School of lateral thinking

what if you reward students with good grades, by sending them on school trips.

what if you make your selection of your school sport teams on the student behaviour in class.

what if you allow students with good grades to take a day off.

deductive or inductive

I think that when Aristotle said: “contemplation is the greatest good”, he was just praising himself. We all know that Aristotle was a Greek philosopher, during the flourishment of the Greek empire. During this period the Greek philosophers saw themselves as superior people. Look for instance at the book of Plato, another Greek philosopher Therefore I think that Aristotle meant that people first have to think, before they say something. What he as a philosopher did of course. However he was probably, in his eyes, the minority. Most people just act on intuition. This event is still going on, despite the effort of our teachers and parents, who teach you when start having your first proper conversation that you have to think before you say something. I agree with his statement that contemplation is a great good, however I do not see a correlation between the statement of Aristotle and “cogitio ergo sum” the statement of Descartes. Cogito ergo sum is Latin for: “I think therefore I exist”. By this sentence you can conclude that Descartes was sure that he exists, because he thinks. Aristotle agrees with him that thinking is a very important skill, however not until the same extend of Descartes. As far as I know Aristotle ones said: “the only thing that I know is that I know nothing”. This sentence tells me that Aristotle would not have agreed with the fact that when you think you live.

enemie of reason

After watching the videos on Richard Dawkins (including the one with Bill O'Reilly), can you say that reason has enemies? Can atheists be angry like religious fundamentalists? What is wrong with believing in a God, in the stars, in pseudo-science, in superstition, in magic, etc.? Whether all of these things are wrong or right is beside the point. Can they really be harmful to man-kind?

In my eyes there is no religion which is harmful for society. They only negative side effect that can occur is that people take the text literally. These people have to understand that these texts are more than a thousands year old. The purpose of religions and also the purpose of Darwinism are to solve one of the most interesting questions available. Because these books are so old the still try to answer a question, which we can now answer easily. However another aim of religions was to keep order in society. However the world has changed completely, therefore the laws that are imposed by these religious books are out dated now. However the people who do not read the religious books between the lines can be harmful to society. However the same problem can arise among Darwinist. Once I had a conversation with a Darwinist. Probably you already figured out that I am a Darwinist myself. However my point of view during that discussion was a Christian point of view. During that discussion the Darwinist became quite aggressive, because I was not easily willing to agree with her. Therefore I think that anyway of thinking is not directly harmful to society. It becomes harmful when a person is not open for other ideas, and only believes that he is right.

syllogism

Piet, you as an Ado support have no right to say that football violence should be punished because that would be hypocrite, because you ado supporters are the biggest hooligans in Holland.

In the above example the syllogism is:

Piet is an Ado Den Haag supporter.
Ado Den Haag supporters are hooligans.
Therefore Piet is a hypocrite if he complains about football violence.

The argument is wrong, because not all Ado Den Haag supporters are hooligans.

opticial illusion

This drawing was made by Maurits Cornelis Escher. In first instance this painting just looks like an ordinary painting. However when you analyse this painting you see that the water is flowing upwards which is impossible. The water cycle that you saw first does not make any sense any more.

Do animals have language?

In our theory of knowledge book there was a discussion between Dolly and Guy. The discussion topic was do animals have language. Dolly said that animals communicate between noises, scents and body movements. She believed that language and communication is the same thing. Because according the encyclopaedia Britannica the definition of communication is” the exchange of meanings between individual through a common system of symbols”. However Guy did not believed with her, he believes that Homo sapiens are the only animal with a language. He thinks that there is a distinction between language and communication and language. In his eyes language is a subset of communication. As an example Dolly gave the Vervate monkeys which have different alarm sign for different predators. However Guy was not convinced by this argument, because his opinion was that the monkeys were only reacting, but they did not understand the alarm signs. Second of all dolly said that chimpanzees that share 99% of our genes should have language, however for Guy the remaining 1% made the difference. However Dolly stayed at the chimpanzees and gave an example. She stated and experiment were chimpanzees were learned the American language. During the experiment the chimpanzees showed there creativity with the signs. This event showed that they understand them. However Guy said that this experiment was not reliable, because the trainers were so emotionally involved that they were not objective any more. Dolly gave another example, however Guy was not convinced and said that animals do not have a language because the do not have syntaxes.

Personally I do believe that animals have a language. We interpret their language as an annoying sound, because we are not able to understand it. Our own language we can understand and therefore we acknowledge the sounds as a language. I do believe that their language is limited compared to our language. Animals just eat, bread and sleep. Our society is more complex. You can compare that with the Sapir-Whorf theory.

Sapir-whorf theory

According to the sapir-whorf theory, language determines what we think. And we can only think what our language allows us to think. personally I agree with this theory. As a person that speaks two languages, therefore I think that i can use my own experience as an example. When I speak dutch, I am much directer. For example in a group of dutch people i will say if someone response was stupid, however i would not do that in an english conversation. Second of all when the language of a discussion is dutch, then i will easily participate in that discussion. however when the language is english I will first think before i participate. Another difference is that in english i am much more patient, and i am willing to lissen to other people. While this aspect of a conversation is not my strongest aspect when i speak dutch.

Will babelfish ever be perfect?

every students used at least once a translator on the internet, especially for b languages like french. However most of the time you realise inmediatly that the program does not translate perfectly. Besides this online translators are usefull, For example to translate a tekst from an other language to your own it is quite oke, however not the other way around. it is also quite handy to use these translator to translate a single word. Besides it is probably impossible to make Babelfish a perfect translator. Most words have a double meaning for example the dutch word bank. it means couch and bank in the same time. Ofcourse this is a quite simple example and this mistake is probably fixable. For example you can let the program look at the other words in the sentence. If you take the example of the Dutch word bank again, you can say: " ik ga naar de bank om wat geld te halen". which means: " I go the bank to get some money", however if you replace the word Bank for couch the sentence does not make any sense anymore. The second problem you have with translators is the sentence structure. Translators translate words word for word, however not every language has the sentence structure, the frech say le moulin rouge, while the english say the red mill. The most difficult things to translate are probably puns. Most people that speak more than one language probably already noticed, that if you translate joke they mostly do not work. Unfortunatly for the translation machines most jokes consist out of puns.

Hansje Brinker

Compared to the Netherlands most countries have a width arrange of myths. Maybe it has to do with the landscape, the lack of rural area’s or mountains. Or it has to do with the Dutch mentality. Because compared to most nationalities the Dutch are quite down to earth. However there are some Dutch myths, and of course one of them has to do something with the dikes. The name of this myth is called Hansje Brinker.

According this legend a lockmasters son saved the Netherlands form a disastrous disaster. On a stormy day Hansje Brinker discovers a tiny hole inside the dike. Without hesitation he decides to put his finger inside the hole. By doing this he literally defends his city with bare hands for twenty four hours. The funny thing about this myth is that is better known outside the Netherlands than inside. The reason for this is probably very simple. Since this myth came into existence after the book Hansje Brinker by Mary Mapes Dodge was published. In this book Mary tries to describe the typical Dutch life of the early 19 century, by describe the Dutch life she uses typical Dutch landmarks and habits such as the dikes and ice skating. Probably she used the myth to tell her readers the consequences of a mistake in the Dutch dikes. However Mary Mapes Dodge wrote her book, while she never visited the Netherlands.

What should be learned at school?

Every student at least thinks once a day why am I at school, this thought mostly does not occur because it is Friday half past four. No the reason for this thought is that we students cannot link the information we receive to reality. However the link to reality differs from person to person. This means that it is impossible to make the perfect school system.

I think that most students agree with me that links with current affairs are always interesting, for example discussing renewable energy with Geography. The basis of our modern school system should not be changed. Begin with the basic (English and maths) on the primary school. I call this the basic, because in every subject you need these two. After developing some skills in these two subject add the other subjects (biology, chemistry, physics, economics, history, geography, modern language, computer science), by doing this students will gain more skill and they will specify there interest which they develop in the third stage. In this stage you will study your favourite subjects of the second stage in more detail, however you will follow match and English because this is the basic. I would also add two new subjects theory of knowledge because it will teach you to approach a problem in different angles, and social studies because I believe that everyone should know how his/her government works.

The approach of developing skills will be completely different, I will mostly work in projects and combine different subjects, for example it is easy to combine statistics and economics. The topics of these projects I would link to the Current problems for example the combination between the credit crunch. During the projects I will use modern technology to gather certain information. This of course I will do in the third stage, because you need some basic skills to analyse the problems.

The last typical feature of my school system is that students have to be actively involved in sports, visiting types of art and helping the community. These three things are quite important, because after an exercise people feel fit, and you have to be fit to absorb the knowledge that is given to you on school. Visiting different types of art you just need to broaden your horizon. The most important one, helping the community, is to experience that not everything is as logical as it seems. In addition it faces you that most of us are very luckily to be in the situation we are.

Overall you can see that the aims of my school system is that the students can make a connection between theory and normal life, can work with modern technology, are fit and have a width horizon and have a clear image of how the real world looks like.

Is school a cave?

400 years before Christ, Plato accounted for this sense of another reality in his ‘Allegory of the Cave’. According to this view on reality, we are prisoners in a cave, looking at the shadows of puppets on the cave wall. That is to say everything we see around us is just a illusion. We may think we see trees and cats and BMWs, but in fact they are only shadows, projected by the light of a fire and some fancy puppeteers. Outside the cave are the true trees and cats and BMWs, or the pure ‘idea’ of these, which would hurt our eyes to look at.

If Plato is right not only is school a cave, then in a sort of way our whole life is a cave. In this cave you have different corridors. All the corridors have different walls that protect us and limit our movements. In the beginning we can only enter a few corridors. In these corridors we have to obey the rules of our parents and teachers. When we graduate we can enter the next stage. We can choose the corridor of company A or company B. There we listen to our boss. We can even dig our own area, and start our own business. However if we do that we still have to compromise with the government. Our whole society is based on staying inside the cave. Take our constitution, we all agree with it. However if you do not, we think you are stupid and you get punished. You get locked up and we will teach you what is right and what is wrong. There is nothing wrong with it, actually it is quite the opposite we all love it. We all love safety and most people hate it to take initiative. We prefer watching moves instead of making them. The people that do take the risk and therefore do go outside the cave we reward them, with honour and high salaries. There nothing wrong with it, this system is even older than our existence.