32. Does push-pin equal poetry?
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
Philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that if two kids playing hopscotch or push-pin* are gaining as much joy and pleasure as someone reading poetry, they have enjoyed as much utility.
John Stuart Mill took a different approach. He argued, “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”
I’m with Mill on this one. One of the things that school is for is to teach our children to understand and relish the idea of intellectualism, to develop into something more than a purpose-driven tool for the industrial state.
Fortunately for my side of the argument, the economy is now reinforcing this notion. Simple skills and cheap pleasures (bread and circuses) worked for a long time, but they no longer scale to quiet the masses. The basic skills aren’t enough to support the circuses that we’ve been sold.
The fork in this road is ever more pronounced because there’s now so much more to choose from. A citizen can spend his spare time getting smarter, more motivated, and more involved, or he can tune out, drop out, and entertain himself into a stupor. The same devices deliver either or both from the online ether—and the choice that people make is one that’s going to develop early, based on the expectations of our teachers and the standards of our peers.
We can teach kids to engage in poetry, to write poetry, and to demand poetry—or we can take a shortcut and settle for push-pin, YouTube, and LOLcats.
*Push-pin was a truly inane game in which kids would stick pins in a cloth or a hat brim and wrestle to knock one over. A little like Angry Birds, but without batteries.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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