Formal education can erode rather than sharpen perception of the natural world
Evidence
A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese. I once knew an educated lady, banded by Phi Beta Kappa, who told me that she had never heard or seen the geese that twice a year proclaim the revolving seasons to her well-insulated roof. Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 83
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces the key Leopoldian contrast between awareness and education that the land ethic depends on.
- ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Grafting & Growth”s stance on attentive engagement and to the observation-as-method thread across all four polyad courses.
- SEED: Angle: an essay on what college curricula train students to trade away — field attentiveness for credentialed substitutes.
- recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
- XREF: connects to: The plant species one notices reveals that person’s ecological education — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 165; Recognition of one’s own sensory ignorance is a condition of learning to observe — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 229; Perception is a portable faculty that formal education and money cannot buy — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 610 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Formal schooling in history and botany does not teach people to see living evidence
#corroborates(0.95) — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 170 - Nature’s misrecognition is socially constructed and socially correctable
#corroborates(0.75) — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 470