Posted on January 1st 2003
Education
By Alex Linder
Franklin recommended looking up every word you don't know as a way to expand your vocabulary. Good idea. Same works for concepts, people - anything you come across in reading, or elsewhere, you're not familiar with. Extension of powerful ideas; their reapplication in different areas - of this 99% of originality consists. Research the unknown; ask simple questions. Compare supposed information with established principles and incentives to mislead. In this way genuine knowledge is acquired, and set in constellation with the rest of your known world. Collecting trivia is not our goal, rather the drawing out of ourselves -- e-duce-ing that defines education -- into the broader world; looking up from our petty concerns to appreciate and understand the context of our lives. We approach the world not in the spirit of the jew, who seeks only 'news you can use' (to profit or to destroy), but to appreciate, and understand. We enlarge our comprehensions to strengthen the world by understanding its parts, and our relation to them. Education is someone wiser than ourselves, or ourselves in a pinch, putting a finger under our child's chin, lifting our eyes to his, then spreading his hand across the broad horizon, our gaze to follow. We rise above our petty and particular concerns; we appreciate, for all canyons are grand, and mountains, hills, plains too; - we walk and move and see, feel, and taste - in time we perceive. Where previously we saw not at all, now we see through, the literal meaning of 'perceive.' This is education; a drawing out; a coming to realize, condensed where it can be, but unfolding without ending for those who choose it. In Chapter one of his book on Christianity, Oliver mentions someone we've never heard of, a certain Eugene Marais, student of the not so lowly baboon. Immediately we ask ourselves: who is this man? Why haven't we heard of him before? It sounds like he was doing Jane-Goodall work before she was, as he spend lengthy periods with baboon troops, long enough to win their trust. We immediately wonder if there were politically incorrect implications to his discoveries. We know that minor women achievers are celebrated, whereas minor male achievers are ignored. Research is required. First we run a vocabulary check on chacma, which seems to be the particular type of primate Marais studied. We have never encountered this word before. Dictionary.com informs us that a chacma is: A grayish-black baboon (Papio ursinus) of southern and eastern Africa. Very interesting! Our conception of primates is enlarged. Next we'll run engine on chacmas, see if we can find pictures. We note the 'ursinus' in the Latin name, and we know that ursine is the adjective pertaining to bears. We suspect someone in the long ago thought these primates bore resemblence to bears, although if it were the same person who saw constellations in scattered stars, we might not see that resemblance ourselves! Search reveals chacmas resemble bears in their remarkable furiness. We learn they're omnivorous and male-dominated. Perhaps we hear less about them for this last reason, as feminists, we know, are always on the lookout for female-dominated species, the better to contrast these species favorably with mankind, pardon, humankind. We research Eugene Marais. He turns out to have been a keen-eyed renaissance man, an extraordinary South African, a poet, lawyer, naturalist, journalist. He's known as "one of the founding fathers of the Afrikaans language." Perhaps it is not surprising we haven't heard of him, as he's exactly the type for which the jewed academy has no use. We learn he studied both termites and baboons. He believed the former operated off instinct only; the latter off "causal" memory. He had a least-resistance theory in competition with Darwin's fittest. It appears that much of what he wrote was in Afrikaans only. This calls to mind our observation on knowledge friction; that more times than theory would suggest are even men in the same occupation -- say, setting up prison telemedicine systems -- unaware of those working in the same field on the same problems. This is true even in the age of Internet. There's a mental gravity that draws our attention ever down to our own concerns, as a baby to its blocks. We must fight this by drawing ourselves out, and that means up and away, looking over the edge of the furrow to see outside our own field. How much knowledge sought by the English-speaking world has already been discovered in the German- ? How much valid knowledge exists but lies fallow -- to us -- because it is untranslated, unresearched, or deliberately covered up? We ponder this in relation to the six major publishing houses all being located in New York, run by jews and staffed by feminists. We ponder in light of our publishing knowledge: is there a market for International German house, specializing in translating German political and scientific texts, specifically semitically incorrect ones, into Enlish? We return to remarkable Marais, of whom we were ignorant until a few minutes ago. We note that he had the respect of Robert Ardrey, himself a writer the implications of whose works render uncomfortable the culturists. We wonder about E.O. Wilson, the famous Harvard ant scientist, also in this line. We ponder again the dictum, 'great minds think alike.' Perhaps to think is to think alike, if the thinking is sound, for reality is of a piece, although reactions to accurately assessed reality differ with the subject. We are charged with interest to do more research on the particular findings of Marais. What precisely did he learn about baboons? Can we find this knowledge in English, if not all of his writings on the subject? Just as the Italians say eating makes appetite, learning too makes us hungry for more. Understanding what is happening, to us and around us, is the only real security. More later. We conclude by observing that in the time we spent researching Eugene Marais and his animals, Berkeley tuition checks for the second semester were cashed, $13,000 per student. While we learned real and suggestive facts, those poor 13k kids taking anthro 101 heard from a jew that race doesn't exist; that human sexuality is a continuum; that free love is the way they do things in Samoa, and ought to be and would be the way we do things here if the repressed parents who signed those checks would loosen up. We gained real and substantial knowledge; Berkeley gained major fundage; Berkeley students gained...not at all, for they augmented nought but their stock of things that just ain't so.
[ The above is from a blog posting. ]