Catechism

Statement: The cat miaouws.

Question: Why does the cat miaouw?

Response: Because he suffers.

Q: Why does the cat suffer?

R: Because he has tasted of heaven, and heaven is fish, and shrimp, and crab, mixed unto a mess of tasty feasting.

Q: But why does the taste of heaven cause him to suffer?

R: Because he no longer tastes it, and it is gone from his presence.

Statement: And if it is gone forever, but he has hope of it, then that is hell.

An Angry Man

Sometimes, in a quiet fuguish (a nice word, both blowfish and music) state, I hear the voice of reason like a catechist and a catechumen.

Why is he angry?

Because all he has is the sense of his achievements.

Why is he angry?

He is not angry if his achievements are the defeat of others.

Why is he angry?

Because you never admit defeat, never have, and never will. And you seem to laugh at his achievements.

But I do not mock his achievements; he has more than most others, and adds to them each year.

There, you see? You seem to laugh, even when you do not. It is why the Lady said he had to get rid of you, and 'good riddance' were his exact and bitter words. We all heard them.

Well, I am happy.

And that too, he cannot forgive you for. You are neither penitent, not conscious of what he thinks of as your crimes. You laughed at him, and he reserves that right unto himself.

Can Holistic Education Exist? (Part 2)

I'm not a very theological person, or a very philosophical one. But I do believe in the relative sanctity of language - the idea that words are meant to describe and detail things to some degree of precision and accuracy. This means that while common usage can shift meaning over time, the time period is normally a fairly long one. Words in general keep their meanings within a time-scale sufficient for one generation to (just about) communicate with the previous or the next.

For technical language, this span has to be a little longer, so that the discourse can extend back and forth through time in such a way that the foundations of a discipline can still be seen (or at least, alluded to reasonably). In this context, 'span' refers not only to a range within time, but also to connectivity (as in a bridge or a tapestry).

And here is Exhibit One: the word 'holistic'. Holism is a property possessed by things which are complete in themselves, and which if decomposed to their elements, would be of less value than the sum of those elements. The kind of value is not the point, although it helps to know what it is. The point is that the whole before decomposition was more valuable to the person doing the evaluation.

Take, for example, a marble bust and the bucket of tiny marble pieces resulting from demolition of that marble bust. To an evaluator who uses an aesthetic baseline, the whole bust has incalculably more value than the marble gravel. To a chemist looking for a source of granular crystalline calcium carbonate, the marble pieces may have more value in a catalytic or kinetic sense (although the mass of substance is the same). The hologram version (i.e., the bust), however, can be thought of as having less entropy. It took effort to get the marble to look exactly like the man whose head it represented. That effort gave the bust a value which is now lost. The chemist can use any other marble source; he need not use the bust.

The same thing applies to a cake, a book, a car – any whole that is made from smaller components which do not spontaneously combine, and which requires an ordering anti-entropic process to produce. The problem lies in the reverse process, from the information-deficient raw materials (materials which do not themselves contain a plan for further development) to the information-rich product (a product which was made through a process that required information). The problem is that when we have unformed substance (or uninformed substance), we do not definitely know what the final form should be, can be, or ought to be.

This is true of people who are being educated. Educaré is Latin for 'drawing-out', as wire is drawn out (whence 'ductility') from raw metal. But what do we want to draw out? The raw material itself offers no clue, and wire without form is merely wire. Of course, wire can have uses in itself, but it can also be made into much more valuable products through progressively more complex processing sequences. An holistic education would be one which could take into account the end-product. And that is something the wire does not define.

So is it all lost? Is an holistic education genuinely beyond us? It all depends. As a Christian, I'd defer to something along these lines. If there is a divine purpose, then that must inform us as to what we must be 'drawn out' to be. An holistic education in a Christian mission school must therefore be based solidly on at least this much.