Re: Re. Education Philosophy

[Myron Tribus <mtribus@mail.earthlink.net>]

Phil Hoover, Mike Tveite, W Mack, T.Q. Nelson and others have weighed 
in with comments related to our understanding of Dr. Deming's System 
of Profound Knowledge, only peripherally related to the subject line 
in this post!  That's one of the things I like about the DEN.  One 
thread leads to another until it all gets tangled up!

I tend to look at the four components as elements of a structure.  If 
you try to remove one, the others fail in carrying the load.

If I could rename them they would be changed:

Variation
     would become "Uncertainty"   How to acknowledge and deal with it.
Psychology
     would become "Human Behavior"  Allowing for and understanding how 
people react singly and in groups.
Systems
     would remain unchanged
Theory of Knowledge
     would become "Epistemology"   The mental processes that help us 
to understand what we know and how we think we know it.

These elements support one another.  The study of uncertainty leads 
not only to decision making, statistics, and variability, but also to 
a need to understand values and how our values determine what we 
decide to measure, study and control.

The study of psychology leads us to understand (a little) why we feel 
a need for statistical reasoning, how uncertainty influences us and 
how we relate to epistemological questions.

I could go on, but I think my point is reasonably clear.  Of course 
we can study the individual elements. But when we attempt to make a 
thoughtful application, we shall be drawn into the need for all four 
components.

The approach based upon breaking of up knowledge into components for 
ease of study is called "academic".  It is a powerful method, but it 
has drawbacks when one attempts to reassemble the results and take an 
action.  This is why the word "academic" is often used in a 
pejorative sense!  As a recovering academic, who has had to deal with 
the "real" world, I understand this first hand.  Life is not 
organized according to the academic disciplines or any other 
disciplines, for that matter.

Myron Tribus,  350 Britto Terrace,  Fremont, CA 94539
Ph:510 651 3641  Fax: 510 656 9875   e-mail: mtribus@earthlink.net
We urge the rich to work harder by giving them more and the poor to 
work harder by giving them less.  Is this not like awarding more 
money to schools who succeed and taking away from those who do not?
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