3 ms·
Maybe people are saying that feelings don't matter, but a more interesting argument is that they're a sensation and it's misguided to assign them intrinsic mora
by ben509 9y ago
Maybe people are saying that feelings don't matter, but a more interesting argument is that they're a sensation and it's misguided to assign them intrinsic moral import. In particular, it's unworkable to claim that if someone's feelings are hurt that another person has to modify their behavior, simply because feelings are entirely capricious.
The analogy I've often used is the feeling of being cold: that you feel cold is simply a perception generated by nerve endings. It really is just in your head, but at the same time it's in your head for a reason. (In the case of cold, not dying of exposure is a fairly dramatic reason, and you might lose your job if you ignored social feelings.) So just as you would neither ignore nor get worked up over feeling cold and would just put on a jacket, often social feelings of offense and the like have some fairly practical solutions that are more obvious if you avoid moralizing them.
So if kids were writing about feelings to recognize and solve problems, that would be helpful, but if it's just navel gazing, it's probably a waste of time.
- rrauenza 9y agoExactly - more importantly this is preparation for college or workforce. Your college professor or boss doesn’t care that you feel that Hemingway or Java is XYZ - they want reasons. There was a trend/fad to get kids to write by encouraging navel gazing. My son recently had an assignment like this for Homer’s Oddysey. The writing assignment requested he write a response to The Beggar and His Faithful Dog. It asked for something that was hidden in his life that no one knew about. This is a literature class not creative writing. My wife’s response was that besides being inappropriate, this isn’t even the lesson / point of the beggar and the faithful dog! Her response: >The last prompt has stymied us. Why would a teen want to write, on paper, to their teacher, to be read and graded, about something so personal that they have kept it hidden and never shared it with anyone? [literally what was asked....] In the story of the Beggar and the Faithful Dog, Odysseus isn't hiding some private character trait that makes people refuse to understand him. He's carrying out a clever ruse to see what's really happening at home and whether his wife has been faithful. It's a story about cleverness, trickery, and faithfulness. Turning that into a personal exposure of hidden feelings takes the fun and adventure out of the story - and it's a boundary violation. This isn’t common core - this is left over lessons from the previous fad.