Hello everyone my name is Christian
Paul Lomeli. I am a third-year transfer student from Pasadena City College.
After learning a little about Charles Percy Snow’s two cultures idea, I feel at
this point in time our educational system has introduced the general basics of
two cultures to all students. Its introduction is beneficial for exposing
different topics to students, but it does have its flaws. It provides a bare minimum
of information to spark an interest in students to pursue one or the other.
From my experience, I do not believe this is a strong structure to guide
students on a career path, because I have had some boring history classes in high
school, but while in college I had great experiences learning about very interesting
history topics that shaped the world we live in today. This course is related
to my academic path by covering topics I enjoy such as art, science, and
technology to help me gain a different perspective. My personal aspirations are
to receive my degree in statistics, and raise a family. Artistically I would
like to dedicate more time playing the guitar and piano.
C.P. Snow places the views from the
two cultures on the opposite side of the spectrum. During the 1950s this scale
seems to fit, as modern technology has still not been introduced to help merge
the two. Communication between these cultures were non-existence, and having no
internet or others way to spread mass communication did not help such as social
media. C.P. Snow did foresee a change coming into place that can bridge them
together and or create a third culture.
The
material to build the bridge foreseen by C.P. Snow is technology. In an article
by Victoria Vesna, she states “The bridge,
in fact, is being triangulated and made more stable with the work of artists
utilizing new technologies, who are in active dialogue with both sides”(page 3).
Modern technology is helping to narrow to gap between the two sides, and with
the two cultures working together it enhances both parties with more advanced
sciences, and continues to explore the deep realm of art.
References
Brockman, John. The Third Culture. N.p.: n.p., 1995. Print.
Snow, C. P. “Two
Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Reading. 1959. New York: Cambridge UP,
1961.
Print.
Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being
in Between.” Leonardo 34.2 (2001): 121-25. Web.
I think it is important that you recognized that the general education classes that we are required to take only "provide a bare minimum of information to spark an interest in students" of subjects that are opposite to whatever field they are majoring in. According to C.P. Snow, this division between either side of campus is due to the structure of academia. Just as "modern technology is helping to narrow the gap between the two sides," I believe that the general eduction curricula should attempt to do this as well, and I think that one step to achieve this would be to introduce majors that are not so black and white (science versus humanities) but rather a blend of the two.
ReplyDeletei also recently in the last year have started to look at traditional schooling for kids to seem problematic. i think for young children all around learning is great to get a strong base for what you might want to study in the future but some of the rules and regulation put on kids aren't real world based rules. i think very strict dress codes for one seem weird, say a child wants to buy and resell ice cream at school to make a slight profit, most to all school would resist this but these model are very important for the bases of starting a business. school should also teach real world problems like how to pay bills, interest rate on credit cards, how to do taxes and so on.
ReplyDeleteI think your hobby for playing music is great. iv seen a lot of art practice recently that falls into the sound healing or called sound baths. these are more eastern practices but essential a person of group of people are put in a special acoustic room or space and different sounds vibrate the body to health or follow the bodies natural processes more efficiently. i can see how the third culture would apply to these kind of practices because a good knowledge of the human body and how sound works and travels is involved in these processes and how they effect each other. The art is captured in the experience and environment or installation of the work, most of these practices would not be performed in a sterile medical setting.