Today is Friday.  Sometimes I am disoriented, unsure if today is Saturday or…  Retirement sometimes has a confusing texture as the structure of the workweek is removed.

I am considering, speculating upon what I would desire if it were possible to be young again, to begin higher education under ideal circumstances.  In hindsight, what would I want?  What approach to a college and graduate level education would serve me best, given my lifetime of experience for reflection?

Later today I want to do my best to collect my thoughts, put them into writing for sharing with a group of friends.  We will compare and contrast our take on “what if I could remake higher education..?” on Tuesday evening of the coming week.

Of course one has to ask if this effort will make any difference?  One never knows what will make a difference, if a tipping point is approaching, or at a far remove.  One has to try.  Ulysses never knew how long it would take to reach his home in Ithaca.  He persevered nevertheless.

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To prepare for assimilating thoughts on my ideal concept of higher education I reviewed words written by philosopher of science, Paul Feyerbend in his work, Against Method.  His words are as follows:

Knowledge…
is not a series of self-consistent theories
that converges towards an ideal view;
it is not a gradual approach to truth.

It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives,
each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth that is part of the collection
forcing the others in greater articulation
and all of them contributing, via this process of competition,
to the development of our consciousness.

Nothing is ever settled,
no view can ever be omitted from a comprehensive account…

Experts and laymen,
professionals and dilettani, truth-freaks and liars –
they all are invited to participate in the contest
and to make their contribution to the enrichment of our culture.

The task of the scientist, however, is no longer ‘to search for the truth’, or ‘to praise god’, or ‘to synthesize observations’, or ‘to improve predictions’.
These are but side effects of an activity
to which his attention is now mainly directed

and which is ‘to make the weaker case the stronger’ as the sophists said,
and thereby to sustain the motion of the whole.”

Excerpt, Against Method by Paul Feyerbend

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How could anyone possibly disagree with the premise that the objective of education is the development of consciousness?  And that the best approach is a methodolical agnosticism?