To: 
From: "Vern Humphrey" 
Reply-To: r_catholic-l{at}yahoogroups.com

To: goffscalif{at}aol.com [mailto:goffscalif{at}aol.com]
> >
> > He didn't even see the irony. :-)
>
> Very few people, alas, know how to *think*, and that is the
> reason they're
> such poor - and vociferously belligerent - debaters.  I have
> absolutely no
> training in debate, but I find that, generally at least, I can
> recognize poor
> arguments and use valid ones simply because I've learned to use
> my mind.  That is,
> BTW, in spite of and not because of the American public school
> system; even if
> I'd paid attention in school, which I didn't, I seriously doubt I
> would have
> learned to think from doing so.  Our schools are quite willing to teach
> anything, just so long as it doesn't require the students to think.

Indeed, such a thing would threaten the teachers, who don't know how to
think themselves!
>
> My favorite example is my oldest daughter.  When we moved here
> from Oklahoma
> the Albuquerque school system decided that she needed to take
> some classes in
> order to graduate (she wound up having to go to night school)
> even though our
> first year here was her senior year and she'd done very well in
> Oklahoma.  One
> of those classes was Communications Skills.  As it happens, my
> daughter could
> communicate better in middle school than just about any graduate of an
> Albuquerque high school I've ever encountered, not because she
> learned it in school
> but because we've always communicated.  She can mangle English
> just as well as
> I can with slang and colloquialisms, but she can also speak and
> write just
> about as well as I can.  And the class was below her
> capabilities.  She knows
> how to *think* about her speech and writing, because she's been
> doing it all her
> life (I was reading to her when she was just a few months old;
> shoot, IIRC I
> was reading to her when she was just a few days old) - and what
> she "learned"
> in the class was stuff that she knew long before we ever arrived here.
>
Communications skills are learned very slowly, and best learned in the
family.  I can recall a study about "Creative Writing" courses in
college. The conclusion what that such courses don't teach much of anything
-- as measured by student writing at the end of the course -- but they
ought to continue to be offered because they teach the student to
"feel good about himself."
>


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