Glenn Kimball - A Way To Learn

[Shirleypal]

Email from Glenn Kimball received 08-16-05
I subscribe to his newsletter and thought this worth sharing.
http://www.ancientmanuscripts.com/

I wanted to thank all those of you who listened to Ian and I on Coast to Coast the other day. I have been on the phone constantly since the program. The tenor of the calls today is very different than the calls I received after the original Art Bell show in 1997. Most of you are now very supportive and have quality questions. Years ago almost everyone was defensive and angry by what I was saying.

The reason for the difference isn’t because people in the world have changed; frankly neither have I. I have given this some serious thought and have come to the conclusion that the kinds of subjects I treat have become a part of the fabric of acceptable historical perspectives. When I began I was just too far out there for most of the listeners.

This was evidenced this last week when one of our new listeners called me on the phone and began to ask me in detail about my credentials. This has happened so many times that I immediately knew what is going on. I stopped the gentleman in mid interrogation and asked him a question. I asked him if he only listened to people who believed exactly like himself? He insisted that this wasn't the point of his questions. I paused and suggested that this was exactly what he was doing. Then I asked him if he ever learned from his children. Jesus made some serious comments about learning from children for exactly the same reason I was asking my question of this gentleman.

We tend to only want to listen and learn from people who believe as we. It is an old story of intellectual incest. We learn from those like us for so many generations that we become inbred in the head. Instead of gathering intellectual strength through learning and growth we weaken our intellect over time by listening only to that which is comfortable and familiar. Learning is sometimes a very frightening thing.

Carl Sagan described our modern intellectual disease. He said that if we make an extraordinary claim it requires extraordinary proof. I always wanted to ask him before He died, "Who made up that goofy rule?" Why would discovery require some exceptional proof? Why wouldn't we go out of our way to understand and make understanding easy? Why can't we listen to each other and learn from each other with ease? I really liked Carl Sagan personally, but I always felt that he was the ultimate intellectual bigot. His pedigreed fraternity had to approve of all knowledge before it could be real. I almost didn't go to college because of what he said. However, I did go to college for nine years. By the time I left with degrees and letters after my name I had been so indoctrinated by professors that I really believed that I as a dummy. Professors thought it was their job to judge their students and to calibrate where they ranked in the world. The first time after I left the university that someone told me that they felt that I was "smart", I looked at them like a deer paralyzed in the headlights. I didn't know what to say. More than that, I didn't know what to feel or think about myself. The professors had consciously or unconsciously caused me to think of myself as a second class intellectual. I still reject accolades in public.

I began to understand when the head of my department came to me at the end of my studies and told me that the topic I had chosen for my dissertation was unacceptable. My first thought was that I was a dummy and hadn't thought it through well enough. Then he said that the reason he wanted me to change my topic was that there wasn't anyone in our school, or in the world for that matter, that could critique me on the topic. He continued and said that the object of writing a dissertation was so that the committee could critique my paper. They wanted one last assault. In other words they felt that a major ingrediant of their job was to take issue with me regardless of the issue. When I had picked a topic that required them to return to the library and learn before they could critique me, the game was out of their control. I suddenly realized that typical university instruction wasn't the true path to knowledge. The real path was a far more lonely road.

The request to redo the thousand hours of my dissertation came at a very difficult time for me. My wife had left me with three small children to raise alone. My teaching contract had expired and the money source had dried up. Here I was with the need to take care of my family, pick up the pieces of my broken heart and to work more than full time just to feed us all. I never finished the dissertation. I don't need your pity. I am making a point. I want you to understand that your struggles are not unique. The struggles you are having with knowledge are common. You aren't the only people that need to talk to yourself in order to have a respectable conversation. I have been famous for mumbling to myself all my life. I learned to love to talk to myself, but what is more important I have had to learn to love to listen to those who believed very differently than myself.

[Lord Moon]

and a great critique, though not an intended one, of what's wrong with the educational system...

I once dated a women that couldn't read, when she was in grammer school she was placed in the special ed because of this,
she was told she would never make it in education...

This woman got an MA from harvard and pulled down straight A's... she still couldn't read...and failed the CBEST... but education is not really about learning.. it's about status, and orthodoxy..and making money.. by getting grants and published etc... and who funds all of that... the corporations.....who are the last people in the world to want someone to develop a car that gets 259 miles a gallon..