[New-Poetry] "The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives"

[Mark Weiss]

>
>I'm against government subsidies, but since we 
>can't avoid them, one I'd like to see would be a 
>full-scale neurophysiology-based study of 
>epistemology to determine just how people 
>learn.  It'd be interesting to see the results 
>of a long-term study of a million or more people 
>from birth to the age of fifty and try to 
>analyze why some turn out well by their own 
>standards and some don't, and why some turn out 
>well by society's standards and some don't.  I 
>doubt that such a study would be feasible, or 
>could cover all the variables that it'd have to, 
>not to mention how politicians out for votes 
>would allow any of the inevitably 
>anti-egalitarian results to be widely known, 
>much less acted upon by educational institutes.

It's not always subsidies. A lot of grants are 
fees for service. Much of the basic research and 
engineering that the government buys is performed by universities.

There's a lot of research on how people learn. 
Turns out there's more than one way. No surprise 
there. And of course a lot of variables, as you say.

Your idea for a grand fifty year study has a 
bunch of fatal flaws, not least that studying why 
someone "turns out well by society's standards" 
would certainly influence the behavior of those 
being studied. And the there's the question of 
what that criterion means. Do poets qualify as 
that kind of success? Does Donald Trump? Are 
there maybe a whole lot of different answers?


>(I just read somewhere that some study showed 
>that home-taught kids come out between the 
>sixtieth percentile and eightieth percentile on 
>the SATs--or whatever the main test is, the idea 
>being that the home-taught have better 
>educations than the publicly-taught, the 
>possibility that smart people prefer 
>home-teaching for their kids, who do better 
>because of their genes, not their formal education, is not considered.)
>
>--Bob


Aghain, a bunch of variables. Home schoolers come 
in basically two varieties, religious types who 
want to protect their children from sin in the 
form of, among other things, much of science, and 
highly educated folks likely to have lots of 
books in the house who have an income sufficient 
to allow one parent to stay home. All that 
attention may be good for a kid (except when it's 
not), but also the level of accomplishment of the 
parents is likely a factor in the children's 
school success (or at least their success at 
standardiized tests). I'd be willing to bet that 
no matter how educated children of the educated 
and professional do better than average, perhaps 
as well as the home educated of the same class, 
and that the home-schooled fundamentalist kids don't do as well.

But I'm not sure what you're advocating. Rousseauian education?

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New from Chax Press: Mark Weiss, As Landscape.
$16.  Order from http://www.chax.org/poets/weiss.htm


"What a beautiful set of circumstances! What a 
lovely concatenation of particulars. Here is the 
poet alive in every sense of the word, and 
through every one of his senses. Instead of 
missing a beat or a part, Weiss’ fragments are 
like Chekhov’s short stories­the more that gets 
left out, the more they seem to contain
 One can 
hear echoes from all the various 
ancestors...[but] the voice, at its center, its 
core, is pure Mark Weiss. His use of the fragment 
is both elegant and bafflingly clear, a pure 
musical threnody
[it] opens a window, not only 
into a mind, but a person, a personality, this 
human figure at the emotional center of the poem."

M.G. Stephens, in Jacket. 
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-weiss-rb-stephens.shtml
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