My kid is nearing the end of her tenure in our local public elementary school. However, for some reason they have had trouble mastering required elements of the language art. After I struggle to answer some of her homework questions, I felt giving up. I had to read some of the text 4-5 times before coming up with very tenuous answers.

Finally, I decided to dispense my massive wisdom instead of trying to demonstrate the correct.

Child, there are several different things you are learning here. In the least you have expression. Expression is the minimum you must do to in the context of speaking, writing, and other performances—let’s just call all these activities performances. Expression can be very basic, chicken scratches, a whole page filled by pencil, a hand print, a foot print, a bark, a cry, Hayden’s Trumpet Concerto performed on a Eb. there are no limits to what constitutes as expression. In America we have laws that protect human vocal expression as a basic rights. Modern arts have taken these to the limits of our imagination. Therefore the minimum is that you must express.

Next thing the teachers teach you is the skill of information communication. An idea in your head, be it information you know to be factual or a feeling, can be communicated to others through performances. Some of the skills in information communication include: summarization, listing information, relating information, serialization, causation etc. the skill of information communication is one of human’s proudest achievements. We can do it efficiently and to great precision. Therefore it is vital that you learn how to do this for both simple and implicit information.

Another purpose of performances is one of affectation. (Here we use it in the first person and speak to skills of affectation, later in a different perspective.) Many of the devices and techniques the school teach are methods of affectation. “How do I grab the readers’ attention?” One often hears echos of classes past… “How do I prepare the reader for this complex concept?” And “How do I surprise/scare/alert/depress the reader/listener/viewer(consumer)?” These skills, for performance learners are geared towards achieving specific goals affecting the consumers. Their successful application reasonably leads to manifestation of intended changes.

So then, for elementary school, you can focus on learning skills and identifying which of expression, communication, and affectation each skill element aims to accomplish….

Me

Now, then, I realized I digressed so much that it is now bed time and her homework is unfinished—because of me. But these thoughts are racing through my head unstoppable.

In truth grammar school performance skill classification actually helped me understand a mess of confusing things. For starters, the fact that expression, as in the freedom of expression, is actually a very nebulous… err… expression. But viewed from a complexity or mental effort to produce, it does not require much. It would appear that freedom of expression is an upper bound on permissible performances. It says that our system of thinking imposes no upper limit to speech or other forms of expression.

EXCEPT, we actually can and indeed do impose restrictions on performances. What comes to mind immediately are NDA’s, trade secrets, government secrets, passwords, etc. There are also lower bounds such as real estate mandatory disclosure rules and SEC filings where specific fields of information are required to be included in any performance. It would appear that we have (or that we have expressed, ala functional relativism—adopting relativistic view to enable computability/functionality/operability) indeed put restrictions on performances that communicate. Even though they are expressive performances, due to their informative functions. The detailed consideration of this type of expression can partially be taken up by a new branch of law covering information property which I proposed as a different type of property from those that we already have laws for, e.g real estate, chattel etc, due to the advancing and emerging science and technology of information. Briefly, we want to quantify it quality information communication using modern and future formal theories of information(such as the idea of information gain). That would enable us to make more precise statements about what we want/can/should communicate.

FURTHERMORE, performances with affectatious nature can further be restricted. Most prominently, in many professional circumstances (teacher, doctor, CPA, police) and in the court of law, it is never permitted for a person to perform so as to (mis)lead the consumer to believe information that is false. They are not permitted to perform so as to induce a damaging or undesirable action of the consumer.

Aside from expression, communication and affectation can be subjective. Whether a person has mislead and whether the performance as intentional or inadvertent, these are determinations that we do not have objective criterion’s for. In the future we may have the technology to measure them, but right now, our society tend to resort to functional relativism by identifying authorities on matters of lying and manipulation—judges in the court system, managers in the professional environment, etc. We, as a society, tend to agree with the judgement of these authorities. “Judge xyz has ruled on such and such matter.” says xyz made a decision , but it also says we hold that decision to be good or true enough to proceed.

I really enjoy my conversations with my children. They make me think hard about what I know and believe. They ask “why” and “what” so much that it trains me to have more critical assessment of the nature of my realities…. and spelling. I can’t wait to talk to them again and again…