Thursday, May 6, 2010

baby morality

Do babies have morality? It seems they start not as an empty leave. In this research children react on puppets that act 'naughty'. They realize this. This would mean it is possible to inherit morality either through genetics, or through the soul or both. Parenting is then more fixing mistakes and changing pathways than really building from scratch. This means children can turn out good without good parenting, or bad without bad parenting. This means excellent parents can have morally challenging children, as indeed happens, and the worst parents can have morally excellent children.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

not knowledge but wisdom

We should be more interested in wisdom than knowledge. But how to teach wisdom in children. Logical thinking, knowing the difference between true and untrue seems a good start. Then it becomes difficult because virtues are dependent on value systems that may vary according to background. Although I think you can translate concepts of value systems and find out there is some accord possible between different value systems. We can agree to believe in laws of nature, in the good of a social system, in the necessity of a law system, in good and wrong although we may differ in detail which makes the world so interestingly diverse. How to teach wisdom according to differences? It is not impossible. A 'tour d'horizon'? Discuss virtues? Teach tools? Are there wisdom tools? Being able to listen to each other seems very important.
Understanding language rather than focussing on how it's written. Maybe we should define limits, in order to be able to keep your own value system but still develop a common wisdom with limits for the teacher as well. Difficult.

*new* item at Chez Odile is the metachat where Creatives and Thinkers meet.

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