And then there was Yale
I’ve been too busy to follow what’s been happening at Yale. But since we’ve have talking about what’s going on at college campuses, I’ll take a moment to pay some attention.
Conor Friedersdorf has a piece on the subject at The Atlantic. After the usual throat-clearing about how the students’ mean well and all that jazz, he gets to a description of what actually occurred. Friedersdorf offers lengthy excerpts from the email written by lecturer Erika Christakis that was deemed so offensive by students that they’ve been “trying to get the couple removed from their residential positions, which is to say, censured and ousted from their home on campus…[by] attacking them, some with hateful insults, shouted epithets, and a campaign of public shaming.”
Fiedersdorf then goes on to add that “In doing so, they have shown an illiberal streak that flows from flaws in their well-intentioned ideology.” Yeah, right, just a little “illiberal streak.” No; their entire ideology is illiberal, in the sense of being profoundly opposed to liberty.
When you take a look at what Erika Christakis actually wrote, you’ll see that it was respectful, almost hesitant, and politically correct, with the mildest of suggestions for change. As Friedersdorf writes, “When I was in college, a position of this sort taken by a faculty member would likely have been regarded as a show of respect for all students and their ability to think for themselves.” I would caution him that the university of his experience has died and is no more. Get with the program (pogrom?), Conor.
Here’s what ensued:
…Yale students…demand[ed] that Nicholas and Erika Christakis resign their roles at Silliman College. That’s how Nicholas Christakis came to stand in an emotionally charged crowd of Silliman students, where he attempted to respond to the fallout from the email his wife sent.
Watching footage of that meeting, a fundamental disagreement is revealed between professor and undergrads. Christakis believes that he has an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to either respond that he is persuaded or to articulate why he has a different view. Put another way, he believes that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue. But many of the students believe that his responsibility is to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings.
Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement.
Do you recognize the description? This is exactly what happened to the administrators at Missouri. Students demand, faculty and administrators must knuckle under and pronto, turning themselves into Allan Bloom’s Ursus universitatis on command.
Here’s the video. Watch it and weep at what leftist education and activism has wrought at what was once one of the greatest universities in the world.
And read the entire Friedersdorf piece.
I could three-peat my comment here about the requirement for students to lead counter-left campus activism, the need for conservatives to play the activist game by rules that may chafe, and the practical example of the Ivy League (not Yale) student-veterans who took it upon themselves to compete head-on against the same sort of campus leftist vigilantes on display here, won the game, and thereby reformed their campus’s culture.
Instead, I’ll just post a link this time:
http://neoneocon.com/2015/11/10/more-on-missouri-and-more-and-more-and-more/#comment-936170
The tactics of the SJW bullies and the Afro-fascists are producing rich fruit. Yale will be spending $50 million over the next few years on various diversity initiatives, while Missouri will be hiring a chief diversity officer at a ridiculously inflated salary. It is highly likely that BLM-inspired threats of boycotting at other football-obsessed schools with largely black teams will occur in the near future.
j e,
Of course. The activist game is the only social cultural/political game there is. Activism works. It always has.
Our nation was founded by activists who were Marxist-method activists before there was Karl Marx. They inspired Marx.
As Neo highlights, campus leftist vigilantes have been fundamentally altering our universities for decades. It’s not the Church, anymore. Universities are our society’s cognitive centers and cultural vectors, so the effect of dominant campus activism is exponential.
Yet conservatives habitually concede leftist dominance of universities that have first-order effect on our social fabric and instead limit solution calls to elections that at best influence a second-order effect.
This episode is a reminder that participatory politics are bigger than electoral politics.
That student is out of control and completely disrespectful to him. Not sure if this was written by the same student, but this editorial in the Yale paper is unbelievably childish and shows how mentally unstable these students have become:
http://tinyurl.com/p7bd8eb)
Lizzy:
Yes, the student in the clip is acting very unstable. I wonder if Yale has had any response to that.
I haven’t followed the Missouri story, because it looked like it’d take a lot of time to research it properly. This one was easy; all I had to do was read the original letter. There is nothing offensive about it. I wonder, is there a societal mechanism for reviewing the latest controversy and deciding that nothing has to be done? Do we have the tools for a public hearing on a matter that would say “this is stupid” and nothing more?
I recall learning in my Abnormal Psych class (bet they can’t call it that nowadays!) that a lot schizophrenics first demonstrated symptoms in college. Even had a college roommate whose older sister had a schizophrenic breakdown her freshman year (at an ivy league school) and was institutionalized.
While there are certainly opportunists amongst the ranks, I’m wondering how many of these activists/offended persons are really people who are incapable of handling college, but in 2015 they are accommodated instead of sent home for professional mental help as was done in generations past.
So, how do we fight back, folks?
The so-called adults need to put some of these little monsters in Time Out, and paddle the rest. Cancel the damn football game. When the student Red Guards realize their temper tantrums are backfiring, they will have a different calculus to consider.
Yeah, I know. Dream on. These leftist lynch mobs are not too far from becoming like the Communist Chinese “Red Guard”:
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/01/23/265228870/chinese-red-guards-apologize-reopening-a-dark-chapter
Remarkably for an NPR article, they actually don’t sugarcoat the horror at all. Actually, since it’s an NPR article, it would be a good one to pass on to any liberal pals.
Lizzy,
I had a similar thought when watching this video. What disturbs me more than her immature tantrum is that none of those around her are reacting as if she is a human having a mental breakdown. Most react approvingly, even encourage her behavior.
I’m not sure what is going on with that young woman in the video, but I can only react with sadness.
If she is having a mental breakdown, or suffers from a chronic mental disorder, I feel sadness that she is so afflicted.
I also feel sadness that those around her are not trying to help her calm down and get treatment.
If this is not a rash or acute episode and this is this woman’s lifeview I feel sorrow that she has such an immature and myopic perception of the world at the age of 18, or older. Someone (partents? teachers? siblings? friends? all of the aforementioned?) have done her a terrible disservice.
j e,
As I mentioned in a previous thread, most universities already HAVE chief diversity officers and staff training and infrastructure in place, and on top of that it’s been ramped up in recent years due to the Obama administration directing the Office of Civil Rights to oversee Title IX compliance for all schools that receive federal money. I am certain that Yale and Mizzou have already bent over backwards to address diversity issues, etc. As Neo points out, it will never be enough.
I wonder how long it will take for the Missouri situation to spread to other institutions. It’s certainly not hard to spark outrage, is it?
The only positive thing about the utter nonsense of the Yale story is that even in the bastions of far leftdom there is some squirming. For laughs, I checked out the comments on one of the HuffPo stories on this topic and there is actually some sharp division.
What’s worrying, unfortunately, is how generational it seems. It definitely sets up as militant, unyielding, idealistic kids attacking older libs for even daring to harbor the idea of freedom of thought/speech/expression.
The people commenting here that the student is acting strangely and may be mentally deranged have apparently never been in black ‘hoods or otherwise positioned to witness lower class black females reacting with anger. I am not making a racist observation; far from it. I am reporting a socio-cultural observation. This flash-point yelling when the desired response is not immediate is painfully typical of a certain sub-culture of ours.
Frog:
Whether or not her behavior is common in certain neighborhoods does not affect the judgment that it is evidence of instability.
We could call these students SJWs or brownshirts, but I prefer to refer to them by the more respectful term, “shirts of color”. For example, “The shirts of color shouted down the speaker.”
It is just unbelievable, yet true. On the other hand, as I have stated before, I saw all of this coming years ago in online groups I was in that included many SJW types. They tried to ban members for saying something like “I don’t want to ask a retarded question but…” I was one of only two or three people out of a much larger group who spoke out against this. This sort of insanity is one of the main things that led to me leaving the left. I hate this more than I can even express, this sort of intolerance. It is in the left’s blood and bones though, the far left, and I just did not entirely understand that previously.
We are in for a rough ride folks.
AND, the fact that President Obama is actually issuing his support in the form of kudos for these demonstrations is beyond the pale. Of course, that encourages them. AGGGH!
liberty Wolf:
Of course Obama praises them. This is his meat and potatoes. I’m sure you remember that he was an Alinsky instructor and a community organizer. That’s what they do.
America just didn’t understand that, back in 2008. His demeanor seemed so calm.
BTW – I agree with Frog that this is a certain type of behavior of some black women that I have seen in person, in certain parts of the East Bay. Say Oakland… and it is not uncommon. Not evidence of a nervous breakdown but evidence of a certain bullying attitude that is now transported to Yale. It is a certain sub-culture and is relatively recent. I think in the past, people would put aside such behaviors when moving up to a place like Yale. Or they would try… but now —
Neo: Yes, the calm demeanor! They had no idea just observing that. So many people I knew thought he had a level head.
He kind of does, like a snake! He knows exactly what he is doing.
liberty Wolf:
Likewise, this gets me in the gut. That’s why I’ve been writing so much about it lately. It has been clear for quite a long time that the left only pretends to be in favor of free speech, dissent, that sort of thing—only when they’re the dissenters. Everyone else must shut the eff up, if necessary by the application of a boot.
When the left gets power, no more need for them to pretend, or to protect the rights of anyone who disagrees. It’s not a pretty sight.
Even if the girl’s behavior is common in certain American sub-cultures, just read the editorial in the Yale paper. It is embarrassing. Shocking that this was written by a college student, one at an ivy league, no less. It sounds more like the ramblings of a hysterical middle-school girl trying to get daddy’s attention.
These loonies are the perfect useful idiot weapon against our weak, PC-obsessed college administrators.
* * * * *
I wondered why no one in MO state government was shutting this down until I saw Josh Earnest’s remarks this morning in support of the ‘courage’ of the Mizzou students, and that Yale and every other college is responsible for creating a ‘home’ environment for these students. I’m going to make a wild guess that someone from the WH (likely Jarrett) had a hand in the college president stepping down (just like she counseled the MO Gov. to not shut down the Ferguson rioters). This makes me so sad.
The Old Guard will fall. They have nothing in their spines strong enough to resist the power of the Left. After all, that generation spent several artistic and intellectual eras destroying the American fiber that created strength and virtue.
Someone needs to make and widely distribute an ad about this. First show some clips of things like the D-Day warriors, then maybe the MLK speech, then maybe some firefighters pulling someone from a burning building. Then flip to her standing in the beautiful “unsafe” Yale campus. Finally tell all the students and their parents struggling to pay tuition at Podunk U how much of their costs are due to diversity administrators who are supposed to cater to these idiots. Ask the part-time nontenured instructors why they have to travel to a couple of schools to earn enough to live.
It’s time to call the brats out and get the normal people to rise up. Ask whether Obamacare would cover psychiatric treatment for them.
OMT, if Obama has been so great for race relations, why are things falling apart now?
It’s time to call the brats out and get the normal people to rise up.
That’s like putting an ad up in the New York Times. It has about the same effect.
These days, the frontier of human learning is on the internet, like Youtube, not ads on tv.
Neo: widespread undesirable behavior that has become normal because it is accepted as such is not a sign of instability, is it?
I appreciate liberty Wolf supporting my observation. He says Oakland, I say New Orleans and Houston. It is a widespread behavioral style.
My point is the young black Yalie female probably reacted like the women with whom she grew up. There is no one there to tell her differently. To correct her would draw the charge of “racism.” It is normal for her. It is also terribly effective at shouting down the opposition. It works!
Frog:
Of course it’s a sign of instability.
If a group is unstable and think being unstable is normal in the sense of being average, the behavior is still unstable.
The word “normal” has two meanings. The first is that it’s average, common. The second is that it’s healthy. The meanings are not identical. If unstable behavior is average and the norm, it doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
It is also terribly effective at shouting down the opposition. It works!
That’s because she knows how to pick weaklings as her targets. Of course it works then.
I find it amusing to watch universities reap the crop they have planted. It wouldn’t bother me a bit if these unhinged Special Snowflakes burn the universities to the ground.
This is all just another example of how the left will ultimately destroy itself. They cannot survive the world they want to build. The closest example to the world they want is the modern university campus. They will destroy it and they will melt away.
If they actually created the world they want they’d all be dead in 90 days.
Neo, but my “normal” is consistent with good health but is hardly a definition thereof. My normal is more quantitative, and yours as “healthy” is qualitative, it seems to me.
The girl in that video doesn’t strike me as mentally unbalanced, just very immature. I’d say somewhere around ages 6-8. “It’s not about creating an intellectual space…it’s about creating a home.”
not directly about yale…but about
Modern Educayshun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM
This reminds me of the Chinese Cultural Revolution I read about in Nien Cheng’s autobiography “Life and Death in Shanghai.” The professors and teachers had to participate in “struggle meetings” where they faced criticism from their students and had to confess their crimes and apologize for their failings. These meetings were all controlled by higher ups who used this to remove their enemies and others who didn’t toe the line. Of course, much of this was manufactured against them or things taken far out of context. Nevertheless, the damage to lives and careers destroyed much trust faith in education. It sure looks like this is coming soon.
eeyore:
In this post I included a pertinent quote about the Cultural Revolution.
From that article on the Chinese Red Guards. See any parallels?
“For most of the past half century, China has avoided a full accounting for one of the darkest chapters of its recent history: the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.
During that time, Chairman Mao Zedong’s shock troops – Communist youth known as Red Guards – persecuted, tortured or even killed millions of Chinese, supposed “class enemies.”
The Cultural Revolution was orchestrated by the Chinese leader, an effort to build a utopian society through class struggle. It drove the country to the brink of civil war and, by some estimates, cost more than 1 million lives.
The early phases of the Cultural Revolution were centered on China’s schools. In the summer of 1966, the Communist Party leadership proclaimed that some of China’s educators were members of the exploiting classes, who were poisoning students with their capitalist ideology. Indeed, the educated classes in general were marked as targets of the revolution.
The leadership gave Communist youth known as Red Guards the green light to remove educators from their jobs and punish them….
“On August 19, I organized a meeting to criticize the leaders of the Beijing education system,” Chen, now 67, recalls. “A rather serious armed struggle broke out. At the end, some students rushed onstage and used leather belts to whip some of the education officials, including the party secretary of my school.”
Chen says he was against the violence, but the situation spiraled out of his control. Chen says his school’s party secretary later committed suicide, and a vice secretary was crippled as a result of that day’s attack.
The same summer, Chairman Mao met with crowds of frenzied Red Guards in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. He endorsed their violent tactics – consisting mainly of beatings with fists, clubs and other blunt instruments. In August and September 1966, a total of 1,772 people were killed in Beijing, according to the Beijing Daily newspaper.
Students beating up their teachers was a shocking reversal in the Confucian society, where educators were once held in the highest esteem.
“Teachers were made to stand onstage, bow their heads and confess their crimes,” Chen says.
… Red Guards still use the euphemistic jargon of the era, including terms such as “struggling” against class enemies. Critics point out that these vague terms could be considered to include acts such as murder, torture and imprisonment.
Meanwhile, in January, another Red Guard leader, Song Binbin, apologized and bowed before a statue of her school’s vice principal, Bian Zhongyun, who was beaten to death. Song is the daughter of Song Renqiong, another leading revolutionary.
Song Binbin did not admit to taking part in the beating. And she did not invite Bian’s widower, 92-year-old Wang Jingyao, to hear the apology. Wang recalls that Bian was beaten so badly that her corpse’s face was completely black from the injuries.
“The Red Guards were simply executioners,” he said. “Their current apologies are to absolve them of responsibility for their crimes. But the chief culprit behind the Cultural Revolution was Mao Zedong.” # # #
This is how the Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution got started. Today, it’s the university campus. Tomorrow, they will want to kick you out of your house.
The difference here and now is we have 300+ weapons distributed amongst 100+ people. It doesn’t matter if 90% are Y’s rollover cowards. 10 million fighting guerrilla war distributed throughout 50 (or 57) states can not be defeated if only 10% of local LEOs and 10% of those in federal uniform say nay.
Keep calm, keep your eye on the front site, and stay calm. Panic is not the way.
I will disagree on one point. I thought that email was, actually, incredibly patronizing. For a moment I even felt trolled – I got that “you can’t be serious…?!” feeling. The author is literally drawing insights from child psychology to back up whatever she has to say on the topic.
The topic IS ridiculous to begin with, no doubt. I am amused by what sort of thing passes for topics of interest and controversy at these “universities”.
Still, the email DOES read as though its intended audience were ten year olds. I know that it is not THAT that they are complaining about, but it is worth noting. I would sooner feel genuinely insulted by an email like that than by an honest takedown. Tell me that I am being unreasonable, childish, and need to stop taking “offense” at every opportunity – but for the love of God, do not lecture me about the cognitive importance of pretend-play, Tiana the Frog Princess or “genuine concerns” (when the topic is pure nonsense) along the way.
The video is weird, to put it mildly. I cannot believe that none of the other students stepped in to snap the poor girl out of that hysterical crisis, help her calm down, and ultimately spare her greater embarrassment.
Head Master Christakis tweeted a few days ago that the student body at Yale should not be judged by a short clip. Okay. Talk about wanting to give the study body too much credit for the “best and the brightest” hot air talk.
Here’s what parents have to say about on the infamous collegeconfidential.com forum (a good percent of the parents posting think universities are fair and objective, not to mention that many lean left, so there’s a lot of support/sympathy for the students anger) –
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1828617-yale-is-imploding-over-a-halloween-email.html
I’m a child of the 60’s (we had some kind of sit-in or whatchacallit at my college in the late 60’s; the “protesters” built a shantytown on the lawn near the library. After 4 days the administration had it bulldozed and called in the National Guard. The End.).
It struck me then (as now) that those-who-don’t-play-by-the-rules have quite an advantage over the rest of us who have been “properly acculturated” in the habits that make Western society function smoothly. (Things like cooperation, tolerance, the assumption that “the other guy” is acting in good faith, the willingness to “turn the other cheek” or just-plain-leave when faced with insults or conflict.)
Short version: “asymmetrical warfare” is as successful in the social sense as it in the military sense.
We’re caught in a vise here: The only way to succeed against such Agitators is for society-as-a-whole to make things very, very, VERY uncomfortable for them, ie, “push back twice as hard” (and possibly knock some teeth out). EXCEPT, that’s completely contrary to the live-and-let-live underpinnings of our culture. Conundrum.
And when our public institutions –the keepers of our culture– accept, indulge, and reward this antisocial behavior, it leaves the rest of us thinking “This is all wrong; and I have NO IDEA how to get back to normal.”
@ Frog: The student had been identified. Her name is Jerelyn Luther. Her background, if anyone might assume, is not from a disadvantaged family on the lower end of the SES ladder. Quite the opposite.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/09/meet-the-privileged-yale-student-who-shrieked-at-her-professor/
She from a middle class family, maybe upper middle class, whose parents have purchased a nice looking home in the suburban (?) forests of Connecticut.
@ Nonny: Yes, it’s a sad and strange reality when The Left takes over the culture. When you control the culture you control the people, and then the people change the politics & policies. Just thinking about it makes my heart feel a little displaced; if it could shed a few tears it would.
This is what democracy ultimately is, an excuse to setup an oligarchy. That’s all it ever has been. All it ever will be.
Much of what America was programmed to accept as civilized and good, such as equality, were illusions and propaganda designed to control the livestock.
People know what must be done, but there is a difference in Willpower required to scoop out someone’s eyes in front of you vs pushing a button and having a machine you never built, kill some people overseas.
As for people who want to fight back , I recommend they start paying attention to successful examples, rather than the failures. Learn to emulate success, stop watching these Reality TV shows of failures. They aren’t going to help you.
https://ymarsakar.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/inside-the-war-against-the-lefts-sjws/
Neo Says: It has been clear for quite a long time that the left only pretends to be in favor of free speech, dissent, that sort of thing–only when they’re the dissenters.
yeah, but they tell the truth that they are FOR women and feminism is a great goodness (and not using people who think being independent is doing what some organization that is all self interest and openly calling for communism for over 70 years tells you to do, and feel bad when they tell you to feel bad and denies your own being if your not on their side directly and using up your life energy for them)
yeah… and thats just a stereotype not eyes wide open, as its a hate full white male patriarchal should be exterminated entity with no rights!!
when they get the communist state they want its going to be VERY interesting, as nothing can stop this… not one thing at all, but them, and they wont – and whither they go, everything else goes, because when the neck turns the head follows.
eeyore Says: This reminds me of the Chinese Cultural Revolution I read about in Nien Cheng’s autobiography “Life and Death in Shanghai.”
VERY VERY astute of you.. its VERY much the same as that!!! in fact i was going to post an exerpt from a book that lays out EXACTLY what your commenting to (not the one you bring up) and that was written a long while ago…
KUDO’S to you for picking up on details that most americans have zero idea of and would not generally listen to as its easier to fight than it is to study. (just ask the college students)
the other regime i said to read about that is VERY pertinent is the changes by the Bela Kuhn state…
i wonder if anyone taught these students what happend to the students in the various regimes where students succeeded in being used by communists to overthrow and cahnge things.
most people forget that the teachers at tianeman square were working for the chinese and that the protestors were dead two weeks later once the west stoppped paying attention and went back to watching things mary martin being peter pan (tv refused to show it again till that year), quantum leap and seinfeld…
while we were laughing, they were being tortured, killed and the families were sent the bill..
The Cultural Revolution came way after the bela kuhn state that came from a democratic state.. they modeled after history, not invented something new, any more than they are now.
It was the successor of the Hungarian Democratic Republic and lasted only from 21 March until 1 August 1919. The state was led by Béla Kun and was not recognized by France, the UK or the US
It was the second socialist state in the world to be formed after the October Revolution in Russia brought the Bolsheviks to power. The Hungarian Republic of Councils had military conflicts with the Kingdom of Romania, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and the evolving Czechoslovakia. It collapsed when Romanian forces occupied Budapest, after which the Kingdom of Hungary was reestablished.
The Hungarian Republic of Councils in russian is the Hungarian Soviet Republic 🙂
been trying to get people to read the wiki that does not cover up the meaning of terms, exposing soviet to be councils, that the democrat socialists do the deeds, and the methods they use… (now why would they know hungary instead of hitler?)
Congressional Democrats express anger at Obama…
http://neoneocon.com/2010/11/19/congressional-democrats-express-anger-at-obama/
[edited for length by n-n]
when it failed:
Béla Kun, together with other high-ranking Communists, fled to Austria on 1 August with only a minority, including Gyé¶rgy Luké¡cs, the former Commissar for Culture and noted Marxist philosopher, remaining to organise an underground Communist Party
Gyé¶rgy Luké¡cs is the man who worked out what is happening to us now.. what alinsky reformed for western tastes, etc..
a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the USSR. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx’s theory of class consciousness.
you know, conciousness raising, black class of minorities, etc… all from him..
who i have tried to lay out for a decade..
now its coming up to the end game and its easy to point out what a decade ago would not be paid attention to much…
– Marcus & Zoltan 1989: 215—16
[edited for length by n-n]
Artfldgr:
Actually, it’s not hard to make the connection with the Cultural Revolution. You are probably correct that the majority of people aren’t going to make it (in fact, the majority probably have no idea what it was). But there are still a lot of people who do make it, and some of them are on this blog.
It’s not so hard, and it’s not so obscure.
For example, I explicitly made the connection in a post written the same day as this thread but prior to it. Here’s the excerpt:
Actually, for anyone who knows history, the connection is quite obvious.
In fact, I wrote a rather long piece about the connection between our student activists and the Red Guard. It’s here, and was written a year and a half ago.
An interesting view of the Cultural Revolution would be “Three body problem”, a science fiction novel translated by Tor, from China. While the main setting is science fiction, the intro is about Mao’s purges.
I haven’t watched the video yet, but I assume that what’s going on is an induced mass hysteria.
The students have been indoctrinated to accept group/herd cues, and now they’re being driven into a frenzy. There is of course, a huge group psychology element here which I liken most to the “speaking in tongues” that occurs at certain spiritual revivals. Group cues are being used to drive these people temporarily insane. It’s very cult-like.
You should look up NLP and mind control techniques, Matt. Seeing is believing, and experience is a better judge of truth than reading abstract treatises online.
It’s one thing to be told that other people have done it to people. It’s quite another to convert abstract knowledge into practical experience, seeing for yourself the effect of these methods.