Summary
In the second chapter of his book, “The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other”, Walker Percy argues that lack of independence, or as he prefers to call it, “sovereignty” of an experience, as well as presence of “symbolic complexes”, or interpretations of an experience in the eyes of the public, deprives an individual of a truly full experience. To prove his point, he uses examples of tourists and college students. For instance, a tourist visiting Mexico and getting lost in an authentic tribe (Percy 51), as well as of traveler in France seeing a stereotypically French (Percy 55) behavior exemplifies how transfer of sovereignty is ceded to an expert: the encounter does not appear fulfilling until someone with higher perceived level of knowledge certifies the experience. In a similar fashion, educational experience becomes spoiled by two primary concepts: the “packaging” of information (delivering information in pre-organized, recurring way), and theory behind the studied subject. As Walker Percy argues, providing specific pre-conceived “symbolic package” detaches the learner …show more content…
When considering the dogfish experiment, it just seems that Percy believes that all the students would be bored from learning in a standard environment, while that does not correspond with reality of high school and college students finding true sense of discovery in the “packaged” activities. In addition to that, because all the current knowledge is obtained through this system of “packaging”, were Walker Percy’s theory fully accurate, there would be very little knowledge produced and passed. Thus, if the author’s assumptions were true, current plethora of knowledge would not exist. In that way, Percy’s reasoning seems to, at least, conflict with
In the second chapter of his book, “The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other”, Walker Percy argues that lack of independence, or as he prefers to call it, “sovereignty” of an experience, as well as presence of “symbolic complexes”, or interpretations of an experience in the eyes of the public, deprives an individual of a truly full experience. To prove his point, he uses examples of tourists and college students. For instance, a tourist visiting Mexico and getting lost in an authentic tribe (Percy 51), as well as of traveler in France seeing a stereotypically French (Percy 55) behavior exemplifies how transfer of sovereignty is ceded to an expert: the encounter does not appear fulfilling until someone with higher perceived level of knowledge certifies the experience. In a similar fashion, educational experience becomes spoiled by two primary concepts: the “packaging” of information (delivering information in pre-organized, recurring way), and theory behind the studied subject. As Walker Percy argues, providing specific pre-conceived “symbolic package” detaches the learner …show more content…
When considering the dogfish experiment, it just seems that Percy believes that all the students would be bored from learning in a standard environment, while that does not correspond with reality of high school and college students finding true sense of discovery in the “packaged” activities. In addition to that, because all the current knowledge is obtained through this system of “packaging”, were Walker Percy’s theory fully accurate, there would be very little knowledge produced and passed. Thus, if the author’s assumptions were true, current plethora of knowledge would not exist. In that way, Percy’s reasoning seems to, at least, conflict with