chaos of the contemporary age indicates how much success we are having in this 'separating' business

 

Good answers. Thank you.
But for the sake of argument, would values, (by definition being dependant upon some sort of code or principle) have to adhere to socially acceptable standard(s)? And if so, what standard(s)?

I recall Hitler had plenty of value based education, so can we consider him a renegade despite ample values? Or can we consider him as one who had values that only differed to the tune of about 6 million dead jews? Which was my whole point, in that, science applied can be just as deadly as values applied, leaving the individual as the determining factor. This leads to the conflict between individual standards versus accepted standards. I know this may contradict my first thought regarding the "self-exploration" of values by students, but that's exploration of values, not the acceptance of them.

I think ultimately, students should be encouraged as often as possible by their professors to be more independant in their approach to what they are taught and in how they may first percieve something. Because these days, too often it's just all about "fitting in".

 

One can not avoid the "fitting in" issue - in other words there must always be some standard or value, from which other standards or values are derivatives - just like you are suggesting the standard/value that students be encouraged to be independent as a derivative (or more specifically, an antithesis) of the standard/value that they are expected to fit it - there is no stepping away from values. There is however the development of values - just because a value is developed (like say the values hitler adopted ) says nothing about the merit or the value

- in other words just because hitler adopted values does not mean that we should not adopt values (perhaps we should not adopt hitler's values) - we should however adopt better values, and this is the business of value based knowledge - if one takes the default position of demanding that no one should establish value based knowledge since it is a misuse of power, it means that the values that will be adopted will be determined by people's demands for sleeping, eating, mating and defending, which on a national level means war and conflict - thus its a misuse of power to not establish value based knowledge

 

There are moral values inherent in the strucrure and comprehension of most bodies of knowledge.

Honesty in one's work. Humility in the face of stubborn fact or unavoidable logic. Correction of error however fondly arrived at. Caring about something other than oneself. Recognition of knowledge and competence and value in disliked or unimpressive or unpleasant or odd people.

 

then why are these values frequently hijacked by other values such as the pursuit for fame and adoration, the acquisition of money and power, etc etc

 

Need to know basis

Shouldn't all of the professors in the hard sciences be able to figure out whether or not planned obsolescence is going on in cars? Do you think you are going to hear them talking about it?

psik

 

Let's say we are complex beings. All values compete, on occasion, for allegiance. Then the immediate question is not why, but how, and not hijack, but supersede - win the competition.

In this view, the profs job is done well if the inherent good values of the particular subject, embedded in the values of intellectual effort, scholarship, and learning generally, are establshed as strongly as possible in the students.

 

iceaura
“

What are the inherent good values of physics?

 

The scientific method?

 

Why do you need a professor in a hard science to work whether planned obsolescence is used in car manufacture?

 

so in other words to determine the value of the applications of physics (like say nuclear warheads) all that is required is an examination whether they were scientifically carried out (ie they were detonated successfully and as anticipated)?

(notice how the lack of value based knowledge inherent to physics makes it virtually non-different from the practical based knowledge of physics)

 

The application of physics is called technology and doesn't use the same methods.