What ONE thing would you have liked to learn early in life?

TTF

That women are not the sweet little darlings we are generally persuaded to think they are.

I could do a whole year's course on introducing that idea although I will admit that any female executive would probably rush the exit.

So once again we are back to what we posit our ideas on.Are they sweet little darlings or a bunch of devious clever monkeys who can run rings round any bloke who has imbibed the former view with his milk.

My advice is to run single sex courses.And include the best literature in the study program.One could easily discuss Flaubert or Stendahl for a year or even Kingsley Amis or Frank Harris.

Are you really a prof.or is that just a hypothetical for the thread like if I said I was a movie director and was casting Salammbo for a $200m project,which is the minimum I would insist upon.

PS-Would a dream have non-physical components in the brain producing it?

I am not really a prof but I play one on TV.

Yeah, I am really a prof.

Link to the college I teach at:

http://www.cy-faircollege.com/

Link to my open air philosophical discussion forum:

Edit [Moderator]: Personal website removed

We meet twice a month.

TTF

p.s. Mods feel free to delete any of this - I was not trying to advertise - a question was asked and I answered. Sorry if I violated any rules.

No violation TF. I'm not the mod though...

If I would learn something earlier in life, it is both empathy and philosophy. Early in my life I had been taught good and bad in terms of going to heaven or to hell. Empathy was not emphasized when I was a child and I sure would like to have it back then, though I know that I did have empathy back then (such as when I felt pity for an unfortunate cat, or the feeling of pain in my left arm whenever I think about a disfigured person) as all humans do, but without nurturing, it could be left out and I sure would like to have built that principle earlier.

ttf, The one lesson that I wish I had learned earlier in life was the fact that no matter how gloomy one's future seems - especially during our teen years, there is always hope of a good life. I say this because I have seen too often where children commit suicide because they feel their future doesn't hold any promise.

I have always been the black sheep of our family of four. All my siblings did well in grade school, and I barely graduated from high school.

To make a long story short, I volunteered into the US Air Force when I was 21 years old, and after four years got my discharge. I eventually earned a degree in accounting, and have worked most of my short (32 year) career in management positions, and retired at 63.

I married a wonderful, intelligent woman who graduated from high school, nursing school and college with honors, and we reaised two wonderful sons.

I just celebrated my 70th birthday on July 2 with 20 famiily and friends at a local Chinese restaurant.

My three siblings have all done very well. My older brother eventually became an administrative judge in California. My younger brother became an eye surgeon, and is now a legislator in California. My sister is an RN.

But you know what? I think I ended up as the happiest one in our family.

I love travel, and have visited all seven continents. Have flown to the highest point on earth, Mount Everest. Been to the lowest point on earth, the Dead Sea. Been to the southern-most city of the world, Ushuaia. And I have friends all over the world and across the United States.

We must teach our children about hope and dreams, and that the future can indeed be much more than we could ever dream of as a teenager.

TTF: This is actually a tougher topic than one realizes at first blush--most of the important life lessons I wish I had learned at an earlier age I would not have been able to internalize at an earlier age. I, like CI, wish I had learned perspective at a younger age--things aren't always going to be bad and no one knows just what the future holds; however, I could only learn that lesson by personally passing through the storms of adolescence. I wish I had known that the people I loved were merely mortal before witnessing it; this would have saved me from a great deal of shock, but I would never have believed it without personally witnessing it. I wish I had known that people change, sometimes dramatically, before I had experienced it; but before I had experienced it, I would have laughed at the notion that a person's character was anything but permanently fixed.

In terms of what might be incorporated into a college course--the most eye-opening educational experience I had was when I first began to seriously study the structure of society in my introductory sociology class. If I was designing a humanities course trying to encompass the most important general knowledge people could use in their daily lives, I would create a class with a social structure theme. You could incorporate sociology and social philosophy (Marx, C. Wright Mills, Durkheim, Marcuse, Chomsky, etc.--though obviously not all of them), literature dealing with social structure (The Jungle, Woman on the Edge of Time, just about anything by Dickens, etc.), and a historical overview of the evolution of social structure (though this ties in well with the sociological view of social structure).

Wouldn't the crucial point be whether the course is designed to create a happy person or a good citizen.If you try to do both you can easily end up with neither.

I like it fine the way it is, thank you.

BBB
Critical thinking.

Instead of just learning facts and topics required to pass tests (Leave no child behind tests, for example), young students need to learn how to think, not what to think.

Youngsters need to understand how product advertising manipulates them to want things they don't need.

Youngsters need to learn how to peacefully settle disputes and use logical negotiation as a method instead of violence.

Youngsters need to recognize the signs of pedofiles and sexual predators.

Before they are teenagers, they need to understand cults and how to recognize them. I consider cults to include all organized religions.

Students need to learn to recognize the clues that reveal what they love to do, which will to lead them to logical future employment.

Before they are old enough to vote, they need to understand political propaganda and how to recognize it and avoid its manipulation.

Before they old enough to cohabitate, they need to rationally understand the difference between sexual passion and long-lasting love. They also need to understand the prenatal origin of homosexuality and to understand the variety of love that exists among us.

Mainly, they need to learn the skills of critical and logical thinking no matter what future path they may follow.

BBB

That all sounds fine and dandy and could easily be a junior Home Office minister at a party conference.

What a course has to do is explain how these things are done.We already have a good idea of what the aims are and have had for many a long year.Is BBB suggesting that our courses have had contrary aims before this prospectus was composed?

spendius
[quote="spendius"]That all sounds fine and dandy and could easily be a junior Home Office minister at a party conference.

What a course has to do is explain how these things are done.We already have a good idea of what the aims are and have had for many a long year.Is BBB suggesting that our courses have had contrary aims before this prospectus was composed?[/quote]

Before you dump more antagonism on my suggestions, you may want to explore educator's success in teaching these skills. If you examine our current political, religious, social and economic health, you may find that such efforts have largely been failures.

Is it possible that we wait too late in children's lives to teach them critical thinking skills? It's too late to begin such education in college.

BBB

I had a maths teacher at secondary school who once told a pupil: "You won't get far in life by thinking for yourself"...

djbt, I'm more interested to learn why this had an impression on you?

djbt:-

Your maths teacher was a wise man.Maths teachers usually are.

Any sensible person who thought for himself would think "I think I'll sit down (lie down) now."A sensible person thinking for himself would never dream of putting in an 8 hr shift at the coalface/blast furnace/check out/dentist's chair etceteraetceteraetcetera.One would get nowhere in life thinking for oneself but why would anybody thinking for himself want to get anywhere in the first place.Someone who thought for himself wouldn't even know where anywhere was.Such a person would probably be incarcerated in an asylum for his own protection.
Don't you think so?

BBB-I wasn't "pouring antagonism".Most of us share most of your ideals most of the time.What we want for TTF's course is the "how".
I don't agree that our efforts have been failures.They might have been improved maybe but I hardly think failure is appropriate.News media does focus on failures I know but I wouldn't take too much notice of that if I was you.

That you can't control what anyone else does. It would have saved me a lot of tears and heartaches.

BD:-

You are saying there that all the tears and heartache are due to you not knowing that you can't control what other's do.Who would you blame for you not knowing a simple thing like that?If you can identify the culprit then it is there your tears and heartache stem from.

Splen - Don't carpet bomb my thread bro.

Bella - I try to cover this with the Stoics - but Epictetus and Co. can seem very intense and perhaps too Stoic at times.

TF

10 foreign languages. Too hard to learn later in life. Would've opened up tremendous opportunities.

Spendius:


Heh.. This got me thinking about the guy in Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy who built an asylum. He built it with all the walls inside out, so that when you walked into the square you were actually walking out of the asylum. In other words, he built an asylum for the world.

But to answer the question, even though it was not directed at me: No I don't think so. I think the entire reasoning sounds drug induced. If you'd said "any sensible person who thought for himself while on drugs", i'd agree.

TTF:-

I started two threads and both of them have been "carpet bombed" flat many times over.Ever heard me whinge about that?I wouldn't even want to.

You are beginning to sound like a control freak.

I simply answered djbt and Bella and BBB and,I think someplace,4mr Ed.Why am I being singled out?I answered bang on thread at the beginning.Where was your response?Didn't like my idea eh?

It has looked to me lately that the production line at the think factory is designed to produce clones of yourself.Are you a preacher?