Sunday, January 04, 2004

posted by: copernicus on 1/04/2004 02:47:00 AM
If you subscribe to St. Thomas Aquinas' theory of a person being born as a blank slate (a blank piece of paper in modern terms), with each learning experience being written on it until its as full as you can make it before you die, then you wouldn’t want to waste any space.

It looks like each generation is able to fit more in their page than the generation before.

Each generation learns lessons a little sooner than their parents, thus more room at the end of the page to go farther than and fit more in than their parents did.

I wish I could speak 5 languages, and if someone had sat me down and started teaching me when I was 4 it would have been easy.

The brain is a sponge that soaks up the most when it is new and dry. The more that it accumulates, the slower it soaks up more.

But when it first gets wet, it can memorize and recite every dinosaur in the book, or teach you to use a computer, or learn 5 languages.

Most children’s brains are spoon-fed, and made quiet when asking crucial questions with convenient lies of fairies, magic bunnies, fat men with reindeer, and fantastic stories of magic, singing purple dinosaurs, and antique, outdated, manipulative, mind-shackling religions.

Children should be given a “No Bullshit Smorgasbord” (or a “Naked Lunch” as Burroughs said) and set loose to eat with their hands.

People can be born with genius intellect, but it has to be fed and watered while it’s small and weak or it withers, starves and fossilizes.

I’ve met hundreds of people who were malnourished as children.