[nekokami]

Originally Posted by Lady Blue

You said here that you're always interested in hearing examples of the educational experiences of different people, but yet you started out by saying that you're not trying to argue with individual experience.

Yes, I said both of these things. Where's the contradiction? I'm always interested in people's individual experiences, and I would never argue that someone hasn't had a particular individual experience. I just don't think we can generalize from individual experiences.

Originally Posted by Lady Blue

It sounded like you were in oppostion to my individual experience by stating there will always be exceptions , as if I was the exception to the rule. That's not the case. That's just the way it used to be. It was the norm. And it worked.

It worked for you-- I don't doubt that at all. Maybe it worked for your whole class, or your whole school. Maybe it worked for your whole generation, all across the US (though I don't think so). We could speculate on what the individual factors are that have changed between when you went to school and the present, or where you went to school and the rest of the country, if you like. I wouldn't try to generalize from a simple comparison between your experience with school and "schools today," that's all.

Originally Posted by Lady Blue

In the future I will try to be more careful in my responses to everyone so as not to be misunderstood or sound like I'm attacking anyone's views. That was never my intention. I would never attack anyone's VIEWS. A view is a belief, an opinion, one side of a whole, a subjective thought, which in my own humble opinion can never be WRONG, just different.

I apologize to Neko and anyone else whom I may have ired or offended. (And I'm sorry for again returning to this subtopic and beating the proverbial dead horse.)

I am neither offended nor ired. But I don't place individual belief in the same category as reasoned conclusions supported by broad evidence. The former is probably best for making personal decisions, but I would prefer broad policy decisions to be made on the basis of the latter.

Slayda, regarding "lies, damn lies, and statistics," what would you trust more for broad policy decisions using substantial community resources and affecting large numbers of people? (Deciding not to make large-scale decisions IS, of course, just such a decision.)

I value both quantitative research across broad communities, and well-done qualitative research that provides rich descriptions of what happens in individual cases. Qualitative research generates possible hypotheses and causes, whereas quantitative research, done correctly, can confirm or reject these hypotheses. Like any tool, statistics can be misused. (Pie charts are a very good example.) But we all have to decide what tools we will use for which purposes, despite their flaws and risks.

Getting back to the original topic, do our EU members agree that the EU culture values the norm more than the outliers, at least for public policy making? That seems like a broad generalization to me, but there might be some truth to it.