Googling Professor Ronald Laura? Part Three

I just thought I would take a comment that appeared recently on my first post on Professor Laura and put it up here in a post of its own, with my response.


Quoth Anonymous:

Hi Chris,

I have seen Ron Laura speak too (in January this year) and I completely understand your perspective given your experience.

However, I stayed through until the end and was left with a different response. I thought it was the most inspiring piece of speech making I have ever heard.

I was not alone.

Another woman like me sat silently afterwards in awe of his level of insight. Her comment; 'it is rare to have the good fortune of being in the presence of someone with such a deep level of understanding'.

I can understood your feelings about the lack of dialogue (and no doubt he would too). However, I felt he connected with us in a different and much deeper way with his speech.

And when I spoke to him afterwards I found him very open to dialogue and totally lacking in arrogance. I don't think he could have transferred his insights with the same degree of effectiveness with dialogue.

What I found most impressive about Ron was that he supported spritual insight with intellectual rigour. It is all too common for spiritual insights to be destroyed by intellectual rigour ...or for them to be conveyed without intellectual rigour.

As for the suit...I understand that you may have related that to the rich and expoitative. I interpreted it as a sign of respect for us as his audience (and for himself).I felt honoured by it and prefer it to the "i don't think you are worth getting out of my jeans' attitude'.Not dressing formally can be a sign of arrogance too. I'll meet you half way on that point...perhaps smart neat casual would have sufficed.I would prefer to see him look more comfortable himself.

All in all Chris I understand your viewpoint given your limited experience of Ron and your frustrated desire to receive support for your child. I really do.

However, I think your blog could do a good man alot of harm. And by the sound of it you don't seem to be the kind of person who would be consciously malicious. Those of us who are creative or gifted ...or who have gifted or creative children or children who need their creative expression supported ...truly need people like Ron in positions of power and influence. With further listening I think you might find that he is actually batting for the same team as you.

I would recommend giving Ron and his work a second chance (or at least let him be).

Good luck with getting the support that you need for your child.

Mary


To which I replied:

Thanks for your message, Mary! I’m glad you put in the effort to write to me. I don’t know if you will ever come back here to read this, but here goes.

Did you read my other post where I unpack a bit more just what I thought was wrong with what Ron Laura said and how he said it?

Given that the content of the talks we attended may well have been different, I also felt how inspiring he was. This is what scared me. A lacklustre speaker with dangerous ideas is nothing to be afraid of. Someone who can get people nodding happily in response to ideas that have been proven to be extremely harmful (e.g., the ‘culturally appropriate’ Aboriginal education I referred to) is a real danger.

I’m not saying that he should stop saying what he believes, still less that anyone should try and stop him from saying it. I did a search and couldn’t find any mention of his name in the context of ‘the Emperor has no clothes’. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have written anything. But I didn’t find anything, so I felt it was up to me to provide a smidge of balance.

I don’t think my little blog can do him any harm whatsoever. When our ideas are challenged, we are either driven to improve how we explain them, or we abandon them in favour of better ones.
Again, the talks may have been very different, but I did not detect a great deal of intellectual rigour in the talk I attended. He only tore down what other people had built, he did not give any coherent picture of what he would replace it with. I couldn’t find a logical exposition of his worldview on his website, either, nor in his book ‘The Perils of Progress’. This is another thing that worried me.

If someone want to throw away the one means of knowledge at our disposal, I want to know what they intend to use instead. If they say: ‘I believe in the infallible Qur’an’, fine. If they say: ‘Here, I am following Marx,’ fine. If they say: ‘My philosophy is based on these seven core axioms revealed to me by the Squid God,’ sure, why not. But leaving your own position cloaked in fog puts the other person at an unfair disadvantage.