Nowadays, in the United States and Europe, people value making new contributions, uncovering new things, and spreading knowledge. But in the past in Europe and other places, knowledge was often hoarded (the way, say, trade secrets are kept today), and it was about preserving and transmitting that knowledge, unchanged, to the designated elect.
I've been thinking of trained thinking in terms of class as well -- growing up in a place that has long prioritized educating everyone (in order to make democracy work) makes it difficult to get a grasp on what it would mean to have a very small, elite, educated class, which would have been the case for much of history. (Some people would suggest we still have such a thing, of course, but I think you see where I'm headed. The difference between having the majority of the people in your country attend some type of school and having the majority trained in a single trade implies drastically different ways of thinking, and a huge difference in the transmission of information.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-03-27 01:46 am (UTC)I've been thinking of trained thinking in terms of class as well -- growing up in a place that has long prioritized educating everyone (in order to make democracy work) makes it difficult to get a grasp on what it would mean to have a very small, elite, educated class, which would have been the case for much of history. (Some people would suggest we still have such a thing, of course, but I think you see where I'm headed. The difference between having the majority of the people in your country attend some type of school and having the majority trained in a single trade implies drastically different ways of thinking, and a huge difference in the transmission of information.)