City Council 6-Jan- 2015: Bond Refinance; Meeting Minutes

Appearances

1. Public Comment:
   No public appearances.

Consent Items

2. MOTION: Approval of Meeting Minutes for City Council Regular Session – November 18, 2014. This was pulled and discussed at length later in the meeting. Part of the discussion centered around what are the legal requirements for minutes. Tim Merrill, city attorney quoted from Utah Code 54-4-203. Of late the meeting minutes have been very detailed (20+ pages). Tim suggested that they could be much more brief as long as they included the substance of what was discussed, proposed or voted on. Extraneous discussions need to be referenced. Shorter minutes make it easier for the public to review what transpired and would significantly reduce the length of time required to produce the minutes by staff. In the end the council unanimously agreed that future minutes should be more of a summary and that the portion of the Nov 18th minutes containing a heated discussion between the Mayor and council member Schoenfeld should be summarized. Note full audio recordings of each council meeting are available online for those who want to listen to the entire meeting at either the Utah State Public Notice website or the Highland City site.

3. MOTION: Approval of Meeting Minutes for City Council Regular Session – December 2, 2014. Approved unanimously with minor changes

Mental Training: A Remedy for “Education” – William George Jordan, 1907

Introduction

William George Jordan was a strong advocate of changing the focus of education. He argues that “there is not one single power, faculty, process or quality of the mind that is trained and developed by our present system of education. Our powers are not merely untrained—they are positively mistrained.” He says that “Education believes that by forcing a certain amount of knowledge, principally by means of textbooks, into the minds of children, that somehow in the divine mystery of mental processes this knowledge will not only be retained, but the mind of the individual will be exercised, trained and developed.”

Mental Training: A Remedy for Education – William George Jordan, 1923

The following is the fourth and final articles in a series of articles on education (What’s the Matter with Education, Educating for Seven Lives, Modeling Education on Genius, Mental Training: A Remedy for Education) written by William George Jordan and published in The Forum, a well respected journal of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Jordon put to together a series of lectures in the early 1890’s on how to improve your mind called Mental Training: By Analysis, Law, And Analogy. He published a synopsis of these lectures in 1907 entitled Mental Training: A Remedy for “Education”. You might find this interesting as well.

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When an educator of the unquestioned ability and high standing of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler[1], president of Columbia University, sums up education in a sentence, his words are worthy of careful listening. He said on one occasion: “When one reflects upon the ravages which have been committed in the name of education, there is some excuse for wondering whether it would not be advantageous to agitate for compulsory illiteracy.” Such an expression from the lips of a mere layman might be construed as wild and fanatic, but spoken by Dr. Butler they represent the sane, serious crystallization of the thought, observation and long experience of a clear thinker who is in a position to know. They show relentlessly that there is something intrinsically rotten in the Denmark of education.

Modeling Education on Genius – William George Jordan

The following is the third in a series of four articles on education (What’s the Matter with Education, Educating for Seven Lives, Modeling Education on Genius, Mental Training: A Remedy for Education) written by William George Jordan and published in The Forum, a well respected journal of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Jordon put to together a series of lectures in the early 1890’s on how to improve your mind called Mental Training: By Analysis, Law, And Analogy. He published a synopsis of these lectures in 1907 entitled Mental Training: A Remedy for “Education”. You might find this interesting as well.

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The world’s most urgent need is not a new crop of geniuses. We could get along very comfortably even if we did not have a new great book, a new marvelous discovery, a new revolutionary invention, or a new superb painting or piece of sculpture for a hundred years to come. The great geniuses of the past still live in their works. They still speak their undying messages of revelation, beauty, truth, inspiration and wisdom. Though we have listened to them we have learned but a small part of their inspiring quality. We have not even begun to exhaust the genius of either past or present.