Quantum Mechanics

The problem, when all's said and done, is the concept of the quantum. In life, as in physics, the quantum is the smallest unit of anything that makes sense in a given context. Once you have this idea of quantity, the idea that all things can be reduced to discrete and finite elements, then it becomes tempting to launch a barrage of mathematical rules in an attempt to reduce the target known as life to its quivering naked essentials.

And that is why holistic education is doomed.

Once people get their hands on numbers and the limited intelligence required to manipulate them, the idea of a whole becomes fragmentable. If a whole can be reduced to numbers, then each numbered item can be dealt with as a single part. If the whole can be reduced to single parts, then it's not holism we're talking about, but the idea of engineering, the idea that you can have specialists and specific things and not have all-round development.

Actually, I don't think that all-round development is desirable as an end unto itself. I believe in the multiplicity of gifts. I believe in the difference of individuals. I believe in the irreducibility of the mystery of life. I mock the idea of the quantum as applied to the reality of the human. And I will stop at nothing to educate without the illusion of holism to lure people to their doom.

I do not want quantum mechanics, people who tinker around with numbers and reduce things to units. I do not want the zeitgeists, people who seek to kill time by diminishing its power against the backdrop of eternity. I want to know that our universe is immune from the spirit of reductionism and the spirit of trivialism and the spirit of fluffiness without cuteness (oops, well, stuff like that). I want a cosmos (not just a world, a secularity that terminates) that goes on forever and ever in the light of God, worlds without end, amen.