« Mark Twain at Stormfield, the Film
Main
Linguistic Diversity In Pre-State Contexts »
January 6, 2009
Visiting Major Intellectual Monuments
The other day, our son, Shirley (my wife), and I were playing around with a metaphor for major intellectual achievements. Most of our discussion had to do with the calculus and evolution by natural selection as such intellectual achievements. Our son's complaint, he often has one, is that many educated people tend not to visit intellectual monuments that are unrelated to their field of expertise. In this case, I agree with him. Who would be satisfied with a cartoon of the Eiffel Tower or the Great Pyramids? Who would think they understood these physical monuments without having visited them? Sure, there's a lot more to understanding such monuments than simply seeing them but seeing them is part of that understanding. Still many educated people are quite satisfied with cartoon versions of the calculus or evolution by natural selections or general relativity. Often they even confuse these cartoons with the real thing.
Here's my short list of intellectual monuments that I think every education person should visit during her or his lifetime.
- Government at the will of the governed (as a concept as opposed to a practical matter)
- Geometry (and mathematical abstraction in general)
- Classical Mechanics
- Thermodynamics
- The discovery of microscopic entities
- The discovery of large-scale entities
- The discovery of long time
- The Calculus
- Statistics and Probability
- Evolution by natural selection
- Genetics
- The realization that past practice is not in and of itself a moral justification for current practice
- The Special and General Theories of Relativity
- The Standard Model of Particle Physics
I don't mean that every education person should be an expert on these each of these monuments. Rather I think they should be able to read experts in the relevant fields with reasonable confidence and answer senior college level questions about them. They should also know the work of the major historical figures who raised these monuments or made significant modifications to them.
Have I visited all these monuments? No. But I hope to see them all now that I have more free time.
To the above list of intellectual monuments, I would add the following:
- The domestication of fire
- The domestication of plants
- The domestication of animals
- Writing
These last four monuments are harder to visit. Ancient peoples built some or all of them more than once. But the educated need reflect on their significance as monumental intellectual achievements that substantially changed our relationship with the world of nature and with each other. The whole list could be expanded in several directions but things like free market dynamics, for example, just don't seem as monumental to me as they may to others.
None of the intellectual monuments listed in this post should be of abnormal interest.
Posted by Duane Smith at January 6, 2009 8:13 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2744
Comments
One can add many more monuments to your list: fundamentals of chemistry, general biology, general biochemistry (including physiology & metabolism), comparative world languages, and so on.
But, let's get real; it is just not possible for "every education person" to know enough about each and every one of those subjects to be able to "answer senior college level questions about them". There isn't enough time to study each subject intensely for a period of 3 to 6 months (as if you were taking college classes) and then to keep up with it (and every other subject) so that you won't forget what you learned.
Posted by: Aydin at January 8, 2009 5:52 AM
Aydin,
Alas, I fear that you are correct. I do have a couple of observation. Memory and time are both problems. I do think there are five or so of these "monuments" that are sufficiently monumental that all educated people should have visited them even if their memory of them fades with time. The calculus and evolution by natural selection are certainly among them. The real problem is that many educated people, particularly in the humanities, and I am not exempting myself from this, talk about these monuments using only the cartoon versions of them. And therefore, they often get them wrong.
Posted by: Duane at January 8, 2009 7:22 AM
Interesting idea, intellectual monuments.
I would want to add a few more to your list from social sciences, like Foucault's key ideas; fuzzy boundaries, postmodernism, Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts, and more.
Posted by: Yewtree at January 28, 2009 7:49 AM
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.