C-52. Preparedness

Be prepared! Yes, there is obvious risk in not being prepared (C-50). But that might be taken solely for this or that situational problem (I: Psit) that might arise, to the neglect (XI) of the behavioral problem (I:Pbeh) – forceful though the latter be (C-41). And the risk in overlooking the behavioral problem is far greater. So….

Be preparing! Develop capabilities (V), because preparedness is what development is all about. Become more consequential, by increasing your materiality (App. XI) – your “consciousness” if that is what a more material minding capability is talking about (It is, isn’t it?). Courage and effort (VI) can add capabilities to the capacities available. The omnipresent risk entailed by the Nature of Things and its behavioral problem for behavioral entities need not be responded to by withdrawal, whether from the particular situation or from behavior more generally.

(Note some alternative avenues taken: Habit, ritual, follower, routine, rote, “shyness” and reticence, hegemony, stability [stable equilibrium rather than neutral equilibrium], etc. All of which are dubious tributes to the force of the behavioral problem.)

Of the capabilities to be developed, concentrate on those most material, those involved in composing (C-47), such as minding’s use of cognition and communication for pointed questioning (X; App. III), and for imagining to bring more of the future into the present – where preparedness is doubly relevant, as anticipation and as effort, so that our future becomes more one of positive compositional change than of passive circumstantial change(II).The humanist’s horizon is not just physical; it is material and more consequential for being so (App. VIII, App. XI).

Education, as preparedness via development (Do either teachers or students get a course in development?), must do much more about compositional capability, and more than its fragmented (non-developmental) approach with the overemphases on learning relative to knowing and on the elementary relative to the basic (XI; App. IV) – and, most egregiously, its concern for behavior narrowly focused on deportment and industry. (See App. V [Health] re “life system” vs. “death system”; also App. XI re CEM=positivism.)

Compositional development should not be insulted or injured by a limiting focus on the so-called “fine arts.” Composing is essential to enhanced knowing (IX), for what cannot be essayed cannot be assayed. Composing as capability (V) – art in its most basic and general sense – is the leverage for D&R (development and research; see App. XII), the productive complement to research and development. (The latter being limited to the ordered after the fact while the former addresses ordering before the fact.)

Infants look to see what happens when they do something. And then when they do it again … and again. Later they will want to act like grownups – when they are not still doing something again and again to get (at least) attention. Adolescents want to try things. Children as they develop are into knowing as their developmental meta-strategy. But their parents? Their schools? They find learning’s instructional aspect irresistible. Can a more artistic (i.e., compositional) home and curriculum advance their knowledge and their development?

Education’s “liberal arts” serve as a general foundation for its advanced contribution to development. But, as skills, they are not as general re needed capability as they might be and ought to be. They owe more to past behavioral solutions than they do to a realization of the behavioral problem (I). In development, strength is the point. Weakness breeds dysfunction.

(c) 2012 R.F. Carter
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