As one of those few thousand physics undergrads, and a one-time high school science teacher, I gotta tell ya... the situation David Goodstein disingenuously laments in the article is as old as education in America. The boohoo about all the lost talent emerges on at least a yearly basis.
There's nothing that can be done about it. The author describes part of the problem when he talks about "mining" people.... "searching for diamonds in the rough that can be cleaned and cut and polished". This is how many educators see students... as potential resources... some of whom pass teacher's highly personal assays of potential, the rest of whom are just dregs, drones fit for the grain mills and the heavy equipment repair shops and retail clerking.
The whole idea of "shaping" people to realize a "potential" is a wrong-headed remnant of 19th century thought, manipulated into utilitarian modes by German psychologists. Until we fully admit that we don't know what genius is, or where it comes from, and that we can't spot it, many of the Al Einsteins will be missed. (See any Einstein biography to see how most of his teachers missed the boat... and Einstein's assessment of education.) But I'm not concerned about the Einsteins... they can fend for themselves.
Everyone who can listen and talk is capable of learning, on their own, all of the grammatical and syntactical complexities of modern speech. Yet our institutions treat them like idiots, or at best sow's ears. They still babble about the value of IQ tests, Miller Analogies and SAT's. Find an experienced educator on the right day, and they'll admit that hese highly-touted measures are as myopic as they are worthless. But... everyone has learned to keep mum about it. It's the system.
Until we recognize that most people have a unique kind of genius deserving of nurture, and not just those we can "shape" into science students, or other "desireable professionals", we won't create the kind of schools we need. Schools that help every individual to realize their own potential... instead of being "mined", "shaped" and "molded" by well-meaning teachers serving industrial paradigms who have no idea of self-fulfilling education. Schools that are shaped not to meet the needs of state and industry but the inherent genius of all individual human beings.
Ah, but who would finance such schools? that don't cater to business, government, or Big Science? There's the rub. Because it's not about people, really, is it? but about Utilitarian schemes and "Human Resources."
No one knows what education is. No one knows what really works. Teacher education courses, however well-intended, are a joke. (I have the experience to back up that statement.) A great deal of educational research is ignored by institutions that are, after all, doing exactly what they were designed and intended to do. Crank out spare parts.
Don't expect that to change.
Goodstein sartorially opines that "Our elementary school teachers are therefore not only ignorant of science; they are hostile to science."
Perhaps. But then, our college professors are not only ignorant about education, they are hostile to education. They pass this dreary duty on to underlings (who often haven't yet mastered English speech themselves) while they pursue grants and "important research". Since they are paid much more than elementary teachers, perhaps they should clean up the mire of their own act before complaining about the beknighted elementaries. Alas, they benefit quite nicely from things just the way they are. They don't have much motivation to do anything about the status quo.
The "ignorant" elementary school teachers (who spend most of their harried, overcrowded, crammed, underpaid days nurturing far more important human features than scientific literacy) are aware of how highly college educators are valued in comparison to what they do.
Goodstein! WHO WILL GIVE elementary and secondary educators THE TIME to become 'scientific literates'?? School boards? Hardly. It ain't in the cards.
Same old song and dance. Blame-passing for a while, then life goes on as usual.
Had Darwin recanted "on his deathbed", that would not be astonishing... but then, that isn't exactly the most mentally stable time of life, is it?
No doubt there are those who dislike the fact that Darwin ever existed, but to make up pernicious lies in the service of deliberate ignorance is despicable.
Premise: In order to create a future economy in which more independent individuals can "think for a living," it's important to have some legal protection of intellectual property
To what extent can this premise co-exist with the Open Licensing ideal? What legal framework can foster income from individual intellectual craftsmanship, and simultaneously provide for community-enriching efforts?
If anything is going to happen, it's going to happen due to action from the musicians themselves. They're the ones who are directly affected by the industry's ways. They're the ones getting pennies on the dollar. Exactly. But until the computing/networking community creates a collection mechanism that musicians can live with (and for many, credit cards ain't it), it ain't gonna happen.
Some point to mp3.com or riffage.com or any of the rest of these online proto-record companies... offering to take 50 percent just to provide a server and a domain name... and say that's a solution, but in the long run it isn't, because it just leads back to the same dependence on a big brother. Sure, some people are happy for the exposure... but that isn't going to cut it in the major leagues.
Music has been like baseball used to be, rich owners, poor players.... and a lot of people complained when baseball players started making good money.
Today's musician, like any other modern entrepeneur, wants to control his work, and hire the help she needs. We're way past the "record companies are bad" thing, which was all decided 25 years ago in the punk era... it's just self-evident. Want to see a model for the new age of self-distribution, fan-base building, making the music you want, and making a living? look at Fugazi.
It's good to see the discussion of this topic finally getting down to what it's about. The music comes from the artists, and the artists need a working solution to escape the majors. If you want to see the dinosaurs get extinct, and get the music you want at the price you want, put on your thinking caps and invent a secure means of distribution that gets dollars to the artists, which they control. If you're just inventing a new kind of record company, then step down, 'cause they won't get fooled again.
most programmers writing Open Source... don't expect any other sort of return.... Most musicians actually feel the same way, they just want to be appreciated. At least until they "hit it big" or whatever.
I keep seeing this interesting perspective of what most musicians expect expressed on this site. Trouble is, it ain't so.... at least, for musicians of the caliber that most Napster users are hungry for... or of the caliber you'd pay $16 a CD for.
Expectations for professional musicians have changed a lot since Grandpa sat around the cracker barrel pickin his banjo. Inconceivably, they expect to be compensated. If they don't, they're probably amiable amateurs. The starving artist stereotype belongs in the last century.
The kind of equipment and talent it takes to compose, play and produce a high-quality album doens't come cheap. Sure, there are a lot of musicians who fit into your category of "just wanting to be appreciated", but they are probably not doing much cutting-edge composing, and they are not recording in $100/hour studios.
When I hear the "most musicians feel the same way" mantra repeated, I'm always suspicious of how many musicians the person knows, and how dedicated those musicians are to the pursuit of excellence. I'd guess that this comfortable misconception is motivated by a lack of desire to see people get what they've got coming.... the same kind of bourgeois attitude toward musicians that plagued Beethoven and Mozart two centuries ago.
Instead of sitting in your pearly white ivory tower on slashdot, and instead of preaching to the world about how things should be, why don't you actually act on it and show the world it can be done?
Wait a minute! Is this what you're going to say to musicians who are getting ripped off by either music industry freeloaders or online freeloaders? I thought *you guys* were the computer/networking experts.
Rhetorical question alert If programmers and networkers had gotten off their dead ass and provided a viable online exchange medium, because... oh I dunno, they wanted to see people being compensated... Katz would have a mechanism to offer his work. Hasn't it been the people who created cyberspace who've sat in their ivory towers, perfectly content to collect their wages, who've scarcely lifted a finger to make online commerce tractable??? I mean... credit cards? How establishment is that? What a freaking hoot.
This all goes back to Nelson's Xanadu... Nelson saw clearly what was needed to avoid this mess...
Re:None, because Napster fucked it up for everyone
on
Helping Artists Online
·
· Score: 1
Why would anyone use a client that charged money per download when a free alternative exists?
Real simple answer: because if the artist doesn't get paid for making music, the artist can't afford/will refuse to make music.
This leaves out the simple economic realization that when you add value to your culture... just as you believe you do in your daily work... you deserve to receive compensation. That is at essence an ethical consideration, a concept which is probably too advanced for many who "want free music." You could be coerced to do what you do, and forced to live in your van down by the river. Slavery will always be an attractive concept to slaveowner types, who also love the idea of something for nothing, and the idea of an underclass.
The right to compensation for your labor... so fundamentally a part of any social structure... is something that most people will recognize... and they will try to see to it that the thieves... those who prefer to steal rather than labor... will be terminated with extreme prejudice.
We're simply talking about the difference between a cooperative society and a world full of brigands. Your stated question leads us back into the middle ages. If a short, nasty, brutish life is what you're eager for, you're decidedly in the minority.
Slashdot Mirror
As one of those few thousand physics undergrads, and a one-time high school science teacher, I gotta tell ya... the situation David Goodstein disingenuously laments in the article is as old as education in America. The boohoo about all the lost talent emerges on at least a yearly basis.
... some of whom pass teacher's highly personal assays of potential, the rest of whom are just dregs, drones fit for the grain mills and the heavy equipment repair shops and retail clerking.
... instead of being "mined", "shaped" and "molded" by well-meaning teachers serving industrial paradigms who have no idea of self-fulfilling education. Schools that are shaped not to meet the needs of state and industry but the inherent genius of all individual human beings.
There's nothing that can be done about it. The author describes part of the problem when he talks about "mining" people.... "searching for diamonds in the rough that can be cleaned and cut and polished". This is how many educators see students... as potential resources
The whole idea of "shaping" people to realize a "potential" is a wrong-headed remnant of 19th century thought, manipulated into utilitarian modes by German psychologists. Until we fully admit that we don't know what genius is, or where it comes from, and that we can't spot it, many of the Al Einsteins will be missed. (See any Einstein biography to see how most of his teachers missed the boat... and Einstein's assessment of education.) But I'm not concerned about the Einsteins... they can fend for themselves.
Everyone who can listen and talk is capable of learning, on their own, all of the grammatical and syntactical complexities of modern speech. Yet our institutions treat them like idiots, or at best sow's ears. They still babble about the value of IQ tests, Miller Analogies and SAT's. Find an experienced educator on the right day, and they'll admit that hese highly-touted measures are as myopic as they are worthless. But... everyone has learned to keep mum about it. It's the system.
Until we recognize that most people have a unique kind of genius deserving of nurture, and not just those we can "shape" into science students, or other "desireable professionals", we won't create the kind of schools we need. Schools that help every individual to realize their own potential
Ah, but who would finance such schools? that don't cater to business, government, or Big Science? There's the rub. Because it's not about people, really, is it? but about Utilitarian schemes and "Human Resources."
No one knows what education is. No one knows what really works. Teacher education courses, however well-intended, are a joke. (I have the experience to back up that statement.) A great deal of educational research is ignored by institutions that are, after all, doing exactly what they were designed and intended to do. Crank out spare parts.
Don't expect that to change.
Goodstein sartorially opines that "Our elementary school teachers are therefore not only ignorant of science; they are hostile to science."
Perhaps. But then, our college professors are not only ignorant about education, they are hostile to education. They pass this dreary duty on to underlings (who often haven't yet mastered English speech themselves) while they pursue grants and "important research". Since they are paid much more than elementary teachers, perhaps they should clean up the mire of their own act before complaining about the beknighted elementaries. Alas, they benefit quite nicely from things just the way they are. They don't have much motivation to do anything about the status quo.
The "ignorant" elementary school teachers (who spend most of their harried, overcrowded, crammed, underpaid days nurturing far more important human features than scientific literacy) are aware of how highly college educators are valued in comparison to what they do.
Goodstein! WHO WILL GIVE elementary and secondary educators THE TIME to become 'scientific literates'?? School boards? Hardly. It ain't in the cards.
Same old song and dance. Blame-passing for a while, then life goes on as usual.
Had Darwin recanted "on his deathbed", that would not be astonishing... but then, that isn't exactly the most mentally stable time of life, is it?
No doubt there are those who dislike the fact that Darwin ever existed, but to make up pernicious lies in the service of deliberate ignorance is despicable.
Keep eating those power pills, kiddies, and drive those dinosaurs back to where they once belonged.
All right then. I'll say it.
To what extent can this premise co-exist with the Open Licensing ideal? What legal framework can foster income from individual intellectual craftsmanship, and simultaneously provide for community-enriching efforts?
Some point to mp3.com or riffage.com or any of the rest of these online proto-record companies... offering to take 50 percent just to provide a server and a domain name... and say that's a solution, but in the long run it isn't, because it just leads back to the same dependence on a big brother. Sure, some people are happy for the exposure... but that isn't going to cut it in the major leagues.
Music has been like baseball used to be, rich owners, poor players.... and a lot of people complained when baseball players started making good money.
Today's musician, like any other modern entrepeneur, wants to control his work, and hire the help she needs. We're way past the "record companies are bad" thing, which was all decided 25 years ago in the punk era... it's just self-evident. Want to see a model for the new age of self-distribution, fan-base building, making the music you want, and making a living? look at Fugazi.
It's good to see the discussion of this topic finally getting down to what it's about. The music comes from the artists, and the artists need a working solution to escape the majors. If you want to see the dinosaurs get extinct, and get the music you want at the price you want, put on your thinking caps and invent a secure means of distribution that gets dollars to the artists, which they control. If you're just inventing a new kind of record company, then step down, 'cause they won't get fooled again.
I keep seeing this interesting perspective of what most musicians expect expressed on this site. Trouble is, it ain't so.... at least, for musicians of the caliber that most Napster users are hungry for... or of the caliber you'd pay $16 a CD for.
Expectations for professional musicians have changed a lot since Grandpa sat around the cracker barrel pickin his banjo. Inconceivably, they expect to be compensated. If they don't, they're probably amiable amateurs. The starving artist stereotype belongs in the last century.
The kind of equipment and talent it takes to compose, play and produce a high-quality album doens't come cheap. Sure, there are a lot of musicians who fit into your category of "just wanting to be appreciated", but they are probably not doing much cutting-edge composing, and they are not recording in $100/hour studios.
When I hear the "most musicians feel the same way" mantra repeated, I'm always suspicious of how many musicians the person knows, and how dedicated those musicians are to the pursuit of excellence. I'd guess that this comfortable misconception is motivated by a lack of desire to see people get what they've got coming.... the same kind of bourgeois attitude toward musicians that plagued Beethoven and Mozart two centuries ago.
Wait a minute! Is this what you're going to say to musicians who are getting ripped off by either music industry freeloaders or online freeloaders? I thought *you guys* were the computer/networking experts.
Rhetorical question alert ... oh I dunno, they wanted to see people being compensated ... Katz would have a mechanism to offer his work. ... credit cards? How establishment is that? What a freaking hoot.
If programmers and networkers had gotten off their dead ass and provided a viable online exchange medium, because
Hasn't it been the people who created cyberspace who've sat in their ivory towers, perfectly content to collect their wages, who've scarcely lifted a finger to make online commerce tractable???
I mean
This all goes back to Nelson's Xanadu... Nelson saw clearly what was needed to avoid this mess...
Real simple answer: because if the artist doesn't get paid for making music, the artist can't afford/will refuse to make music.
This leaves out the simple economic realization that when you add value to your culture... just as you believe you do in your daily work... you deserve to receive compensation. That is at essence an ethical consideration, a concept which is probably too advanced for many who "want free music." You could be coerced to do what you do, and forced to live in your van down by the river. Slavery will always be an attractive concept to slaveowner types, who also love the idea of something for nothing, and the idea of an underclass.
The right to compensation for your labor... so fundamentally a part of any social structure... is something that most people will recognize... and they will try to see to it that the thieves... those who prefer to steal rather than labor... will be terminated with extreme prejudice.
We're simply talking about the difference between a cooperative society and a world full of brigands. Your stated question leads us back into the middle ages. If a short, nasty, brutish life is what you're eager for, you're decidedly in the minority.