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A Few First Thoughts on the End of the Printed Word

January 31, 2010

Many talk about the demise of the newspaper (and perhaps also the book) as digital media become more widespread and people get “The News” from the Internet.

We need to look closely at what’s happening, especially now with the advent of the iPad, at what we may be losing, but also and probably more important, at what we are, I think, clearly gaining.

I would say first of all that the issue lies not with the intrinsic value of “News,” the subject matter of the best of our publications, or the great importance of the bringers of the “News.” The place of the news, its importance in our lives is, largely thanks to the internet and the new electronic media, greater now than ever before.

The issue that we are concerned with is much less than that. Newsprint, book paper, the printing presses, those are the “lives” that are facing their end, just as were ended, some time after Homer, the oral bringers of the news.

For 3000 years or more writing on papyrus, parchment, and much more recently paper became more effective and more efficient than oral transmissions in bringing the “news” to the people. Would we even have had an Odyssey, that is, an oral account of Odysseus’s journey, if our own “media” had been present at the time of that journey?

So, yes, of course the advent of electronic media does represent a loss, as does every change, from that of the clipper ship to the steamboat, the horse and carriage to the automobile, and all the myriad other instances when what seemed to be a vital part of our lives was abandoned by the side of the road as we moved on and into a widely different future time.

Now we are faced with the loss of the paper book, the newspaper, and the magazine. But is there any doubt that the digital transmission of words is more effective, more complete, certainly much less costly, much less a drain on our natural resources and hence more environmentally  friendly?

Again, it’s important not to forget that the “News” is not threatened, only the means of transmission. If that is fully understood we will stop bemoaning the loss of the newspaper, and the book, and fully partake of the much greater news opportunities of the digital world.

The strange thing is that now, when there are so many who daily experience the internet, there are almost as many who don’t understand that their new habit doesn’t mean the loss of anything vital, but that it’s only a correction, a change in vehicle, with actually much better news coverage than ever before.

How would one defend the loss of what we call “hard copy?” Book lovers say, —”Oh don’t take my book… I have it by my bed at night, in my pocket when I go to the beach, with me when I travel. Furthermore, I can’t imagine my life without my own library of books. For books, probably no less than my wife and children and now grandchildren, have been and still are such a huge part of my daily life.”

I understand this. The books I own, probably only a few thousand remaining of the 10s of thousands I have owned in my lifetime, comfort me and call me back to all, or nearly all the important moments of my past life.

The French writers, André Gide and Albert Camus, whom I read while in Medical School (and ended up dropping out as a result). Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man and others of his works recalling my time in graduate school at Columbia in the 60s. The bilingual, French and Classical Greek editions of the Greek and Roman classics that I read while teaching at St. John’s College in the late 60s.

Alston Hurd Chase’s A New Introduction to Greek, the text I used in my teaching of that language while at St. Johns. Pirandello’s complete works, especially the hundreds of his short stories, one for every day of the year, that I read and reread as I wrote my PhD dissertation (never finished) while living in Florence, via Michelangelo,  …

And it goes on and on, right up until the present. In the 90s I stocked my shelves with Russian books while I taught myself to read that language following six months in the Soviet Union, and most recently I’ve been purchasing from Amazon’s used book network political science books, books about evolution, cosmology, the history of the earth, also calculus texts, the study of which had been cut short while being taken up with the running of a school I started with my wife in the 70s…

Anyway, am I implying that books, such as the ones that have accompanied me throughout my life, should somehow live forever? And to make sure that they do we ought to keep the printing presses rolling?

Well yes, and no. No because paper texts are probably not the best means of assuring the survival of men’s knowledge and discoveries. Paper texts can be lost, as was the case during the fire in Alexandria in the first century before the present era, and during the Inquisition and the Nazi periods in Germany and Southern Europe when books were first banned and then burned. That which still happens I’m sure.

In fact, books are easily destroyed and we should have better ways of preserving the best of what men have thought and written.

And as we think about these sorts of things we need to distinguish between books, what is it that they contain and that we need and want to preserve, and the news, what we no less want to preserve, the papers, journals, and magazines that contain the accounts of what the few have witnessed and/or experienced and written down for the benefit and enjoyment of the many.

In fact, of the two I would say that the “News” is the most important. It is the news that precedes the book, the news of the experience or the thought that one has had. The news that Odysseus left Troy and successfully made it home to Ithaca where Penelope was waiting. The book is just one person’s account of that trip. Present day media facilities would have given us myriad accounts.

In the news we learn that drone fired missiles are destroying segments of the Al Qaeda leadership in North Waziristan…. The book that often follows the news accounts is someone’s interpretation of what happened, perhaps a much fuller treatment of what it means, say, for the U.S. to fire missiles into the wild border regions of Pakistan. But the News came first.

In my opinion we should concern ourselves less with the writing of the book, because books will be written with or without our support. The news is at greater risk. We need to be sure that the News can reach us, and for that to happen someone has to be there and has to have whatever it takes to write it down and then transmit it…

We need to be mightily concerned that this sort of thing never stops. I would even argue that the news coming into our homes, now in electronic format, ought to be considered no less vital to our well being than the electrical, gas, water, sewer and other supply lines.

This is already happening with broadband hookups. Children are now growing up, attached as much or more to the internet supply line to their homes as to the water running from the tap, or to their parents returning into the house from the store with the groceries.

What if the News were to be treated like a utility, like heat, water, and electricity? Is it no less essential to our well-being, our completeness? In fact, is there anyone who gets by on heat, water, and electricity alone?

Actually we pay now for news coming into our household via cable or satellite. Why wouldn’t payments of this nature be enough for the creators of the all important News? Why do we also need advertisers? The latter do not accompany the arrival in our homes of the other “utilities.”

Well, after having said all this, I guess I do think that there is still a place for hard copies. For books and journals etc., the kind of thing you put in your pocket and take to the beach, and the kind of thing I have so many of in my library at home.

But electronic publications don’t need to threaten the book. Both can exist. We still need to find out how they might best coexist. Perhaps books are to computer screens as candles to electric lights? Is anyone without candles in their home? An interesting, but probably not a valid analogy.

I know the e-readers. I have a Kindle, and I also have access at no cost to many of the classics through the Project Gutenberg. But it would never occur to me to keep, say, Melville’s Moby Dick, Chekhov’s and Pirandello’s short stories, only in digital format, and this in spite of their being readily available for download to my computer. I still need to have them in book form.

Even though in the long run my books will be dead the way I’ll be dead (although as I look over my library shelves it is clear that their life spans will outdo my own), returned as dust to the earth…. while, although the jury is still out, the electronic form of the book may be as close as anything in our possession to being immortal.

During my life time books on paper will have fulfilled an essential role, perhaps one that electronic books, even the digital versions of the books of my library, will never fulfill. Perhaps because of this, to some extent anyway, the printing presses will continue to roll as does the horse and carriage (although not the steamboat). I guess this is what the “issue” I mention above is all about….

Categories: Idle idle thoughts, Thoughts

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The First Year of the Obama Presidency

January 26, 2010

I find myself mostly agreeing with this commentary from Columbia University researcher, Alice Kessler-Harris, in the current edition of Dissent Magazine:

“I count myself among those disappointed in Barack Obama’s presidency so far. I had not expected miracles, but I had hoped for a more dramatic turnaround in our politics: for an end to the war in Afghanistan; a rapid closing of Guantánamo; and a denunciation of torture, rendition, and the endless pursuit of an elusive and protean terrorism…. I anticipated a more generous health care bill and a restoration of modest regulations on banks and financial investment firms. Obama led us to expect these things of him when, in his mellifluous and powerful voice, he advocated “change you can believe in.”

“Mostly agreeing” because I wouldn’t have placed the “rapid closing of Guantanamo,” nor the “denunciation of torture and rendition” high up on my own priorities for Obama’s presidency. Downgrading the “endless pursuit of an elusive and protean terroism,” yes, that was a high priority for me also.

For me there are other Obama, if not failures, areas of neglect and downright inactivity that have been even more important sources of my own disappointment.

In particular:

Too often Obama has allowed the Democratic Congress to set the political agenda for his administration. While reforming the country’s health care system may have been important to him the bits and pieces of reforms actually proposed were all, or nearly all the thoroughly unsatisfactory creations of Congress. And it now appears that any future reforms of the money and banking segments of our economy will be no less left to the Congress to fashion and then enact, the president again watching from the sidelines.

Similarly our country’s war strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan are not so much the President’s own creation as that of his military generals. The result being that we’re looking at what seems more and more like (as impossible as I always thought this to be) a repeat of our disastrous Vietnam experience nearly two generations earlier.

But my own greatest disappointment lies in areas of presidential neglect and inactivity. Two in particular.

Our middle classes, those who work and pay income taxes, those who make up this country’s backbone, provide the labor for the country’s industries, as well as for the country’s wars, (just and unjust) are hurting. These people’s salaries have not been rising, but their costs of living of course have been. Furthermore their numbers are diminishing as more and more of them lose their jobs and homes and join the ranks of the unemployed.

For our middle class citizens not to do well and prosper is to bode terribly for the country’s future. Improving the increasingly difficult circumstances with which these people are struggling ought to have received Obama’s full attention from day one of his presidency, more so than reckless foreign wars in the Middle East, more so even than insuring the uninsured (the cost of which would be mostly born by these same middle classes).

The other area of neglect, so far anyway, is immigration policy. Doesn’t the President understand that our country has always been and is still most about, the large numbers of people, good people, hard working people, who come here from all over, and who for most of the country’s history have been welcomed and given the opportunity to work? Doesn’t he know that it’s these millions, among whom was his own father, who have come here and with hard work and encouragement realized the American Dream?

He needs to make sure (this insurance even more important than health insurance) that the people coming to these shores, and, through the work that they do once here, growing this country’s wealth, doesn’t stop.

Open Door immigration policies have always been, if not this country’s greatest source of strength, right up there with the founding principles of our founding fathers, with such things as democratic governance, the free market, the rule of law, the protection of individual rights and the other principles that inform and characterize and make precious our lives together.

Mistakingly I believe, the President has yet to turn his attention to immigration. He should be vitally concerned with easing the path to citizenship, not only for those who want to come here but also for those millions who are already here but without legal status.

Although such an effort might, more than anything else, keep him from being elected to a second term, the President himself said, just today while speaking with Diane Sawyer of ABC News:

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. I don’t want to look back on my time here and say to myself all I was interested in was nurturing my own popularity.” Would that he do this!

Categories: Thoughts

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More on the poverty in Haiti, this time with Nicholas Kristof and Mark Danner

January 21, 2010

(If you haven’t already read Ben Macintyre’s piece, The Fault Line in Haiti Runs Straight to France, in today’s London TimesOnLine go HERE, read it and then come back, although what Ben tells us about Haiti’s appalling French connection during the past several hundred years may make all that I have to say below meager fare.)

As if in answer to my post on the widespread failure of international development aid (see also the Wall Street Journal column, “To help Haiti, end foreign aid.”) Nicholas Kristof in “Some Frank Talk About Haiti,” asks, why are Haitians so poor?

Has development aid failed because the Haitians are simply not capable of doing whatever is necessary to fix their country and lift it out of its current position as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and in doing so improve the living conditions and opportunities of the people?

And if that is the case, if they are not capable, shouldn’t we abandon entirely any attempt to help them with our billions in aid programs?

Kristof doesn’t believe this to be so. He does cite a number  of mostly conservative pundits and commentators who are down on the Haitians’ ability to govern themselves, convinced that any financial aid coming from us would, as in the past, only be wasted, going into the pockets of the corrupt few, not to the benefit of the impoverished many.

Of course, we have to distinguish between development aid and disaster relief. The current earthquake relief effort is not at issue. Even those most critical of past Haitian aid go along with the urgency and necessity of our sending help now. Earthquake, no less than tsunami and hurricane relief has little if any opposition.

But what might be the next step following the relief effort? How can we help the Haitians move on? Is there something else we could do that could begin to substantially reduce if not eliminate the country’s ingrained, debilitating poverty?

Kristof blames the poverty most of all on the loss of the island’s forest cover (which rich and abundant as it once was can be seen in the neighboring Dominican Republic). Now what trees there still are cover hardly 2% of the land surface, the result being that the soil has so eroded that today the people are no longer able to grow enough food for themselves.

Kristof insists, however, that the people should not be blamed for their situation. They were not primarily responsible for the loss of the forest cover. And now they are not the problem.

On the contrary, he says, to visit and to meet the Haitians is to see that they are the country’s treasure. “Smart, industrious and hospitable, successful when they come to the United States,” they could with our help be successful on their island.

Maybe. In part that is Kristof, always the optimist about people’s possibilities, life’s possibilities. One would like to believe that he’s right. In any case here is what he proposes:

First of all, Haiti, far more than most other impoverished countries — particularly those in Africa —  could plausibly turn itself around. It has an excellent geographic location, there are no regional wars, and it could boom if it could just export to the American market.

According to Kristof a good, perhaps a best strategy for Haiti would be to help them build factories, in particular garment factories, producing goods for the market to the north.  For example, a few dozen major shirt factories could be transformational.

In the coming months as the United States turns from disaster relief to rebuilding it ought not only to send aid workers but also business types, people with money to invest in new businesses. That is what Haiti most needs.

And finally, in Kristof’s own words: “And let’s challenge the myth that because Haiti has been poor, it always will be. That kind of self-fulfilling fatalism may be the biggest threat of all to Haiti, the real pact with the devil.”

And here a footnote: Mark Danner in an op ed piece in today’s Times has just given us a short version of Haiti’s terrible past. To understand the people and the country it would help immensely to read it.

Danner’s conclusion? Not too different from that of Nicholas Kristof:

[What might be done to change things?] “America could start by throwing open its markets to Haitian agricultural produce and manufactured goods, broadening and making permanent the provisions of a promising trade bill negotiated in 2008. Such a step would not be glamorous; it would not “remake Haiti.” But it would require a lasting commitment by American farmers and manufacturers and, as the country heals, it would actually bring permanent jobs, investment and income to Haiti.”

Is President Obama, immersed today in battle with the banks, listening?

Categories: Thoughts

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Idle Thoughts

January 17, 2010

In letter exchanges with John Adams as well as in his own autobiographical writings Thomas Jefferson proposed that, “instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society, and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions….”

But of course what we have today, some 200 years later, is still an aristocracy of wealth, along with an aristocracy of merit, in particular an aristocracy of verbal and mathematical merit, aka as intelligence, although with ample room and ample recompense for the many talented ones who entertain us.

We are still without an aristocracy of virtue, perhaps even more so than in Jefferson’s time.

Categories: Thoughts

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I wonder if our President reads Thomas Friedman

January 17, 2010

Thomas Friedman has no need of me to call attention to his op ed pieces. He has a readership. I have none. Nevertheless today he speaks exactly my mind (and I suppose that of many others).

When he says this in today’s Times:

“Frankly, if I had my wish, we would be on our way out of Afghanistan not in, we would be letting Pakistan figure out which Taliban they want to conspire with and which ones they want to fight, we would be letting Israelis and Palestinians figure out on their own how to make peace, we would be taking $100 billion out of the Pentagon budget to make us independent of imported oil — nothing would make us more secure — and we would be reducing the reward for killing or capturing Osama bin Laden to exactly what he’s worth: 10 cents and an autographed picture of Dick Cheney.”

Categories: Online readings, Quotations

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More on Chester Finn and school reform

January 16, 2010

Chester Finn, no less than Arne Duncan and his “Race to the Top,” labors under the (mis-)conception that student achievement levels depend primarily on what the educators, – the teachers, administrators, and politicians — do, and that downward or flat, as at the present time, achievement levels call for additional reforms.

Maybe, but so far a long series of public school education reforms  beginning in this country in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik into orbit 4 October 1957, have done little or nothing to raise the achievement levels of all our students, and have done particularly little for our most vulnerable, most impoverished and most often minority, Latino, Black and other, students, those for the most part living and attending school in our largest inner cities.

Why is this? The answer is obvious but so far educators have not been paying attention. What have we ever learned ourselves that has not come primarily from our own efforts, from our own active involvement in the learning process?

Why would it be any different for kids? For what students learn, translated into measurable achievement levels, depends most of all (as for the rest of us) on what they do for themselves, not on what we do for them.

What reforms, if any, have sought to make the students primarily responsible for their own education, for their own learning? The three reform movements of which Chester Finn speaks, national standards, data driven instruction (testing), and school choice, have little or nothing to say about the role of the students in all that.

As it is now, even the best students, the so called “good students,” are probably doing what they do in school to please their parents or teachers rather than themselves. Although they may be learning the lessons of the school and classroom, what they’re really learning, what’s becoming an integral part of their makeup, and most important for their future lives, is probably not what they’re doing in school.

When and if learning does take place, if progress is made and achievement gaps are narrowed or closed, it will be most of all thanks to the efforts of the learners, of the kids themselves.

I thought of all this while reading David Brooks writing about the devastation brought about by the earthquake in Haiti. The extent of the devastation, he says, is much more to be blamed on poverty, that which had made for a totally inadequate infrastructure of support systems, as well as permitting contractors to build without meeting proper building code requirements.

Brooks reminds us that an earthquake in the Bay Area of Northern California, on October 17, 1989, just as powerful, 7.0 on the Richter scale, did a tiny fraction of the horrendous people and property damage that we are now witnessing via the Media’s constant coverage of the aftermath of the quake in Haiti. The poverty of Haiti and affluence of Northern California are the explanation of the hugely differing quake damages in the two places.

Then Brooks goes on to say that all the development aid of the past several decades has done little or nothing to reduce, let alone dispel the poverty not only in Haiti, but in the under developed world generally. He concludes with the simple admission that “we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty.”

Brooks then quotes the economist Abhijit Banerjee who has this to say about the effectiveness of aid to the undeveloped world: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”

And it was here that I thought to myself that similarly, or analogously the best way to raise our students’ achievement levels was not to go on tinkering with the public school environments and curricula, for perhaps making real progress in reducing ignorance and raising achievement may also not be within our power or control.

And in fact the real growth and development, that is taking place in countries like India and China, is not to be attributed to international aid efforts, such as those of the World Bank and others, but to the efforts of the Indians and the Chinese themselves. Similarly perhaps real student achievement will only take place when the students themselves assume the major responsibility for their learning.

This clearly has not yet happened.

Categories: Achievement Gap, School Reform

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School Ramblings brought on by reading Chester Finn

January 14, 2010

Chester E. Finn, Jr., in an article in the most recent issue of National Affairs, no less than the educational reformers of whom he speaks, has it all wrong. It’s not so much that the reforms have been misdirected, gone after the wrong targets, not been basic enough.

It’s rather that the reforms and the reformers, no less than the protectors of the public school status quo, have not, like the blind men, seen the whole of the elephant they would describe.

“Blind monks examining an elephant”, an 1888 ukiyo-e print by Hanabusa Itchō.

The whole elephant, well what is that in the educational context? What is the beast out there that one ought to see in its entirety?

We need first of all to agree on a number of assumptions, not so much concerning educational goals or aims, as the nature of the reality out there, the reality that confronts not only the kids every day of their lives, but us too, especially those of us, probably most of us, who are vitally concerned with the education of kids.

Not so much educational goals because there can be any number of these, as you will readily agree if you’re just a bit familiar with all that’s been written about education during the past several hundred years or more — goals such as making kids into life long learners, imparting to them all the necessary skills and knowledge, turning them into good citizens and good people, good fathers and mothers, and now especially turning them into the skilled workforce that will enable us to better compete in the global economy, and so on.

Rather we need to start, not with these abstract goals that have little to do with the kids, but with the kids themselves, and with the world in which they are living.

In regard to the kids no two of them are alike. They are all different, with different interests, abilities, talents, different backgrounds, family situations. And they live in different ethnic and class communities, experience different walks and rides to school, and so on.

And then in regard to the world out there in which they are living. you’d be hard pressed to find much out there that corresponds or relates in any way to what the kids are doing in school. For example, if you’re an adult living, as I am in Tampa, Florida, how many times during the past year have you encountered out there in the life of the city an algebraic or geometric  expression, let alone problem?

And how many times in your everyday lives have you even looked up at the moon and the sun in the sky let alone looked beyond these two objects and with the help of the stupendous findings of the astronomers looked all the way back to the big bang?

How many times have you been taken up with a consideration of your own biological make-up, shared, as we have learned since Charles Darwin (that which you ought to have learned in biology class in school) to a greater or lesser extent by all life on the planet?

In other words what is going on out there in the world where the children, where all of us are living, that at all reflects, or relates to in any way, let alone supports the academic programs of our schools?

I’ve never encountered anyone out there in Tampa either writing an essay, or reading a great book. What is going on in the world, and what the kids are witnessing and being a part of in that world, when they’re not in school, is something else entirely.

Do our professional educators ever ask themselves how many people, let alone kids, outside of the classroom are writing? or even, in the world of the computer and television screen, reading books? Yet reading and writing, we’re told, by these same educators, is what school is or should be mostly all about, two activities that are pretty much absent from people’s daily lives. The kids know this.

This is why, as Finn points out, the achievement levels in our schools have remained flat for a generation. We’re asking of our kids things that are not going on anywhere else. This is why kids never seem to learn a foreign language in a classroom. This is why our reforms have not made a difference. What we have the kids do in our schools is totally out of sync with what is going on out there in the world.

And there is not only the world out there, out of sync with the schools. We are not helping the kids to be in sync with themselves. No two kids, no two of anything alive, are exactly alike.

And when, perhaps because of our concern for providing if not equality, equality of opportunity, we treat the kids as if they were all alike, we naturally fail to reach more than a few of them. And if we do reach that few, it’s only because the few by chance happen to fit the description of the student we have imagined.

As I write I realize I’m not saying anything new. There are those I’m sure who said at the time of Horace Mann’s Common School that school was not the only, or perhaps the best way to prepare kids for life.

And there are those still terrifically alive and interesting, what I would call the “no school” people of the sixties and seventies, the Paul Goodmans, the John Holts, the Ivan Illichs and many more, who valiantly although in vain tried to convince us that school was dead while giving birth to a creation of their own.

If the “no school,” the school is dead people did not succeed it was not because they were wrong. Actually, I think they were right in most of what they said about how kids learn (and for the most part not in school).

It was rather that society, in the form of the educational establishment couldn’t change its spots. Didn’t even try, and instead went on pretending to change by one endless series of reforms after another. Finn does make clear that following all these reforms nothing of real substance did change.

Kids continue to go to school. We continue to pretend to teach them, and they continue to pretend to learn. Not too different from totalitarian states where people pretend to be citizens with rights, where the country’s leaders pretend to recognize those rights, such as the right to vote, but where the real life, the people’s lives, all of that is confined to private spaces, such as about the kitchen table in the former Soviet Union.

What would it take to change things, to do away with the pretense that presently engulfs our public, and probably also, although to a lesser extent, our public charter and private school environments?

It would take two things:
1) A recognition of the world for what it is and of people for what they are, and
2) The abandonment of the principle, now current in our schools, that one size fits all.

And we need to accept and admit that the schools are not going to change the world. They don’t have that power. Virtue can’t be taught. The schools are just not going to shape the kids, let alone the world, in the ways we would like them to.

But somehow kids will become what they are, what they’re suppose to be, at least when they are successful and happy, and they will do this in spite of the obstacles placed in their way by the schools. The best schools, and among the enormous variety of such places in the country there are those that are “best”, will help their kids to become what they are, not place obstacles in their way.

The irony is that we do know much about kids and the world, enough to improve our “schools,” or whatever other means we employ to prepare our kids for adulthood, but we act as if we didn’t have that knowledge. We know, for example, what adults spend their time doing, doing things that have little connection with what these same adults (and now their children) did and do in school.

And we know that kids are different and need quite different paths to follow. The traditional academic and college preparatory path is, at best, only one among many, only appropriate for a minority of kids. That in itself, the fact that only the needs of a minority are being met, ought to make us reconsider what we are doing, or rather not doing, for the majority of them.

Here, taken from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics I list the jobs that the adults in the country are now doing. The total civilian labor force as of December, 2009, was 153 million, 144 million of whom were employed.

Of those employed 22 million were farm or farm related workers, 19 million were in goods producing industries, mostly construction and manufacturing.

The remaining 113 million were in the services, 22 million in government, 19 million in education and health (the fastest growing sectors at the moment), 17 million in professional and business services, 15 million in the retail trades, 13 million in leisure and hospitality, leaving the remaining 27 million jobs in other miscellaneous services.

Now have our politicians and educational establishment figures, who have so much to say about the responsibility of our schools to turn out graduates who are ready and able to compete in the global economy, have they at all considered what our own economy consists of in the way of occupations, have they considered the actual jobs that are being done by our adult population, and what sorts of preparation would be needed to get and hold these jobs?

I don’t think so. For they most of all speak as if we needed to get our kids ready to outperform the hundreds of thousands of Chinese engineers who are graduating from engineering schools in China every year. Where are the jobs to be found in this country that would employ these desired graduates?

No they can’t have thought much about the kinds of jobs adults are doing and the kind schooling, if any, that would be most appropriate to insure that the jobs out there are being filled adequately as they open up and become available. For the kind of educational goals our professional educators like to talk about have little or no relevance to the actual job prospects that the kids will eventually encounter.

Our country’s jobs, by and large, need at the most only basic literacy and numeracy skills. The sorts of things that kids ought to be able to obtain with 8 or fewer years of schooling. Most of the jobs out there are not helped, probably hurt by what we would do in the schools, or at least pretend to do — that is, teach higher forms of literacy, higher mathematics, advanced placement courses etc. Hurt, because of what we might have done instead.

We need most of all in our thinking about schools to stop believing that kids need to be highly skilled and highly knowledgeable to enter the job market. For the vast majority of positions out there they need only two things — the basic 8th. grade or less education I have mentioned, and something I have not mentioned, but that is probably even more important, good work habits.

These would be such things as the ability get up in the mornings after a good night’s sleep, to be on time, have ready for the job whatever one might need, know how to listen and to learn while  on the job, and other such things. The acquisition of these kinds of skills and habits could and ought to be stressed in the schools. It’s not, not nearly enough, and here lies perhaps the greatest failure of the schools in respect to what they might have done.

Not that preparation for the job market, which means now preparation for the service industries, should be the primary function of school. It shouldn’t. For as long as school makes up such a huge part of the kids’ growing up it should have as its primary function helping kids to find out about themselves, to discover their own gifts and interests, find out who they are. Know oneself is still relevant.

For many kids, probably the majority of them, a selection from elective subjects and activities such as music, theater, art, athletics, vocational training, including courses in computer hardware and software, public service and work internships, debating etc., and not required academic classes, would be much more appropriate and desirable for their time in school. But more and more we seem afraid to go in this direction. Afraid of the “chaos” it might bring?

It is from these sorts of electives, once having achieved a basic level of literacy and numeracy, that the kids should be allowed to choose. This is the meaning of choice. And these activities would get their attention, and then, if they were ready and interested, they would learn.

In fact, what does one ever learn without being ready and interested? It is here that lies the greatest explanation of the failure of our schools and of the reforms of which Finn speaks

Finally, and in spite of the fact that the ideal for many of us is still an academic education, meaning by that the acquisition the skills and knowledge stemming from the study of history and literature, math and science, foreign languages, et al. these skills and knowledge are not now, and probably never have been within the power and possession of more than a tiny minority of the now 7 billion people on the earth.

Why continue to force kids to believe that an academic education, suitable perhaps for a minority, is what’s most important for all? It’s not.

If the teachers were in fact capable of making kids life long learners and more reliable and responsible citizens of the Republic, those kinds of educational goals that Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann and others assumed were desirable and possible some 200 years ago, then what we are trying to do would make some sense, but they are not.

In fact, we have learned, over and over again, that the acquisition of the habits of good citizenship as  well as becoming a life time learner have never had much to do with what goes on in the school and classroom. Once again the most helpful “reform” would be to accept that these sorts of educational goals are simply not within the school’s power to realize.

To accept that and to go on to do what is within our power. That would be reform, probably even for Chester Finn, reform you could believe in.

Categories: Goals of Education, School Choice

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The Jews

January 13, 2010

David Brooks citing Steven L. Pease’s new book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” reminds us, or rather spells out for us, just how well the Jews have done throughout many of their adopted countries and most of all in the United States since the end of World War II.

“Jews are a famously accomplished group,” he says. “They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates….

“They make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.”

I have often thought to myself that perhaps the very biggest errors of first Hitler, and then Stalin, were to not treasure this obvious treasure of highly ambitious, highly intelligent, highly creative, and highly sensitive, highly whatever people.

Instead, Hitler tried to exterminate them, and with some success in regard to the 6 million or more of them whom he sent to perish in the Holocaust camps of Eastern Europe. Happily, however, he did not accomplish what he had intended and exterminate an entire people.

Stalin, following the defeat of Hitler and Germany, did allow the Jews to go on living, but refused to fully accept them as Russians, as full citizens of the Soviet Union.

Stalin never ceased to remind the Jews, right down to their Jewish identity cards that they were forced to carry, that they were a people apart, although he did not hesitate to profit from their achievements, in particular in chess, in the arts, and especially the theoretical sciences, claiming their achievements as the Soviet Union’s own, which of course they weren’t.

In the Soviet Union the Jews, although not in large numbers confined to perish in the Gulags, did remain a people “apart,” right up until the demise of the Soviet Empire in the 1991, and even afterwards in the new Russia that emerged from the ruins. Those who were able to leave, first with great difficulty from the Soviet Union, and then much more readily from Russia, settled in Western Europe and in much larger numbers in the United States and Israel, with all the truly extraordinary results that Pease outlines in his book.

What might, I have often wondered, the world be like today if the millions of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia had been allowed to remain in the places of their birth, had been nurtured, not forced to suffer pogroms and holocausts, had instead been actively encouraged to turn their intelligence and great talents in active support of the societies in which they lived?

But of course it was not to be. Instead we had first Hitler’s then Stalin’s grotesque errors in regard to this people. Only did the United States, after a rocky discrimination filled beginning, get it right in respect to the Jews.

Most of all we eventually got it right for here to meet the Jews, as well as all new comers to the country, there was and is the well established belief that the government’s principal role is not to primarily use and abuse its peoples, but to nurture and protect them, in particular their lives, liberties, and their individual pursuits of happiness.

In regard to the Jews, and the other peoples who have never ceased to come here, opportunity is what is here awaiting them. The Jewish people, rejected in their homelands, came here, took full advantage of the opportunities awaiting them, flourished, and continue to flourish, to the great benefit of themselves and us.

Categories: Thoughts

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Aristotle and Wahid and the Voice of Moderate Islam

January 7, 2010

Thomas Friedman has frequently written about the failure of moderate Muslim leaders to speak out against the Muslim extremists among them. In a recent Times op ed piece, for example, he writes:

“What is really scary is that this violent, Jihadist minority seems to enjoy the most ‘legitimacy’ in the Muslim world today. Few political and religious leaders dare to speak out against them in public. Secular Arab leaders wink at these groups, telling them: ‘We’ll arrest if you do it to us, but if you leave us alone and do it elsewhere, no problem.’”

Well one of those few political and religious leaders in the Muslim world, a former president of the world’s third largest democracy and the country with the largest Muslim population, who did dare to speak out was Abdurrahman Wahid.

Wahid, who died on December 30 of last year, was the first elected president of Indonesia after the resignation of Suharto in 1998, as well as being a long time president of the Nahdlatul Ulama, one of the largest independent Islamic organizations in the world (some 30 million members) whose mission is to make up for the failings of government by funding schools and hospitals, as well as by organizing communities into more coherent groups to combat poverty.

Mr. Wolfowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia and assistant secretary of state for East Asia, now a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes in today’s WSJ about his friend, Wahid. Wolfowitz stresses Wahid’s deep humanism, his knowledge of and even acceptance of much in our Western heritage, in particular the Aristotle of the Nichomachean Ethics, and his firm rejection of the writings of Said Qutb and Hasan al Banna, the founders of the Muslim brotherhood and to which as a young man, not unlike Bin Laden, Wahid had been attracted.

Wolfowitz writes, “When I visited Wahid recently he told me of a long-ago visit to a mosque in Morocco where an Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics was on display. Seeing that book had brought tears to his eyes and Wahid explained: ‘If I hadn’t read the Nichomachean Ethics as a young man, I might have joined the Muslim brotherhood.’

“No doubt, what had so impressed Wahid was that Aristotle could arrive at deep truths about matters of right and wrong without the aid of religion, based simply on the belief that ‘the human function is activity of the soul in accord with reason’ (Nichomachean Ethics, Book I). But his tears must have reflected the thought of how close he had come to accepting a cramped and intolerant view of life and humanity.”

Categories: Online readings

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How do the terrorists see themselves?

January 6, 2010

Probably not as terrorists. Certainly not as the embodiment of evil out to destroy the good. We actually know a lot about how they see themselves. They speak often of the validity, the rightness if not the goodness of their cause. Here are two examples.

One from the Pakistani Five. Do you remember, those five Americans who traveled to Pakistan and were arrested by anti-terror authorities in Pakistan and accused of plotting terrorist acts? They told a court Monday that they had intended to cross the border into Afghanistan to wage Jihad against Western forces. And they denied any links to Al Qaeda or plans to carry out terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

Here is what one of the five, Ramy Zamzam, a 22-year old Egyptian American,  told The Associated Press as he entered the courtroom, “We are not terrorists…We are Jihadists, and Jihad is not terrorism.”

Why were they going to Afghanistan? They said they only intended to help their Muslim brothers who are in trouble, who are bleeding and who are being victimized by Western armies.

Jihad, of course, has several different meanings in Islam. Zamzam seemed to be referring to Jihad as the duty to fight against the foreign armies illegitimately occupying Muslim lands. That may be the meaning of Jihad closest to Al Qaeda’s founder, Bin Laden himself.

According to one Web definition: “Jihad is one of the words that have been misused due to misunderstanding its true meaning. The word “Jihad” is derived from the Arabic word “Jahd” which means fatigue or the word “Juhd” which means effort. A Mujahid is he who strives in the Cause of Allah and exerts efforts which makes him feel fatigued. The word “Jihad” means exerting effort to achieve a desired thing or prevent an undesired one. In other words, it is an effort that aims at bringing about benefit or preventing harm.”

Shouldn’t we at least raise the question whether these people, mostly Muslims, such as the Pakistani Five, who are flocking to those areas of the Muslim world currently occupied by foreign armies, are only trying to free their “brothers,” not principally, in spite of their words and the suicide actions of some to that effect, trying to destroy our Western civilization?

Here is my other example of how these people see themselves, this one in the words of Anjem Choudary, a 42-year-old lawyer and the British-born son of a Pakistani immigrant, and the leader of a protest march planned for the streets of Wootton Bassett, the small English town that has achieved iconic status in Britain for honoring the passing hearses of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

“Our protest march,” according to Choudary, “will be held not in memory of the occupying and merciless British military, but rather the real war dead who have been shunned by the Western media and general public as they were and continue to be horrifically murdered in the name of democracy and freedom, the innocent Muslim men, women and children.”

In his open letter to the families of the 246 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the toppling of the Taliban in 2001 Choudary goes on to say, “It is worth reminding those who are still not blinded by the media propaganda that Afghanistan is not a British town near Wootton Bassett but rather Muslim land which no one has the right to occupy, with a Muslim population who do not deserve their innocent men, women and children to be killed for political mileage and for the greedy interests of the oppressive U.S. and U.K. regimes.”

Now if this were a debate, and if there were not so many lives at stake, if there were not suicide bombers always waiting in the wings before stepping onto the stage and blowing themselves up, and if somehow the innocent were not dying in such large numbers, well then there would be two readily defendable sides to the question. And in that case the topic for debate might be: Western Forces Should Immediately Leave Afghanistan.

Actually, I happen to agree with that statement, that our forces should leave Afghanistan, and also Iraq. If the actual wars were not such terrible things, if the seemingly endless line of suicide bombers were not almost daily murdering innocent civilians caught in the cross fire, I would gladly defend my position in debate. As it is the two sides are bent on their mutual destruction, not in words, but in blood, and talking is probably quite out of the question.

Categories: Current Affairs

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