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.”

Why isn’t this guy, James E. Miller, and not David Rubenstein, correct (see below)? Or at least why do I think he’s correct? Why is the service that teachers offer somehow different from any other business? You of all people ought to know? Anyway, his reasoning is, and has for a long time been, sticking in my craw. (Meaning I don’t seem to be able to move on.) Although “decline” may not be the right word to use because when were things ever better? Here also there was no Golden Age.
P

‘Rubenstein mentions the need to “Educate. Educate. Educate.” by reforming public school systems and highlighting the need for governments to “allocate resources more efficiently.” But of course public officials who derive their income from coercion are never capable of economizing resources as prudently as private individuals. If Rubenstein truly wanted the education industry to thrive, he would demand the government relinquish its claim on the sector and allow the market mechanism to bear its fruits. Teachers offer a service like any other business. Having bureaucrats in charge of a great portion of the industry is no better than nationalizing the production of sweaters or miniskirts. Economic calculation and resource allocation are best utilized by those who earn their income from voluntary consumers. The consequence of the public education system, reliant on force for payment, has been an increase in cost for service and no real increase in the quality offered. In other words, the industry’s lack of the elements that define capitalism has been responsible for its decline.”

“What’s at stake aren’t Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. And we have to reclaim them.”

“Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last -– an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.”

“Now, a return to the American values of fair play and shared responsibility will help protect our people and our economy.”

But nowhere in his address does he tell us exactly what he means by these values, although in the third excerpt above he does name fair play and shared responsibility as being two of them.

The President’s tendency to use what I’ll call “motherhood and apple pie” like language, that is the perfectly “safe” words and phrases that make us feel comfortable and on familiar ground, illustrates, I believe, this President’s (who is by no means alone in this respect) greatest weakness.

By the way, motherhood and apple pie, are they American values that need to be recalled and reclaimed? Well you see the problem with this kind of question and with the President’s language.

The President is clearly in love with his own rhetoric, his own choice of words. And the “turn of phrase,” such as this one, “a renewal of American values,” seems to interest him more than whatever, if anything, the phrase may mean or represent.

All too often, here in the State of the Union, and elsewhere on innumerable occasions, the President makes use of his real rhetorical gifts to address our nation’s and the world’s problems and it doesn’t work. Rhetoric may make us feel good, but no matter how superlative will never provide an answer to a real problem.

Our real problems, such as the burgeoning cost of our health care, that without action on the government’s part will bankrupt the country, such as the failure of so many of our young people to learn useful skills while in school, that which has already resulted in companies going elsewhere to look for a skilled workforce,— these problems and others cry out for substantive proposals and action.

In respect to the latter we’re still waiting. And the very last thing we needed the other night was a lecture or sermon on renewing our values.

I’d like to know if anyone who heard or read the State of the Union address on Tuesday knows what the President may have meant by American values? Sure, like motherhood and apple pie we need to protect and defend our American values. But what are these values? Are they real? Apple pie is real, motherhood too. Maybe he should have talked about them because then we might have known what he meant.

I heard the address and I don’t know what he meant. If a visitor from another planet, or even from Shanghai, were to ask me to tell him what we valued, that is those values of which the President spoke, I wouldn’t know where to begin, nor if ever I did begin where to stop.

In fact there is very little agreement among us about what we value most, American values or other values, and it is probably for this reason that the President never tried to say what these (imaginary?) values were.

This has to be a kind of a third rail for the politician. For anything said publicly in regard to our values, with of course important exceptions such as NFL football, the military’s use of killer drones in the North Western provinces of Pakistan, and the burial at sea of Bin Laden, would have found more disagreement than agreement among his listeners.

Perhaps all one can safely say is that American values are the values that Americans hold dear, and that there may be as many of these as there are Americans. What about you, do you even have a brother with the same values as yourself?

Well OK, I’m not entirely correct about that for most of us, including you and your brother, probably do share some values, maybe not apple pie, but probably motherhood?

Finally, there are things that we all value (things that still need to be identified) and these, whatever they are, may have been what the President meant? Well yes, there are certainly things that we can agree upon — the rule of law, innocent until proven guilty, the use of red and green lights at a crossing, sidewalks of course, and thousands of others.

But aren’t these types of things not so much values as customs and strategies that we have devised and then adopted to make our lives more secure and more stable and comfortable? Again you can see the problem we are facing to understand the President’s language.

Regarding most things that we value isn’t it because they work? They are helpful, they help us to bring about the result that we want to achieve? Apple pie and ice cream at the end of a good meal? There may be an American who doesn’t value that although I haven’t met him or her.

But here’s a value, one that just occurs to me. Perhaps this is one of the very ones that the President had in mind. I think of the value of hard work. And in fact the expression does occur once and early on in his address:

“An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.”

Now I agree that this is a value, or rather that this is valuable, or, again, that I myself value working hard at something. But in my some 80 years of living I have never noticed that this “value” was particularly American, more so, say, than Chinese.

In fact, isn’t the value of hard work something we Americans often tend to associate with newcomers, with immigrants to our country, with all those who are working hard for themselves and their families in order to get ahead in the new country? And because we are, after all, a nation of immigrants, we may very well mistakenly attribute to America what they bring with them, and then once here we call what they’ve brought, and may not even have found here, an American value.

Although, and here’s the rub, even for that nice American value of hard work, doesn’t it often happen that after years of living among us those once immigrants to our shores, probably like us before them, abandon their own values, including that of hard work, and become much like the rest of us, or at least no longer work as hard as at the time of their coming, when only by their hard work could they obtain a good life for themselves and their families.

I will say one thing for our President —unlike nearly all of the Republican candidates for national office, he is not trying to send the most recent generations of “hard workers” back to where they came from. He correctly recognizes their “value” to our country and is wisely proposing to help them to remain here.

Although, once again, as if not being secure and comfortable in his own office with almost going it alone in regard to immigration policy, with actually helping illegals to remain in the country, and probably ever in love with his own rhetoric and turn of phrase, he throws into the portion of his address when he discusses immigration these harsh words:

“I believe as strongly as ever that we should take on illegal immigration. That’s why my administration has put more boots on the border than ever before.”

Alas! Too bad! And he was doing so well.

“Boots on the border?” What’s that mean? Putting on your boots and kicking people out? Whatever it means, and whatever it is, it’s certainly not an American value. And for all that we’ve said about hard work and the immigrants to our shores it’s a terrible strategy. Once again he evidently got carried away by his own rhetoric.

“My mother turned ninety in the Connecticut house where she had lived for almost sixty years, and spent her last decade looking out the window. For my mother’s birthday my wife and I arrived at her house early and at noon my children and grandchildren surprised Gramma Lucy with a visit. We hugged and laughed together, taking pictures, until I watched my mother’s gaiety collapse into exhaustion. … A few months later she had one of her attacks of congestive heart  failure …. An ambulance took her to Yale-New Haven Hospital. My wife Jane and I drove down from New Hampshire to care for her when she came home. … She knew she could no longer live alone, her pleasure and her pride. We moved her to a nursing home not far from us in New Hampshire.”

“She died a month short of ninetyone. Her brain was still good. A week before she died, she read ‘My Antonia’ for the tenth time. Willa Cather had always been a favorite. Most of the time in old age she read Agatha Christie. She said that one of the advantages of being ninety was that she could read a detective story again, only two weeks after she first read it, without any notion of which character was the villain. Even so her last months were mostly bleak.”

I’ll turn 80 this year and I’ve decided to cease reading the Western stories of Louis Lamour (of which during the past year or two I’ve read some 57) even though I’m pretty sure that I could go on and read the others and then all of them a second or third time, and that what I would experience would not be much different from the experience of Hall’s ninety year old mother when reading Christie a second or third time.

Lamour’s books would be, I’m sure, on a second reading, mostly new for me also, but I don’t want to go that route. The route of the old? I’d like to stay young even while growing old.

So instead I’m reading the classics, all books that I’ve read previously, and also that are mostly “new” to me now on reading them decades later. But, I tell myself, this is not the same thing. It’s not that I’m old and losing my memory. It’s that I’m seeing further now than I did at an earlier age and time. Or at least I’d like to believe it.

Regarding the classics there is simply much that I didn’t see during that first or even second reading years ago. The last time I read Moby Dick was in the 1980s when I set out first thing in the mornings to read the story out loud to the assembled students in our school. I never finished that particular reading even though we were reading Somerset Maugham’s abridged version, the one that comes without all the whaling information (information that is now certainly more readily available and more complete on Google).

Would Melville have written as he did, filling us in with everything he thought we should know about the whaling industry, if Google had been available? I don’t think so. The last time I completed the book, the whaling chapters and all, was in 1957, so another reading now would be more than appropriate.

A great book, of course, deserves multiple readings, and especially readings coming at different points in one’s life. Now this may also be true of skillfully written thrillers or adventures, such as those of Christie or Lamour, but much less so.

I sometimes wonder what that novel, one that Melville didn’t write, would have been like, if he had chosen the American West, and in particular the settling of the West, as the backdrop of his story, instead of the 19th century whaling industry.

One senses in Lamour’s thrilling and exciting tales that there is much there, and that Lamour himself is only touching the surface of the land and the people, and that the depths of the experiences he touches upon cry out to be heard and told by a greater writer.

What if instead of the some 100 or more tales Lamour tells, all of them telling much the same story, he had spent his writing years becoming that ‘greater writer’ and writing just one tale, one story (I think of the example of Cervantes’s Don Quixote which I’m rereading, this time an electronic version on my iPhone) one in which he tried to put it all down into just the one book, much as Melville tried and to great degree succeeded, in putting it all down about the 19th. century American whaling adventure?

Then we might have had, even more than Moby Dick, the great American novel, because the story of America is much more the story of the successive waves of immigrants moving West in search of riches than it is of the mad Ahab leading his ship and crew to a watery end in the far Pacific while bent on killing the white sperm whale that had cost him, Ahab, a leg.

For Ahab’s story, in spite of Melville’s attempt to make it so by symbols, by having most everything in his story be much more than it seems, is not the heart of the American story.

Isn’t it the fact that we, along with the other so called developed nations, are no longer able to meet and satisfy the generous commitments we have made during the times of affluence to the material needs and welfare of our citizens?

During those years, that is our “fat” years, when the economy was growing and jobs were more plentiful than they are today, we readily made these now unsustainable commitments. And we did so principally for two reasons, given of course that in those fat years the means of doing so were readily available.

First, wasn’t it obviously  the right thing to do? To commit large portions of the country’s financial resources to the old and the infirm, to the young, the disadvantaged and handicapped, to our public servants in their retirement, to public education, to health care, to our armed forces, and what else. Who could deny the rightness of our doing all this and more?

And secondly, our elected representatives who made these commitments clearly knew that by  so doing they were also helping themselves, at least as much if not more than their legislation was helping those in need. For the various segments of society that were the beneficiaries of their actions would go on electing them to public office.

So to take the steps to get us into our present situation was as they say, a no-brainer. All along the way to this point in time, throughout it all, Republicans no less than Democrats were happily growing the entitlement portions of federal, state and local budgets, and in doing so thereby transforming us, no less than the politicians in France, Greece, or any number of the 27 nations of the European Union, into a debtor nation, or, what is now almost the same thing, a welfare state.

Now while it may have taken no brains to get us here to get us out, if even possible, will take a lot of brains, brains we probably don’t even have. Up until now the brains of our best economists including a good number of Nobel Prize winners have not agreed among themselves regarding diagnoses or remedies.

In spite of hundreds if not thousands of op ed advice columns mostly written by the economists the economy is still barely growing, unemployment still high, especially among the young, the recession still alive. We can say, however, that we’re not yet in a depression, and for this we might not unjustly give credit to the President and his own team of economists.

But more than brains (on the part of the economists or anyone else) it’s going to take will and courage on the part of our elected representatives. They’re going to have to do what’s difficult, so difficult that it’s just almost never done. They’re going to have to take back a good part of what they and their predecessors gave away in the good years. And, what is probably ever more difficult for them, they’re going to have to cease weighing the impact of whatever they do on the likelihood of their being re-elected to office, and just do it.

Now what are the chances of our elected representatives showing that kind of courage? Probably no more than those of the perennial snowball. Should we therefore abandon them and our country along with them? Well no, I don’t think so. In any case there’s probably no place to go where things are any different, where the courage, and the will to do the right thing, are in place.

But there is this. Even if our representatives won’t change in response to the changed circumstances of the country, change will come and change will be forced upon them. Much as in the past when our leaders did not change but simply were changed by events as they endured the terrible consequences of their lack of will and courage.

Our own history is filled with innumerable instances of this sort of thing, some more costly than others, as, for example, the War between the North and the South, the Great Depression, and any number of other wars, especially those of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, in all of which the country did muddle, or is still muddling through, but only with great accompanying losses of lives and treasure. And much as our present situation, none of these things had to be.

The cartoon is taken from a review article, War No More, in Foreign Affairs by Timothy Snyder of Steven Pinker’s new book,
The Better Angels of our Nature.

From these two numbers he goes on to conclude that “we are $800 billion away from taking half of GDP out of the private sector” — the implication being, of course, that this is not good, terrible in fact. Why government would be “larger than society!”

Now while not everything is wrong with his reasoning, there is not much that is right about it. Most of all he is just wrong to assume that a line can be drawn between government and society. Or to imply that government is only in the business of spending monies created by the private sector. Government is on the dole?

It has always seemed to me that much of our new wealth, and resulting GDP growth, stems from government funded projects. A simple example, wars. These are initiated by governments and before they’re over make many individuals, not a part of government, wealthy.

Nor need I mention other government initiated projects of which there are myriads, including moon shots, interstate highways, and the protection of farm, forest, and recreational lands, all of which have grown this country’s wealth considerably.

Larry is talking nonsense as so many of the current Republican presidential candidates. Why? Why would he want to make us believe that we’re not the problem, but that the problem is government? I guess I understand the candidates doing this but he is not even running for office.

In any case as much as he would like to for the benefit of his argument he cannot draw a line between the public (local, state, and federal government) and the private sectors. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. Where would you place yourself, on what side of the line?

He writes: Would we have adopted monotheism in the first place if we had known, 

(1) That our species is at most 200,000 years old, and very nearly joined the 98.9 percent of all other species on our planet by becoming extinct, in Africa, 60,000 years ago, when our numbers seemingly fell below 2,000 before we embarked on our true “exodus” from the savannah?

(2) That the universe, originally discovered by Edwin Hubble to be expanding away from itself in a flash of red light, is now known to be expanding away from itself even more rapidly, so that soon even the evidence of the original “big bang” will be unobservable?

(3) That the Andromeda galaxy is on a direct collision course with our own, the ominous but beautiful premonition of which can already be seen with a naked eye in the night sky?

These are very recent examples, post-Darwinian and post-Einsteinian, and they make pathetic nonsense of any idea that our presence on this planet, let alone in this of so many billion galaxies, is part of a plan. Which design, or designer, made so sure that absolutely nothing (see above) will come out of our fragile current “something”? What plan, or planner, determined that millions of humans would die without even a grave-marker, for our first 200,000 years of struggling and desperate existence, and that there would only then at last be a “revelation” to save us, about 3,000 years ago, but disclosed only to gaping peasants in remote and violent and illiterate areas of the Middle East?

But isn’t he beating a dead horse, or hasn’t he simply created a straw man opponent, easy to knock over or blow away?

For who among the educated peoples of the world has not revised his own conception of God and religion in response to the findings such as the three mentioned? Of course there are those who have not, as evidenced by the most recent debates in Iowa.

Perhaps the Iowa debaters are not ignorant themselves but just trying to get the votes of the ignorant, of whom there are many. However, given for whatever reason they saying, or not saying about God, evolution, and all the rest they really can’t be a part of our conversation. And we can only hope and “pray” that they don’t obtain by their efforts positions of power over the rest of us.

In any case previous conceptions of God as depicted in the Old Testament, the Koran, and probably in the writings accompanying most if not all the great religions of the world, given the dominant position of science and its discoveries in our, are greatly in need of serious revision.

And, in fact, when these traditional outlooks are not changed in response to the findings of science, well then Hitchens, and many others of similar persuasion, are certainly correct to ridicule those holding onto such clearly obsolete beliefs.

I myself tend to agree with the late Stephen Jay Gould who proposed that the worlds of science and religion commanded “non-overlapping magisteria.”  So, yes, let’s keep God.

I along with Gould would allow religion and science to go their own separate ways, and hope that just as we don’t interfere with the freedom of thought and action of our fellows, that those who hold powerful positions in science and religion do not encroach upon the other’s legitimate spaces of thought and action.

However there is for me a much more interesting question than the one Hitchens and others tried to answer for the Templeton Foundation. My question would be, “Do the findings of science make recent history, or at least the way we look or make use of that history, obsolete?” Do we give to that history too much importance?

To both I would answer emphatically yes. I believe we should stop dwelling so exclusively on the history of the past 5 or 6 thousand years, let alone the history of modern Europe and America during the past 5 or 6 hundred years, and instead, we should make come alive, in our schools, and in our homes the much more significant history of man, of all men and women, on the earth, this history being one of some 200,000 years.

And we should give no less of our attention to the history of the earth, this one being some 5 billion years long, and, although not finally, the history of the universe, this one being even longer, some 12 to 15 billion years. “Not finally” because there may be multiuniverses out there, each one with a history.

To alleviate our present problems and, for many, sufferings, if not get over them entirely, we need desperately to see ourselves immersed in something much grander than the story of America, or even the story we uncover when we locate our own native American, European, African or other roots.

For this “something grander” has the best chance of freeing us from being the prisoners of the ideas and beliefs of the very recent past, many of these being the very stories and dogma accompanying religion, and many of these being the causes of our present troubles.

This something grander has the best chance of freeing us from being native American, European, African, Asiatic or something else, attached by mere chance to this or that place on the earth’s surface.

For after all we are, aren’t we, just one species (unlike, say the beetles of which there are some 400,000) with a history of some 200,000 years, of most of which we are still mostly ignorant. Shouldn’t that history be more on our minds, more of an influence on how we live, or don’t live together?

And most of all it is the findings of science that can and should put us into this much larger context. Our Aleut, Inuit, Tlingit, Haida, and other Alaskan cousins are just that, cousins, meaning that we have ancestors in common.

Hadn’t we ought to have the Aleuts, Inuits, Tlingit and others at the family table when we celebrate, and not push them away into some terribly remote and unfamiliar past? For our pasts if we go back just a few more years, as science has made evident, are the same.

Why do we continue to locate ourselves so much in the present? Perhaps it’s because we are a species or people still fearful of the “other.” A species that would stay close to home, to what we know, both in our thinking and in our feelings.

And isn’t this blind attachment to the present and recent past, this fact about who we are and how we live, more than any other that brings about the still abundant wars and killings that we never seem to cease to experience?

Isn’t it recent history, that which if not learn become acquainted with in our homes and schools, that most justifies these wars and killings? Witness present day Iraq, and in that country those very close cousins the Sunnis and the Shiites (not to mention the Israelis and the Palestinians) who go on killing one another. For what, mostly for their adherence to their own recent history.

Man’s history, all of it all together, is not obsolete, and since this history is only one, when we look back far enough we see that we share it with everyone else.

And this shared history, in fact our evolutionary history, if we would only let it, has the power to do away with our clinging attachments to our recent past, the events of which at the present time serve mostly to keep us apart, if not at war with one another.

Why would any American even consider them for the office? Is this what so many mean when the speak of our “civilization” as being in decline? That our people would actually vote for such as these? In Iowa what “civilization” do these candidates represent? Certainly not one I want to be a part of. For the moment, anyway, they seem to represent a minority and probably won’t impose their reactionary views on the rest of us. Let’s hope so.,

The battle for the Republican presidential nomination that, as the Media would have it is beginning in Iowa, ought rather to begin here with the Economist article, or at least with the ideas expressed therein. The “battle” in Iowa is much more like a squabble in a school playground among the loudest and most ignorant of the children.

What is it about these Republican candidates that enables them to hold their extreme and revolting positions regarding so much? As in the school playground here also it must be ignorance. What are their revolting positions? Here is how the Economist summarizes them. Grab hold of something to steady yourself while reading on.

Nowadays, a candidate must believe not just some but all of the following things: that abortion should be illegal in all cases; that gay marriage must be banned even in states that want it; that the 12m illegal immigrants, even those who have lived in America for decades, must all be sent home; that the 46m people who lack health insurance have only themselves to blame; that global warming is a conspiracy; that any form of gun control is unconstitutional; that any form of tax increase must be vetoed, even if the increase is only the cancelling of an expensive and market-distorting perk; that Israel can do no wrong and the “so-called Palestinians”, to use Mr Gingrich’s term, can do no right; that the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and others whose names you do not have to remember should be abolished.

It can’t be, you say. Well it is. Cry the Beloved Country once again.