From “The Open Society and Its Enemies”, Volume 1, Chapter 7, Section V:
“Institutions for the selection of the outstanding can hardly be devised. Institutional selection may work well for such purposes as Plato had in mind, namely for arresting change. But it will never work well if we demand more than that, for it will always tend to eliminate initiative and originality, and, more generally, qualities that are original and unexpected. … [This is] a criticism of the tendency to burden institutions with the impossible task of selecting the best. This should never be made their task. This tendency transforms our educational system into a race-course, and turns a course of studies into a hurdle-race. Instead of encouraging the student to devote himself to studying for the sake of studying, instead of encouraging in him a real love for his subject and for inquiry, he is encouraged to study for the sake of his personal career; he is led to acquire only such knowledge as is serviceable for getting him over the hurdles that he must clear for the sake of his advancement. In other words, even in the field of science, our methods are based upon an appeal to personal ambition of a somewhat crude form. (It is a natural reaction to this appeal if an eager student is looked upon with suspicion by his colleagues.) The impossible demand for an institutional selection of our intellectual leaders endangers the life not only of science, but of intelligence.
“It has been said, only too truly, that Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and our universities. I do not know a better argument for the optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them. In spite of the treachery of so many of their leaders, there are quite a number, old as well as young, who are decent, and intelligent, and devoted to their task. ‘I sometimes wonder how it was that the mischief done was not more clearly perceptible,’ says Samuel Butler, ‘ and that the young men and women grew up as sensibly and goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost deliberately made to warp and stunt their growth. Some doubtless received damage from which they suffered to their life’s end; but many seemed little or none the worse, and some almost the better. The reason would be that the natural instinct of the lads in most cases so absolutely rebelled against their training, that do what the teachers might they could never get them to pay serious heed to it.'”
Popper had a lot of interesting things to say about education, scattered through his works, especially the OSE. This is a consolidated list of comments and statements. http://www.the-rathouse.com/RC_PopperEdu.html
A slight tangent, but interesting nonetheless. It is interesting how Karl Popper seems to be popular everywhere, but academic philosophy. Indeed, in my class on the philosophy of science, the professor dedicated only two classes in an entire semester to study the “falsificationism” of Karl Popper. Carnap and Hempel, two rather uninspiring philosophers who have provided little light to their subjects, were both given more attention. However, outside of professional academia, I have always found individuals to be far more receptive to Popper’s philosophy, especially on the topic of conjectural knowledge.
I have begun to theorize that this is because academia, and university schooling often does not regard truth as the end to be sought after, but rather attempts to solve problems that are contained in a discourse of literature. Whether a is does not matter as much as what Carnap said about a compared to what Hempel has. Those outside of academia are far more receptive to simply deciding the worth of ideas simply based on their truth-value without needing to define the problem with respect to the literature on it.
A nice point! What have the tens of thousands of unoriginal and uncritical philosophers got to talk about except what X, Y and Z said about a?
Let “a” be the inductive method of science. Then in the light of what Popper said about a, whatever Carnap and Hempel said about a has little interest, except as a part of the history of ideas that were superseded by the advance of knowledge.
@hsearles I believe one of the reasons Popper is so well-received outside academic environments must be his writing style. Not just the “stylistics” of it, which is arguably “un-academic”, but the conjecture-and-refutation style of presenting new ideas. I think it’s fair to say that even The Logic of Scientific Discovery, a more technical work, is at least in this sense “approachable”.
@Rafe: Nevertheless, I think your rhetorical question is misplaced. To me, such questions seem dangerously close to the idea that reading the relevant literature in the field is something one can escape. Moreover, if one stumbles upon an original philosophy (such as Popper’s), and if it, the original philosophy, is capable of some degree of independence, then bye-bye Mr. Rest of the Field! This, I believe, it’s wrong. You can read acres and acres of Popper; if you’re not aware of what is he responding to and not aware of what has been responded to him – hardly can be said that you are indeed “aware” of Popper’s place in the field. Of course, this is not just about Popper. It’s more like a general price scholars have to pay.
Argumentics, I must disagree with you on both points.
I have found Popper’s writing style to be more harder to read, in a stylistic sense, than any other philosopher of science I have read (the list includes Carnap, Goodman, Hempel, Kuhn, and Salmon, if you are curious). But, what makes Popper easier to finish is the fact that his works, with the exception of _The Logic of Scientific_ and maybe some others, are the wide breadth of his thought. The ways that he analyzes scientific knowledge is applied to other fields like biology and politics in ways that draw the reader into the philosophy by showing its conclusions on a wide scale. Popper is not simply a philosophy of science, he is a philosopher in the truest sense of the word, and that’s what makes him easier to sit through. All too often studying what has been said about the debate becomes not only
While I would certainly agree that just because Popper’s theories are better than those of Carnap and Hempel is not a justifying reason for not know what the two said, I think that you seem to miss what Rafe was suggesting above. At least to me, what Rafe was attacking, as suggested by me, was not the fact that scholars study what X, Y, and Z said about a in order to gain a greater appreciation of the debate, but rather scholars not looking beyond what has been said hitherto, and realizing that a debate includes more than just what has been said up to a point, it also includes the problem to be solved.
Linking this with the above quote, the current system of tertiary education is a breeding ground for the abuse of this focus of merely secondary sources. Among the factors must be the fact that not only do most students care less about the material, but also the fact that , in order to maintain their academic positions, professors are in a publishing industry, and a basic result of this is far more commentary than actual ideas.
I don’t get it. I think I agree with you, but I’m not quite sure what’s your contention. Are you saying that Popper is easy to read because the same train of thought from LSD is applicable (and applied) to other fields? I don’t get the “wide breadth of thought” expression.
As for the second part, I might have missed Rafe’s point. As you put it, I agree with you.
argumentics,
“You can read acres and acres of Popper; if you’re not aware of what is he responding to and not aware of what has been responded to him – hardly can be said that you are indeed ‘aware’ of Popper’s place in the field.”
From my own studies both outside and inside academia, when confronted with the literature Popper responded to, I’ve been extremely disappointed. It feels, sadly, on the whole irrelevant to whatever philosophical problems are at hand. Or, I should say, their problems are of the kind that I don’t find interesting.
Why continue to work on justifying our preferences after reading David Miller’s work on the insufficiency of sufficient reasons? Why continue to work on the problem of induction when it is neither necessary in the context of discovery nor necessary and sufficient in the context of justification?
I see no reason to be aware of their current status for the same reason I see to spend my time reading recent works of theodicy.
Yes indeed, it is necessary to see how Popper’s work relates to the history of ideas and the contemporary scene. In fairness to myself, I have been reading around the field, on and off, for (say) 40 years and quite a bit of those years have been spent reading Hempel, Carnap, Salmon, Ayer, Russell (especially), Wittgenstein, the Cambridge people, the Oxford people, the US pragmatists, the Dewey email list, the Peirce email list, the Wittgenstein email list etc etc, and also Apel, Habermas, Derrida, Foucault, Paul de Mann and various others in the POMO stable. Consequenty I am prepared to say that the time spent on those folk was practically wasted, in terms of getting on with important problems, except that it qualifies me to say that I have actually been there so I can make an informed comparison of the Critical Rationalists (Popper et al) with the others.