Some Navajo schoolchildren, like many other children, have trouble in math class. According to an article published in a leading journal for mathematics educators, one reason may be that "the Western world developed the notion of fractions and decimals out of a need to divide or segment a whole. The Navajo world view consistently appears not to segment the whole of an entity." Teachers in the rural Southwest might therefore want to begin with concepts more "naturally compatible with Navajo spatial knowledge," such as "non-Euclidean geometry, motion theories, and/or fundamentals of calculus," and de-emphasize or postpone "segmentation...into smaller parts."

"I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"
- CP Snow

University presidents seem pretty proud of their undergraduate colleges. However, their answers to a recent poll suggest an alarming gap in their knowledge: the past two hundred years. Asked by Michael Adams, President of Fairleigh Dickinson University, to name the books "you believe every undergraduate university student should read and study in order to engage in the intellectual discourse, commerce, and public duties of the 21st century," the academic leaders came up with a list that pretty much excluded anything written after 1800.

The young specialist in English Lit, ...lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

... My answer to him was, "... when people
thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

- Isaac Asimov

This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind than perhaps people in the field are accustomed to. Being a vulgar engineer I'm allowed to break a lot of the rules that people in the humanities usually have to play by, since nobody expects an engineer to be literate. Ha. Anyway, here is my tale.

Recursive transition networks are an abstraction related to context-free grammars and finite-state automata. It is possible, to generate random, meaningless and yet realistic-looking text in genres defined using recursive transition networks, often with quite amusing results. One genre in which this has been accomplished is that of academic papers on postmodernism.

"If one examines the semantic paradigm of consensus, one is faced with a choice: either reject the constructivist paradigm of consensus or conclude that consciousness is capable of significance, given that art is equal to culture. The subdialectic paradigm of narrative holds that the State is intrinsically used in the service of class divisions. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a neodialectic situationism that includes language as a reality."
- The Dada Engine

"…if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in order to come more quickly to my principle theme..."
- Jacques Derrida

The highly abstruse nature of postmodern discourse presents a crisis to its academic community, which can no longer distinguish between nonsense and serious scholarship. This experiment involved the composition of nonsensical scholarly articles, synthesized by such ridiculous means as replacing profanities in the texts of Marquis de Sade with philosophical jargon. Four out of ten nonsensical articles submitted to professional journals were accepted for publication. These results suggest that postmodern discourse cannot be semantically differentiated from nonsense, and therefore must be assessed according to social-superficialfeatures such as the prestige of the author.

Hugo Ball, 'Dada Manifesto' (read at the first public Dada soiree, Zurich, July 14th 1916)

Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means "hobby horse". In German it means "good-bye", "Get off my back", "Be seeing you sometime". In Romanian: "Yes, indeed, you are right, that's it. But of course, yes, definitely, right". And so forth.
An International word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.

Zeitgeist Films, distributor of the documentary Derrida, currently in limited release in select cities across the country, poses the following rhetorical question on its promotional website: What if you could watch Socrates, on film, rehearsing his Socratic dialogues? The insinuation, of course, is that Jacques Derrida, the contemporary French thinker sometimes called the "father of deconstruction" deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the ancient Greek thinker sometimes called the "father of philosophy." This is true only insofar as a firecracker and a hydrogen bomb both go pop. Otherwise, the comparison is ludicrous.