> No major mind damage is going to be done by a different presentation. > > But I would like to disassociate the notion of geometry and the regularity > of forms as completely and as early as possible. And this is where I seem > to be most non-Fullerian. > > Art >
Not claiming to follow, but yes, we appear to diverge here. The thing is, we don't disassociate "playing with blocks" from architecture, and by extension from geometry, at all, in current childhood education. We most intimately link a rectilinear format, with various cylinders, cones and balls, into the young (very young) imagination. Cubes are both prevalent and regular, without any doing from me. So Fuller's innovation is *not* with respect to linking shapes and geometry early (regular shapes included, in the form of blocks, toys using them), but in the particular assortment of shapes and their canonical relationships. It's much more 60 degree than we're used to (what with all the equiangular triangles everywhere), from a classical western perspective, which is more 90 degree, more into post and lintel perpendicularity. So where I think Fuller and our concentric hierarchy challenges the status quo is in the manifest non-rectilinearity of this approach (NOT that this conflicts with Euclid in any way -- it really doesn't, except when we get into abstruse territory, such as absolute and infinite continua versus discrete and definite manifolds and such (analog vs. discrete stuff)). My view is he went up against a huge bias, but since he based himself outside of academia, in a sort of business world place, it wasn't like he could be shut out of the game. He was independently capable of mobilizing a large network. This has relevance in that a lot of what we call the open source movement may be traced to his anticipatory design science revolution concepts of the 1970s and 80s. Engineering and a focus on artifacts trumps political efforts to block basic innovations in math teaching. There's really no stopping us, politically speaking (because we really don't care about politics that much (like, we're popular already)). Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig