It’s gratifying to have a cherished concept achieve such wide currency, but ...

Slow Food is profoundly conservative, advocating a strong bias in favor of traditional methods of food production, preparation and consumption, moored in widely known, socially sanctioned patterns, proven by centuries of success. Slow Gardening, a usage coined by Felder Rushing [http://www.hgtv.com/landscaping/slow-gardening/index.html], is sufficiently similar to make a rough sort of sense. In both cases, taking more time is almost incidental to the core idea of paying more attention.

But the Slow mind as I understand it from these posts is profoundly inattentive, at least in the usual sense of the word, quite specifically not anchored in consciousness, the traditional criterion for productive thought. Once engaged, it may yield understanding almost instantly, far more quickly than the analytical reasoning it compliments and may complete.

So might not an argument be made that the Fast mind is the “Slow” one: broadly successful, socially bonding, accepted as standard for millennia by lay thinkers and professionals alike? Although it’s not exactly new (mystics unite!), Honor to the Tortoise is the radical idea

To which more power, btw. My question is merely lexicographic, a product of my Fast – or is it Slow? – mind.

Whichever it may be, it’s delighted to have found this blog. Long may The Compass Point show the way in both fast and slow lanes.

I like Steiner’s version of the dichotomy – reason vs intuition – and his solution: Differentiated Instruction in reverse.

Instead of content-based instruction though a buckshot hodgepodge of modalities based on the students in the room, Waldorf focuses on the awakening and integration of all the modalities in all students, as a way of leaping past them to intuition (the apperception of wholes).

As if each student were all the Hindus in the dark with an elephant (http://amminadab.com/temple/islamic/elephant.htm)

Of course, as with Differentiated Instruction, it requires such craft and preparation to design a spiral, holistic curriculum that there isn’t much room for Constructivism. So this wouldn’t be something to dogmatically apply to everything. Perhaps math, with Cuisinaire rods.

My Geometry teacher Mr. Arthur had a different strategy. He allowed us students to fall asleep during his lectures in order to give their tortoise minds a chance to develop.

Sadly, he was ahead of his time. We just thought he was boring.

And haven’t we had enough “hare-brained” government these last few years?

There’s times when you need quick decisions but they are better when the “decider” has down some slow brain reflection over the years leading up to the snap certainty.