Monthly Archives: February 2012

It is Timothy Egan’s opinion, in a December 2011 Times op ed piece, Please Stop Sharing, especially now with the ease of access to internet technology and in particular Facebook and Twitter, that we’re sharing too much. Are we? Can we ever share, go public with too much of ourselves? In important senses isn’t sharing what life is all about?

Well yes, he is right on occasion, as in the example he cites of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner, becoming in Egan’s words, “the saddest of the digital exhibitionists.” But was it sharing, or perhaps how, and even more what he was sharing that was at fault in Weiner’s case?

Without a doubt what’s happening and what Egan is describing is new. Facebook, Twitter and all the other APPs on our digital devices are propelling us full speed ahead we know not where. And we definitely should try to understand what’s happening. Maybe even ask if it’s a good thing? Is it? Or if we decide it isn’t should we conclude with Egan that we’ve gone too far in this public sharing of ourselves, and reverse direction?

Most likely for the centuries, much longer, the thousands, tens of thousands of years of homo sapiens’ presence on the blue planet, anonymity was the rule, and twittering was for the birds. But that of course can’t mean that things always have to be that way. In so many other respects we have left those tens of thousands of mostly private and unknown worlds far behind us.

For some reason Egan seems to feel that anonymity was and still is a good thing, and that we ought to treasure it, not so readily fling it overboard as we sail or fly into the brave new world of sharing ourselves on the internet with hundreds or thousands of others most of whom we couldn’t possibly know let alone be their friends.

Egan says that “people he once admired, even looked up to — smart, literate, funny folks — have gone down several notches in my estimation after they decided to reveal their every idiotic observation via Twitter.”

The evidence for this? He gives us these three “idiotic” tweets of a good friend:

“Stuck in traffic. OMG, this light is long!”  “Just had the best burrito of my life!”  “Saw my first deliveryman on a Segway. — how cool is that?”

My reaction to these tweets? I didn’t think they were idiotic. Not at all. I thought them neat and that it was cool that we were able to get that close to someone else, not even with the status of a “stranger,” but someone whose very existence was only known to me before, if at all, as a statistic, being just one of seven or more billion people on the earth, one whose anonymous existence (for me) would otherwise never have touched my no less anonymous existence. If nothing else the tweets do make him come alive to me, …and if I were to tweet in return?

Egan thinks differently. Not very cool, he says:

“Not very, actually. Where did this compulsion for light confession come from? In part, surely, from narcissism, a trait as ancient as our species. But at least Narcissus could only stare at his own reflection until it killed him.” Does he mean by that that this present Facebook/Twitter obsession is going to kill us?

The number of people we know in this life through direct contact is tiny, for some of us maybe only a wife, children, grand children and a few friends, a few people at work. Most of the people we know, or know of, reach us if at all through their public communications, through their sharing.

OK, my now knowing Egan’s friend, X, through his observations about the length of a traffic light, a liking for burritos, and his curiosity about the Segway is pretty thin stuff compared to what others, perhaps through a story, a song, or their role in a sports event, or other production, have done to make themselves known to the public.

When I think about it, I myself do a lot of sharing on my Blog, tweeting, although not yet on Facebook, and I have no idea if my mostly idle commentary is of any interest to anyone, in fact whether it’s seen or read by anyone, whether it’s any “cooler” than the tweets mentioned. And it may be that what I’m doing is much like looking in a pool of water, at my image in a mirror.

But how many of us live our lives without ever looking in a mirror? Can we really get along without it? And isn’t it our intention on Twitter and Facebook, unlike whatever the intentions of Narcissus may have been, that others may enjoy, if not learn from, what we have found in ourselves and have made public and they can now share?

Although I never thought that I was alone to be irritated when stuck in traffic and waiting for the light to change, nor any less alone to like burritos and be curious about the glimpse of that Segway that I do catch sight of from time to time, reading someone else’s tweets echoing my own thoughts even on such little things (also occasionally big things) does make me feel a bit less alone. And that may be the best explanation why some 200,000,000 Americans are active users of Twitter and Facebook.

Mike

Thanks for directing me to Kelly Flynn’s piece in Ed Week. Have always, well since I was a public school teacher in 1969, felt the same, that the elephant in the room was bad behavior, student apathy, absenteeism and other such, and that we, teachers, (and administrators, parents, everyone) refused to talk about it. And this is still the case, as Kelly says.

But even more important we have never addressed the causes of the apathy, absenteeism etc., What makes the kids behave the way they do, apathetic, truant and all the rest? And endless series of reforms, as Diane Ravitch and many others have shown, have not changed the situation in the public schools.

Just the other day I was visiting a public school here where I’m now living and it could have been 50 years ago in the high school where I was a teacher myself. Apathy and absenteeism were still rife.

Well you know what I think, and I probably need not say it once again, that the cause is socialism, that which was the result of our failure, at the time of Horace Mann’s 19th. century school reforms, to make sure that the principal actors in the drama of schooling, the students and parents, had ownership, that they somehow owned the process. But from that beginning some 160 years ago they didn’t.

If teachers and students/parents were somehow to “own” the process of getting an education it would change things overnight. For those who have ownership, and therefore stand most to benefit, or not, from their actions, do not display apathy or absenteeism. In our public schools, alas, the students and their parents don’t own anything at all, least of all their time for learning.

In fact the students, even those, perhaps the majority of them who in one way or another “game” the situation and stick around and do what is expected of them, understand very quickly that the educational system is not theirs, that it belongs to someone else, that it has little interest in who they are or what they most need.

Only a form of ownership, paying for something with money one has somehow if not earned at least controls, will get the buyer, in this case the student, interested in the quality of the product, in this case his or her education.

The $5 fee you speak of, as charged at Noble Charter School Network in Chicago, is a step in the right direction.

In today’s Times (February 20) Thomas B. Edsall summarizes what he sees as the electoral positions of the President and his Republican challengers (in as much as one can lump them together).

President Obama, he says, is calling for additional investment in public education thereby growing the chances of everyone to succeed, for revisions to the tax code insuring that everyone pays their fair share, and for new regulations insuring that everyone follows the rules. In other words, the President is calling for an even more active Federal government.

The Republicans, on the other hand, are calling for reduced taxes, regulation, and spending, in order thereby to free market forces and revive private sector economic growth, while all the time denouncing the expansion of a Democratic “entitlement society” and what they see as a trend toward European social democracy.

Edsall is questioning whether both positions are not “off the mark,” and in particular, (while perhaps revealing his own position in the debate) whether “the legitimacy of free market capitalism in America is facing fundamental challenges,” challenges that so far neither the President nor the Republican candidates are addressing.

And in fact, Edsall says, there are challenges or issues out there, that are making many of us, including some politicians and political thinkers, uneasy.

Issues such as whether,

– large segments of the American workforce — millions of people — might not be at a structural disadvantage in the face of global competition, technological advance and ever more sophisticated forms of automation, and if this situation is permanent.

– the  share of profits from improving corporate productivity flowing to capital and to high-earning C.E.O.s continue to grow, while the income of wage earners stagnates and their share of profits declines.

– the surging wealth and income of the top one percent and of the top 0.1 percent has reached a tipping point at which the political leverage of the very affluent decisively outweighs the influence of the electorate at large?

– in the United States and Europe democratic free market capitalism is no longer capable of providing broadly shared benefits to a solid majority of workers.

And if one may read between the lines it seems that for Edsall there is only one important issue, one that the presidential candidates, including the President himself, are not talking about it, that being the [questionable] “legitimacy of free market capitalism.” In America, of course, and elsewhere.

Is he correct, ought we now to be questioning the legitimacy of free market capitalism? I think he’s wrong. Hasn’t he forgotten, for example, that “free market capitalism” is more that anything else, certainly more than any number of leaders of nations, let alone the mistaken left and right political ideologies imposed upon their peoples by these leaders, responsible for the wealth and the accompanying growth of the numbers of the earth’s peoples?

Free market capitalism, or what is the same thing, the free exchange of goods and services among men, is perhaps the single most important force acting upon us, or with, or from us, as you like, that has brought us to where we are today, where millions of the poor live (are alive) with advantages that the kings and rulers of the earth of earlier times did not enjoy.

Free market capitalism is a force, no less than gravity or evolution, and no less than these two can it be denied without disastrous consequences as we’ve seen in any number of failed states when individuals were not allowed the simple freedoms of movement and exchange. Edsall should be asking a quite different question. And in fact most of the writers he cites in his piece are for the most part not questioning the legitimacy of free market capitalism. Instead, they are noting, again, that free exchange between peoples does also bring about creative destruction, and any number of other painful side effects.

And the question he, and we should be asking is how, if at all, we might manage and thereby reduce the painful side effects, the pain, the destructive forces of free market capitalism. We cannot, as the Republicans would do, just leave it alone, for too many people will suffer needlessly. In fact, for all our history we have managed it more or less well. But we have to be careful not to tie it down, as the Lilliputians Gulliver, with any number of rules and regulations that would ultimately prevent our freedom of movement and resulting new wealth creation.

I don’t believe that President Obama is questioning the legitimacy of free market capitalism, but he may not understand, for example, that corrections to our, in part, failed systems of health care and education, will not result from his actions but only from allowing, and then not obstacling the resulting myriads of free exchanges among free individuals in a free market.

The passage below comes from a “Stone” article in today’s NYTimes. I couldn’t resist sending it to you, not because I thought for a moment it would alleviate your suffering. I knew for sure that it would not. But, I thought, it would arouse at least a smile, or laugh on your part, the ‘best medicine” always, as they say. Let me know.

Evidently the angels in the beginning circled about God, then (for some reason?) became distracted, grew heavier, and fell away. Bodies then are nothing more than the heaviness acquired as one falls away from God, nothing more than lazy and sluggish spirits.

A nice image if nothing else. Perhaps if you could just convince yourself of this way of seeing, might then your terrible back pain disappear as you became once again all spirit?

OK, I know, but it is a nice image, accounting still, perhaps, for much of the appeal of religion. Also, in Father Origen’s time, the first century B.C.,  a time of little or no medical knowledge, I suppose these and other such ways of envisioning one’s own situation may have lessened, if only a bit, the pain?

Here’s the passage:

The philosophical meaning of materialism may in the final analysis be traced back to a religious view of the world. On this view, to focus on the material side of existence is to turn away from the eternal and divine. Here, the category of the material is assimilated to that of sin or evil. Thus the first-century Church Father Origen tells of how, at the beginning of time, the angels circled around God in a completely immaterial state. They were entirely focused on him, but at some point they became distracted, and they began to fall away from him. And as they fell they grew heavier and heavier, and fell faster and faster. To be a bodily thing on Origen’s view, and to mistake the world for a world of bodily things, is to be a thing that is distracted from the divine. Later, along the same lines, the 17th-century Cambridge Platonist Anne Conway would describe bodies as nothing more than “lazy” and “sluggish” spirit.

Dale Stephens, just 20 years old and himself a college dropout, asks in a Times Blog, Why Go to College at All? In response to his questioner he pretty much rejects the reasons people give for going to college. All  except for one, status. That one he allows. College does confer some status, especially if you’ve gone to one of the big name schools, and even if for only a semester or two. (In regard to that I’d like to ask him if the status obtained, say from Harvard, is worth the $200,000 price tag?)

The other arguments he demolishes with a few well chosen sentences and I find myself mostly in agreement with what he says. My own grandchildren are not old enough yet, but when they too are thinking about college I hope I’m still around can introduce them to the ideas of Dale Stephens. Actually well before then, because his ideas apply to school generally, not just to college. I wonder if he has read John Holt?

So, how does he respond to the usual arguments? College, they say, is where you go to learn. No, he says, you may go there to learn, but if you’ve spent much time there you’ll agree that there very little learning goes on. Yes, I agree, and I would add that when the student does learn it probaby has more to do with what he does for himself than what being in a college environment is doing for him.

In regard to, —college is where you socialize and develop a network of important contacts if not friends. That and status have always seemed to me the most convincing reasons. But at what price? For much less than the cost of a college education you could easily put yourself in situations where you would “socialize” as much or more than in a college dormitory, and make friends, and establish “contacts.” That sort of thing doesn’t have to be confined to college. Work and travel are two other such situations that come immediately to mind.

Then what about “self-discovery?” Isn’t that what happens in college? Stephens would say, and here I would strongly agree, that college, not to mention school, may be what most puts off one’s discovery of oneself.

There’s certainly no evidence that people learn more about themselves in a classroom or college dorm than in any number of “real” situations, such as being away from home and having to work and fend for oneself.

The last of these reasons for going to college, and in fact the one that you hear most often in the media, — that college graduates earn more than those who have not been to college. In other words you go to college to grow your earning power, to get a good job. Stephens dismisses this argument neatly when he says,

“The key factor may be not the degree itself but the degree earner. It’s not that college creates success. It’s that smart and motivated people in our society tend to go to college. I bet if you took those smart and motivated people and put them out into the work force [without college], they would [still] earn more than other people.”

Bravo! And I would stress, as Stephens does, that all that money spent on college might be put to better use. Not to mention all that time in classrooms and other situations when you may be enjoying yourself but probably not “learning.”