Education, plastination

Classes start again the day after tomorrow, and i feel as motivated by the idea of going back to teaching as i enjoy sucking on rusted nails. The sad thing is that i miss the kids, their enthusiasm and youth and freshness, but i hate to see how we teachers dampen all that by dumping on their backs the expectations of an educational system and a society that wants not to give them freedom of choice, but a box in which to put it. Of course, i'm bitching here about the system, but i might as well start beating my fist against my chest and chanting mea culpa.

It is impossible not to learn stuff in life, so what is a school good for? Obviously, for someone to tell you what the things that you're supposed to learn are. Instead of schools there should be learning houses, where resources would simply be made available for people. Nothing obligatory, nothing forced.

Sure, there would be some who perhaps wouldn't do anything for a while. I get the feeling it wouldn't be a long while, though. It's very boring not to have anything for the mind to chew on and the self to digest! And even if there were some who decided to never even learn to read and write, their number would be lower than the multitudes of those who, today, get their minds plastinated.

That's a neat word, isn't it? "Plastination". My niece Leandra taught it to me the other day. She went to a museum in Los Angeles and saw all these human bodies and organs preserved by that process. Basically, plastination is achieved by extracting all the water from tissues and then re-infusing them with a transparent polimer that, on curing, makes biological matter impervious to decay. The advantages of this method is that organs and tissues keep almost the same form and color they had when they were alive, with the advantage that you can touch and handle them without getting your hands soaked in gore or other bodily fluids. Yes, life is always messy to handle, so whether it be minds or bodies, plastination is a good idea, particularly if you want to be in control.

Anyway, if you want to take a look at a plastinated body, go to http://www.univie.ac.at/anatomie2/max/max.html and knock yourself out. It's quite fascinating, actually, though also obscene, particularly the idea that there should be museums displaying this kind of artifacts.

At the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia they have on display a collection of anatomical abnormalities, results of illness, genetics or accidents. Some of them date back to the XIXth century, before the days of plastination, so they're either dessicated or kept in some kind of preserving solution. There's the incredibly distended intestine --dessicated and stuffed with straw-- of a man who didn't have a bowel movement for years; there are grotesquely deformed fetuses or infants in huge jars; there are, in a glass cage, the remains of a man who died of chemical burns.

Dwayne took me there one afternoon. I found the exhibition fascinating and repulsive at the same time. I thought we went there because, as a doctor, he thought i'd find it interesting, and i did, indeed. Even more interistingly though, i'm just now reading that this museum is not only a very popular attraction, but also "the most requested museum among young tourists out to test their date's capacity for the unusual (http://www.phillyvisitor.com). Hmmm... I wonder now, was it a test? Did i not pass?

I'm not sure that such places should be open to the general public; i can agree with far too many of the pro and con arguments though, so i can't make up my mind.