I wrote about the Land Conservation movement a few years back. In light of education reform efforts it’s worth revisiting the senseless contradictions inherent in many debates of this type.
The Land as Place…
The old paradigm has caused a polarity between conservation and development. Therefore developers ‘greenwash’ their plans to appease to conservationists. This becomes a political game.
So we educate learners to become one or the other; a developer or a conservationist. We thereby strengthen the polarization and it becomes a senseless contradiction that has no resolution in and of itself.
Like the cruise control directions to “set your speed a little slower than the person in front of you;” if everyone did this, we would slow all traffic to 35 mph as each repeatedly adjusts their speed downward in reaction to the continually slowing traffic before them. Why 35 mph? Because that is the minimum threshold for operating cruise control. Thus, the dumbing down of the majority, the mediocre mainstream, the leveling of minds to the least common denominator.
What we want adds up to what we don’t want. This is known as the fallacy of composition. Oscar Wilde wrote, » More: Fallacy of Composition: A Senseless Contradiction…
