Have you seen your Shadow? (1 Viewer)

Uncle Gizmo

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I did something Wicked when I was a boy, and it did indeed affect me deeply ...
 

The_Doc_Man

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I know I have a few clandestine skeletons clanking and clattering in the cluttered old closet of my clumpy memory.

Randell Garrett, a science-fiction novelist, once described "learning" as an inelastic collision. He used a metal ball for the analogy. In essence, in an elastic collision, your ball will bounce off something with no apparent effect. It is unchanged and therefore might bounce the same way in any subsequent collision. After an inelastic collision, however, the metal ball is geometrically altered and if its next bounce comes off the deformity that results from the harsh collision, it will bounce differently. It has "learned" something. From this analogy, Mr. Garrett suggested that if we are like typical school kids, education bounces off of us without leaving an impression. Which tends to support the idea that we HAVE to discover and confront our own innate and more extreme evils before we can become a better person.

Along the lines of recognizing the evil within ourselves, when the US Army was making its way across Europe in WWII, many German citizens did not realize what was happening in the death camps and refused to believe that Germans could do that. They were appalled when they were brought to the camps to be forced to help bury the bodies of those who didn't make it out alive. They couldn't recognize the evils buried in their society. I know my father-in-law couldn't believe what he saw as his unit liberated more than one camp.

For the curious, Mr. Garrett's description of "education as a collision" was in the novel Unwise Child, published in 1962.

And yes, my first sentence betrays the writer in me who cannot resist a good alliteration.
 

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