A Second Reading
1. I’ll have to say that I didn’t recognize any real progress of thought. It seemed like Percy gave a central idea and built around that with different examples. In the case of the tourists at the Grand Canyon the idea was to recover the beauty of the canyon and to feel what it is like to discover this great thing as if you were the first to see it. With that he gives four examples or ways to go about recovering this feeling. In the example of the student disecting a dogfish in lab or reading Shakespeare and being compared to someone who randomly stumbles upon both, he tells about how the individual who finds these things in “the wild” so to speak, will learn a great amount more than the student. Percy says that the way the information is presented to the student, in its “educational package,” make it harder to learn from it. The student is almost forced to learn what they are supposed to learn without exploring outside of the cirriculum. These examples are much different than the recovering of the Grand Canyon but the idea of discovery remains important in each circumstance.
2. The talk of loss in this essay is important and I think it’s Percy’s main point that he is trying to make. The loss of the creature does exist in the case of the Grand Canyon. There is definitely something missing when you go through the system: the tour, the cameras, the “beaten track.” But Cardenas had “it,” whatever “it” is, and thats wut made the creature his and only his. The sight of the Grand Canyon was probably so breathtaking that he would not have been able to say “I claim this for my queen” or any of those cliche things that they say in the movies. He says in the essay that we lose our sovereignty to the experts, the ones we trust to tell us if what we experienced was genuine. We sacrifice sovereignty on purpose, so that we don’t know what we want to know, giving us a sense of ignorance and dependence on those “experts.”
prof Groom said,
September 11, 2006 at 5:31 pm
Jake,
Nice readings – this surrender of sovereignty is what leads to the division Cesar talks about in his blog – the consumer and the expert. Why might such a division be understood as a loss? I really enjoyed your reading of the “educational package”; I’ll talk more about your discussion here today in class.
mikebrouillette52 said,
September 11, 2006 at 10:09 pm
I agree with you blog on loss. We sacrifice it all to the experts and gain a sense of knowledge that is taught, not learned. This almost answers Professor Groom’s question that he posed, but not totally.
Kristin Gauta said,
September 11, 2006 at 10:10 pm
I liked how you said that people surrender their own thoughts to the experts. You also described Percy’s ideas very well by using examples from the reading.
kwadkins said,
September 11, 2006 at 10:14 pm
I liked your idea of discovery in you answer for the first question. It seems that you understood the point that Percy was trying to make with the examples of tourists and students.