For the IAS: How to tell good theory from bad theory?
- We’re flooded with information and the universities are only making it worse: unreadable studies which only function as support for the status quo (see below) *. The decision-making elite doesn’t care if or what you think and the universities keep pumping out decision-makers by the thousands each year. There is literally a population waiting in line to make your decisions for you. Can it not also be said that the IAS wants to think for you?
- Why is it that so much of the work of the IAS is so unconvincing? Perhaps we’ve lost sight of the ability to tell good theory from bad. It is clear that academics suffer from tunnel-vision and there are the formal questions of writing in an academic form, whichever one you use. Perhaps the very form of the essay now renders it useless, unless the essay itself can be redone. This is true for rationalized historical forms that refuse emotion.
- Why is it the IAS hasn’t picked up on the recent ideas in educational presentations, say, from Howard Gardner’s “Multiple Intelligences”? Why write theory to exclude emotion, poem, picture, experience, sound? Why has the IAS no videos? We haven’t kept up with the times. We’ve fallen behind and we can’t admit our techne’ is outdated. Instead, we’re left with silly A-news trolls. How outlandish it is to attempt education! Don’t you think every resource will be required?
- At the opposite extreme is the garbage that stands for avant-garde academia. Hyper-complicated graphing-images with text which is too small to be read with the naked eye. “Specialist-Only” publications which you don’t really need to read because your boss will be reading it ‘for’ you. Hyper-theory which makes no mention of actual people inhabiting cities (again, see below). *
- At the very least, can’t we require that what stands for anarchist theory make connections to a big picture? Must it not include emotion, perception, a sense of history, illustrations, pictures, examples? What about the ‘Grain of the Voice’? We have to find multiple ways to illustrate and present our ideas in order to address enormously complicated issues. Perhaps it is only anarchist, anti-authoritarian, mutual aid which will save the essay and education from the blather of middle class idiots.
- Isn’t it the same to require evolution in education as it is in gender and race?
*Infra Eco Logi Urbanism http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/I/bo21063903.html