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Re: Doctrine is not necessarily truth or even really useful.  
Re: Doctrine is not necessarily truth or even really useful. -- DWA Post Reply Top of the thread Forum
Posted by: Angus Cunningham
07/19/2008, 22:00:57

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I raised the question not expecting an answer, DWA, because I sense there is no word yet for one of the activities I feel is underbudgeted in school life -- free-form com-munication with a wise and sensitive adult. Most of what is scheduled in schools is indoctrination, I sense, although much must be different from the English private school environment of my youth, which is basically all I authentically know about schools!

I think the lack of such a word is partly why I grew up unaware of the difference between language, articulation, and communication and why I had so much difficulty understanding the principle of reciprocity in communication. I understood very early the principle of reciprocity in material exchanges, but for a reason I believe is at least partly connected with the lack of the word my question sought, I did not understand the principle of reciprocity in non-material communication until quite late in life.

But for all my ranting on this subject, I do today feel everlastingly grateful to my Latin masters; we did not call them teachers, and frankly now that I think about it, I don't think they often, if ever, used the word "teach", so how they described in the masters' common room what they were doing I don't actually know. Although no one could in those days convince me Latin could ever be useful to me, somehow I found my Latin lessons fun, which empowered me painlessly to learn grammar and its value to both clarity and individuation and also empowered me to have a pretty accurate intuitive sense of what I might expect Latin-derived words in Western European languages to mean in English.

Ille deus pugnas amat effusumque cruorem.


Angus Cunningham

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