From: mvij@ocf.berkeley.edu (Manish Vij)
Newsgroups: alt.culture.us.asian-indian
Subject: Re: Interracial Dating, ABCD's, and Dissension
Date: 26 Jan 1993 08:40:30 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley Open Computing Facility
NNTP-Posting-Host: tsunami.berkeley.edu

Rakesh R. Patel writes:

>There is no school like the School of Hard Knocks.

The school of hard knocks is great for teaching you how to survive.  It
will embitter you, harden your heart, close your mind, and yes, protect
you.  Precisely the opposite of my ideal human being.  This school will
teach day-to-day life, not ideals.  I cherish my ideals even as I ignore
them temporarily while not being able to carry them out: Simon &
Garfunkel had a great line,

    And every dream comes back to me
    In shades of mediocrity...

Practicality will get you far, but ideals point the way.

>I love the arrogance that education is the silver bullet ot all our
>problems. If education is so wonderful, how come the West had brought upon
>the world, World War I, World War II, the Cold War, etc. I think you
>would agree that the West is on average, the most educated.

First of all, whether the West has brought wars upon a passive world is
questionable.  Japan was involved in WWII, and the USSR in the Cold War.
Yes, the more so-called educated nations wrought these wars, but that
is because they had more advanced war-making technologies.

Which leads me to the basic point: technology/skill is not wisdom.
The U.S. circa 1950 was mired in McCarthyism, racism, and sexism to
an extent much greater than today.  The mere fact of industrial
sophistication did not mean people moved forward.

Say we avoid the word education because it seems ambiguous.  Call it
wisdom.  You seem to be uncomfortable with things not hard and fast.  That
is typical for an engineer :-).  Wise people coexist in peace.  Let me
leave it at that most basic level.  This requires tolerance, which requires
understanding, which requires open-mindedness, which requires humanistic
(not skills) education to undo the prejudices inculcated in people by
those around them. 

You say:

>I don't think anyone has to be taught equality of man. It is just an innate
>feeling. If one has to be taught equality, what a shame.

Bullshit.  I would never have suspected such idealism from you.

If children were left alone, fine.  But children are taught
prejudices and intolerance.  Teaching equality is an unteaching of unreasoning
hatreds.

In the 1930s, Southern whites were saying, 'I don't think anyone has to
be taught that blacks are inferior.  It is just obvious.'

>I don't have to anything about Hegelian philosphy to lead a honorable
>existence. It is the height of arrogance to assume that only liberal arts
>students are supposedly "educated" and I am uneducated if I haven't read
>about the 100 Years War, or some author deemed by some university as been
>so wonderful.

Listen to what I am saying.  I never said only liberal arts students are
educated.  If solidly math/science students learn other than math/science
on their own, they too are educated.

I never said you necessarily have to read about the 100 Years War, or
Shakespeare, or any of a list of literature by dead white males.  I have
no ethnocentric core courses.

I am saying that people who do not learn any human-ness, whether in class
or out of class, are uneducated, because the non-human subjects are skills.
That is a definition.  You may disagree with the definition, but I would
love to see you prove that the study of history is a skill while the study
of IC design is a wisdom.

It has been a pleasure dealing with the open-minded people I have met, and
a pain in the ass dealing with the close-minded ones.  The open-minded
ones did not necessarily have any formal ... oops, that word again --
education.  And I DO think the world would be ten times better if people
were wiser and more open-minded.

>>I don't buy that 'every culture is entirely correct in its own way and must
>>be insulated from others' BS.  Indian culture can benefit from its contact
>>with American culture, and vice versa.  I personally am trying to pick the
>>best things from both cultures.

>Sounds like something I heare on StarTrek. :)

:-)  Not at all.  If you had been on this newsgroup last summer, that was
the major thread.  It is day to day life, not some weird mumbo-jumbo.

By the way, if you EVEN try to classify me as a long-haired Cal dreamer,
you can take my PRACTICAL BS-and-MBA short-hair-required application software
business-in-two-years and shove it down your throat.

Manish