The Classical Road to Success

009-Classical Success
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

The classical model of education is that you read lots of books and then wow the lady of choice with your erudition. Poetry, quotes and other passive knowledge is supposed to spill from your mouth, converting the woman into a quivering mass of worship. Yes, well, it's really like getting yourself a set of tools and some instruction manuals, and expecting to become a professional DVD repairman by showing your customer your tools and quoting the manual.

The only worrying thing is that sometimes it works, people are fooled by someone who quotes knowledge at them without realizing they should check the ability of the person. Here in Poland there is a lot of trust invested in certificates and qualifications, despite the equal knowledge of how easy it is to forge such things, the level of corruption and the sheer experience of qualified people not knowing what they are doing. The trap is that most people have no real idea of how they can test for quality themselves, they have been sold on the idea that 'someone should do it who is qualified to do so'. duh!

Poland has a high rate of alcholism among artists, partly because it is a nation taught to have faith in authority and qualifications, imagine how tough it must be to say 'look at this river!' and to get the reply "Yes, it is 1200 km long and serves the 3 primary industrial ports of the nation.', when you meant 'feel it, breathe it, think about your relationship to it, touch it, taste it, watch it flow'. A philospher once observed that if you put your foot in a river one day, and then repeated it the next day then it would not be the same river, yesterday's water have long flown. To the classicalist, though, it is still the same 1200 km long river, nothing has changed - unless a new specialist comes along and remeasures the river and states it is actually 1201.2 km long..