online: 28 november 2006
modified: 27, 28 november 2006

21 november 2006 education as artifice


15:00 in the little valley i call utopia...

4 white ducks with yellow beaks meet me with a chorus of simultaneous quackings as i approach the edge of their pond, if that's whose it is...

...obediently i walk along a fenced pathway through a water garden and i stop to look at some little artificial waterfalls...

...a lesser magellan goose in a cage is standing on one leg...

in a miniature zoo (all this is artificial, so yes it is art)...

i call this little valley 'utopia after rain'... the air is cold yet fresh and invigorating, yet damp and bitterly cold... (it's too cold and damp to sit, so i keep walking, and write standing, on paper, not handheld)



later
...at the end of a private road a five-barred farm gate slowly, and jerkily closes by itself, with no visible cause... a minute or two has passed since a car went through... crude and improvised as it is, this automatic or robotic servant reveals the half-hidden nature of the so-called intelligent environment, with its ability to transpose causes and effects in time and space... an invisible picture of our future...

...bare trees against the clear sky... a kestrel (or is it a sparrow hawk?) hovers... swoops or dives lower... hovers again... again swoops downwards... then another kestrel arrives... the 1st keeps hovering while the 2nd soars and circles below... then they fly off together...

...at Parliament Hill and in near darkness Son of Winds is again flying a kite with electric lights... he tells me of his life and i presume (from all he says and does) that he must have good parents... oh yes he says and tells me that his father was an engineer and his mother a mathematician... they encouraged him to go to university and always to do his work well... critical as i am of academic education i have to admit that in him it has been effective and good... i must remember that (when i resume 'the education of everyone', my intended reshaping of it in the electric book)...!




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