Didn’t Jesus know this, —that we all, and not just our fellows, in his case his fellow Jews of ancient Palestine, were one people? He may not have understood then as we do now that we were and are alone on the earth as the only surviving member of the genus homo, cousins if you like, all descendants of our African ancestors.

In any case Jesus’ words as written down in the Gospels by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, picture the men and women of his own time, the Jews, Romans, Greeks, and the others, as being in their essential human qualities, in their humanity, all the same. No where does the man Jesus give any importance to their ethnic or racial, or other differences.

We might rightly ask, why have we gone on ignoring this message, of the unimportance of physical or racial differences?

Believers and non-believers, both, go on making the mistake of stressing their particular beliefs, or non-beliefs, rather than being primarily concerned, as was Jesus himself, with how we treat one another. Who cares a fig about what they believe or do not believe, when it has always been what they do, how they live, that it’s all about?

Throughout our history there have some believers and some non-believers, those now we would call secular humanists, who have understood the importance of how we treat one another. But too many even of them continue to make the mistake of claiming to know, the ones that there is a God and the others that there is no God. It never seems to occur to either group that there is no way they can know anything at all about God, and certainly not whether or not he exists. This observation, or as I would like to say, fact, alone accounts for the continuing power of the Bible’s Book of Job.

Why haven’t both believers and non-believers realized that if there is a God he would probably be most interested in how we lived with and how we loved one another, and not at all in what we might make of him, God, neither in our thoughts, nor in our prayers.

In my opinion the power of prayer continues to be much overvalued. It’s as if we went on betting on a horse that had never won, to everyone’s agreement, a single race. For in fact, how many prayers have ever been answered? And in any case of what interest could our prayers ever be to any God?

There is just no evidence that God has any need of us. And neither is there any evidence that we need him. Whereas there is plenty of evidence, more than enough, that we need one another, and why isn’t this what gets all our attention?

Two:

This one in regard to the differences of which I spoke earlier, in regard to the words race, ethnicity, religion, culture and others, that in our usage of them we have been led on to stress our differences, creating thereby brutal oppositions and rivalries, and ultimately to our killing one another.

In regard to the subject France has just outlawed one of these words, race, making it now a crime to use that word in penal law. France’s National Assembly has decided, we’ve been told, to drop the word “race” from the country’s laws.

That may be the first word to go, but there are others, will the politicians stop there? And anyway, can it be done, can a problematic word be banished from the language by a vote of the ruling Socialist Party, by the stroke of President Hollande’s pen? Can the simple prohibition of a word that has accounted for untold suffering and huge numbers of deaths in the past prevent additional suffering and death in the future? You would like to think so.

In any case, it’s always an interesting question, how much does something, good or bad, depend upon there being a word for it? Or if there is no word is there no thing out there that the word would represent? If there is no word for what we’ve always called racial differences, such as skin color, physical prowess, brain power, etc. does that mean that we will stop separating people by such differences? Probably not, but perhaps it could be a step in the right direction.

According to the writer of the article in the Times the “move” in the French Assembly was “aimed at undermining the bogus foundation of racist ideology.” The word race, it was said, had no scientific basis and from now on the words racial and race would be dropped from articles in the French penal code, and when necessary be replaced, perhaps, by the word ethnic.

There was plenty of reaction as reported in the French press — “You don’t change reality by changing words.”  “We should also ban the word ‘disease’ and we would suddenly all be healthy.” “There’s no connection between the two — Diseases exist, human races don’t.”

And there were the words of President Hollande, himself, “There is only one race, and one family, the human family,” much like what I was trying to say in my Blog.

Alana Lentin and Valerie Amiraux, writing in The Guardian, cautioned that, “Not talking about races does not lead naturally to the demise of ‘race thinking.’” Again, that interesting question. Does not using a particular word, not talking about something, lead to the end of that something?

In regard to what I’d been saying in the comment above about believers and non-believers, might not having a word for God do away with God? Maybe, because God is not a single entity, and having just one word does make it perhaps into something it’s not.

I’ve always believed that the Greeks, and many non Greeks, or barbarians, and many American Indian tribes, had it right. There are many Gods. For clearly the word God stands for many things, many different things, and serves many people, many different people. And not having a single word to represent so much might keep us from adopting the single idea of one true God. For hasn’t the latter expression, the one true God, leading to my God vs. your God, much like the single word race, also brought about mostly untold suffering and death to the world’s peoples?

President Obama was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago, speaking with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. It seems that Nieto’s principal stated agenda for the meeting with Obama was that it be affirmed, loudly and clearly, in the presence of his visitor from the North that Mexico was more than the sum of its problems.

For it does seem to most of us, who know little of Mexico except what we may read in the day’s headlines, that the war on drugs as well as the growing numbers of jobless youth, both of them clearly huge problems, are what Mexico is mostly about. It’s understandable that the new President would want to dispel this idea of his country.

And there’s no need, I’m sure, to point out that Mexico’s problems have repeatedly crossed the border between us, and are now no less our problems than theirs. And in fact, in regard to the drugs, that particular problem may be more ours than theirs.

During his visit Obama did try to help the Mexican President portray Mexico as more than its problems. In a speech to high school and university students at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City on Friday, May 3rd, he declared that it was “time to banish the stereotypical Mexico of violence and people fleeing across borders and embrace the new image of a strengthening democracy and economy…” “it’s clear,” he said, “that a new Mexico is emerging.”

Was he successful in changing our idea of the country? Probably not, but it is worth asking not only about Mexico, but about any country, about us, if the country is more than the sum of its problems. What, for example, would our own country be if it were not primarily just its problems, in our case these being not just unemployment and the war on drugs, but the  hundreds, the thousands of other problems with which almost daily we are bombarded by the media?

And we might, each one of us, ask the same thing about ourselves. What would I be, for example, if I were more than the sum of my problems? For the problems, of marriage, family, work, and much else, are there and there are days when they do seem to sum me up nicely.

I don’t know how President Nieto answered his own question, what for him was Mexico other than its problems? I don’t know what he may have said to Obama in private conversation.

I do know something about how we might answer the question, better, how our presidents have answered the question. In particular, certain of our presidents (or in one case founding fathers) who in times of revolution and war when presidents perhaps were, and still are, more listened to, have spoken to what we were.

It does seem as though our most admired presidents are those who have come up with the best answers to the question about what we are other than our problems.

At the time of the founding of our country Thomas Jefferson affirmed that we were a people who believed that all men were created equal, that they were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights among which were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments including our own were instituted among men to secure these rights deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Abraham Lincoln speaking on November 19, 1963 at the dedication of the newly created cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to honor the war dead of what had turned out to be the most important battle of the Civil War just a few months earlier, between July 1 and July 3, began his two minute talk with a brief summary of Jefferson’s words in the Declaration,”a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

For Lincoln at Gettysburg the “more than our problems” were all those who on the battlefield had given their lives that our nation, the United States of America, might live and experience a new birth of freedom, and that government, our government, a government that was of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president for four elected terms of office, between 1932 and 1945, during both the country’s greatest economic depression as well as its “greatest” war, spoke at his first inaugural in 1932, not so much to the very real problems we faced, but much as Jefferson and Lincoln earlier, to what we were or could be as a people, saying:

“This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.”

Our current president, President Barack Obama, well known for his speeches, in any number of them, as much or more than his predecessors, has tried to put into words the essence of what we are as a country and a people. And although inevitably, given the obstacles this country, and any country, will always encounter, some of his addresses do read like a laundry list of our problems, at the same time they would persuade us of our  real strengths, to a recognition on our part of what we are, of what we are capable of achieving when we work together. —Much as at the country’s founding, during the Civil War, during the times of the Great Depression and World War II.

This was certainly the overriding message of Obama’s second inaugural address. The task of our generation, he said, was to make Thomas Jefferson’s words, the life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the Declaration, real for every American. His rhetorical device for doing this was to repeat the phrase, “We, the People.” In his own words:

“For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. … We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity.  …We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.  …We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war. We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still…

More than our problems? No less than the Mexican president, that’s what we would like to be.

In other words there really is only one of us. Does make us kind of special you would think. There were at one time others, the Neanderthals, for example, but these and other even earlier representatives of homo had pretty much disappeared by the time our own history began, some tens of thousands of years ago.

So wouldn’t you think that the fact of our being the only surviving member of the genus homo would have over the years of our history brought us together? After all, being just a single species, doesn’t that make us all cousins of a sort?

But instead we have, cousins all, during those tens of thousands of years remained apart, organized ourselves into groups, tribes (still prominent today), gangs, nations, countries, all of which have constantly fought with one another, leading all to often to the expulsion, disappearance, or death of one or more of the opposing factions.

And over and over again we have seen that only by giving up their individual characteristics, often the very things that made then what they were, have groups and individuals, in the past and still today, been able to survive. For fierce rivalries leading to all out wars —and not the few moments of peace that past civilizations may have known — are what dominate our history.

Wars characterize the history of the world, but also the history of our own country, America, that which is not always recognized. For there are and have been those who would make the particular American experience an exception. But in respect to the huge place of wars in our own history we’re not.

In fact, even before the coming of the Europeans to the New World at the end of the 15th. century to what would one day be the United States of America, the inhabitants of what are now the 50 states, making up the members of the 500 or more native American tribes, were themselves more often than not at each other’s throats, no less than the new arrivals from Europe who had brought their own wars with them to the new land.

The native Americans, again no less than the Europeans in regard to their own shared African origins, were apparently ignorant, or at least paid no mind to their common descent from Asian hunter gatherers who had crossed the Bering land bridge into Alaska some 14,000 or more years before.

Instead to account for their own origins, the hundreds of Indian tribes had their own creation stories or myths, much as did the ancient Hebrews and other peoples. The Arapaho had their Duck and Turtle who helped man to make the dry land; the Cherokee pictured the earth as a great floating island suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from a sky vault of solid rock; the Kiowa traced their origin to their emergence from a hollow log…

A recognized common origin might have brought peace to the tribes. Instead the stories they told of their different origins probably only served to separate them even further.

Nor did the Europeans by their coming bring peace to the natives. From their arrival they fought with the natives over the land. Although distant cousins themselves of the native Americans they encountered, sharing a common origin in Africa, although their paths out of the continent were probably different, they early on proceeded by their possession of superior weapons and eventually by their greater numbers to overwhelm the natives and take their lands for themselves.

And when this particular American land grab, just one of a long series of land grabs throughout history of the world, was over, and the mostly European illegal immigrants of that time had successfully conquered and destroyed, or sent to “reservation” land (that being most often land that the European settlers didn’t want for themselves) much of the native population, did peace follow?

No, of course not. And instead, the native Americans being either decimated or restricted to reservation quarters, the European Americans proceeded to fight among themselves, most remarkably in a civil war that was and would remain the most deadly combat in our own history. And this was just one, not the first and not the last, in a long series of wars waged by Americans right up until today.

The two words, war and conquest, are perhaps the best two word summary of the history of the world. And war, if not conquest (for at the present time the victors seem to no longer know what to do with the conquered peoples and will often leave them be once the fighting is over) is very much with us today.

But the wars are no longer among the peoples of Europe and America but between the latter and the peoples of the undeveloped and developing world, and no less among these peoples themselves. For the inhabitants of much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East by and large not only do not share our beliefs but are also by adhering to their own beliefs often seen as a threat to our way of life, and in some instances do threaten us by their actions and hence we go to war.

Perhaps if there had been other hominids, others so different from us that they became a real threat to our own survival, much as rival species in the animal kingdom, we might have come together and waged war against what might have been a real threat to the survival of  homo sapiens.

Well there were no others, we were the only homo but, as we have seen, instead of coming together we made and continue to make much of our differences and thereby feed the separations between us.

Today there is one essential question for us all. Will the differences among us, differences of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and now more than ever before, differences of ability, talent, and intelligence, all five, six, seven or more of the latter, not to mention differences of education and class, will all these differences continue to make us go to war with one another, or will they finally be set aside and will our common humanity take over?

Just as there is not yet a unified theory of everything there is not yet an answer to this one.

No one made him take the heroin and alcohol, and yet I cannot help but hold myself and others to account. I had unknowingly colluded with a system that devalues talking therapy and rushes to medicate, inadvertently sending a message that self-medication, too, is perfectly acceptable.

My son was no angel (though he was to us) and he was known to trade in Adderall, to create a submarket in the drug among his classmates who were themselves all too eager to get their hands on it. What he did cannot be excused, but it should be understood. What he did was to create a market that perfectly mirrored the society in which he grew up, a culture where Big Pharma itself prospers from the off-label uses of drugs, often not tested in children and not approved for the many uses to which they are put.
And so a generation of students, raised in an environment that encourages medication, are emulating the professionals by using drugs in the classroom as performance enhancers.

And we wonder why it is that they use drugs with such abandon. As all parents learn — at times to their chagrin — our children go to school not only in the classroom but also at home, and the culture they construct for themselves as teenagers and young adults is but a tiny village imitating that to which they were introduced as children.

The issue of permissive drug use and over-diagnosis goes well beyond hyperactivity. In May, the American Psychiatric Association will publish its D.S.M. 5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is called the bible of the profession. Its latest iteration, like those before, is not merely a window on the profession but on the culture it serves, both reflecting and shaping societal norms. (For instance, until the 1970s, it categorized homosexuality as a mental illness.)

One of the new, more controversial provisions expands depression to include some forms of grief. On its face it makes sense. The grieving often display all the common indicators of depression — loss of interest in life, loss of appetite, irregular sleep patterns, low functionality, etc. But as others have observed, those same symptoms are the very hallmarks of grief itself.

Ours is an age in which the airwaves and media are one large drug emporium that claims to fix everything from sleep to sex. I fear that being human is itself fast becoming a condition. It’s as if we are trying to contain grief, and the absolute pain of a loss like mine. We have become increasingly disassociated and estranged from the patterns of life and death, uncomfortable with the messiness of our own humanity, aging and, ultimately, mortality.

Challenge and hardship have become pathologized and monetized. Instead of enhancing our coping skills, we undermine them and seek shortcuts where there are none, eroding the resilience upon which each of us, at some point in our lives, must rely. Diagnosing grief as a part of depression runs the very real risk of delegitimizing that which is most human — the bonds of our love and attachment to one another. The new entry in the D.S.M. cannot tame grief by giving it a name or a subsection, nor render it less frightening or more manageable.

The D.S.M. would do well to recognize that a broken heart is not a medical condition, and that medication is ill-suited to repair some tears. Time does not heal all wounds, closure is a fiction, and so too is the notion that God never asks of us more than we can bear. Enduring the unbearable is sometimes exactly what life asks of us.

But there is a sweetness even to the intensity of this pain I feel. It is the thing that holds me still to my son. And yes, there is a balm even in the pain. I shall let it go when it is time, without reference to the D.S.M., and without the aid of a pill.

Ted Gup, the writer, is an author and fellow of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

In Dante’s Hell the First Circle is reserved for the wise men of antiquity. In Solzhenitsyn’s novel the Circle’s inhabitants are political prisoners, and because they have special skills —electronic engineers, mathematicians, linguists, even a painter, skills that can be utilized by the Soviet state, conditions at the sharashka are about the best there are throughout the Gulag.

The time of the action, really long conversations between the prisoners often about a special time in their lives, is New Year’s Day, 1950. At one point in the novel, in the chapter entitled, To the Resurrection of the Dead! Solzhenitsyn writes:

Давно замечено, что наша жизнь входит в нашу биографию не равномерно по годам. У  каждого человека есть своя особая пора  жизни, в которую он себяполнее всего проявил, глубже всего чувствовал и сказался весь себе и другим. И что  бы потом ни случалось с человеком  даже внешне значительного, все это чаще –  только спад или  инерция того толчка: мы  вспоминаем, упиваемся, на много ладов  переигрываем то, что единожды прозвучало  в нас.  Такой порой у иных  бывает даже  детство  — и тогда люди на всю  жизнь остаются детьми. У других — первая любовь, и именно эти люди  распространили  миф,  что любовь
дается только раз. Кому  пришлась такой порой пора их наибольшего богатства, почета, власти — и они до беззубых десен  шамкают нам о своем отошедшем величии. У Нержина такой порой стала тюрьма. У Щагова — фронт.

In Harry T. Willett’s 2009 translation,
“No man’s life proceeds at an even tenor through the years. There will always be a time when he realizes himself most fully, feels most deeply, makes the greatest impression on others–and on himself. All that happens afterward, however significant on the face of it, is most likely to be an abatement, the ebbing of that high tide. We never forget that time; we endlessly ring the changes on it. For some people it may even be their childhood, and they remain children all their lives. For others it is the time of first love, and it is they who have spread the myth that we love only once. There are those for whom the great time was when they were richest, most esteemed, most powerful; and they will still be mumbling without a tooth in their gums about their departed greatness. For Nerzhin the decisive period was prison. For Shchagov, life at the front.”

And here in Thomas P Whitney’s earlier, 1968 translation:
“It has long be,en known that our life stories do not follow an even course over the years.  In every human being’s life there is one period when he manifests himself most fully, feels most profoundly himself, and acts with the deepest effect on himself and on others.  And whatever happens to that person from that time on, no matter how outwardly significant, it is all a letdown.  We remember, get drunk on, play over and over in many different keys, sing over and over to ourselves that snatch of a song that sounded just once within us.  For some, that period comes in childhood, and they stay children all their lives.  For others it comes with first love, and these are the people who spread the myth that love comes only once.  Those for whom it was the period of their greatest wealth, honor, or power will still in old age be mumbling with toothless gums of their lost grandeur.  For Nerzhin, prison was such a time.  For Shchagov, it was the war.”

For Solzhenitsyn, like Nerzhin, prison definitely was such a time. For my father it was the time when he became materially well off, affluent, the time following the depression and the war, both of which he had lived through and during which he had known deprivation. When he had money he seemed to most enjoy giving it away, and especially to those who weren’t expecting it, and of course to his own children.

What was that time for me? It wasn’t coming into money. I’ve always had enough money thanks to my parents, and perhaps because of that money never did become a major factor in my life. For me perhaps the transformative moment, one that is still with me, was my first real encounter in my reading with ideas.

And schools had not been, what they were supposed to be, the means of that happening, so in my case schools never meant much to me and when I hear other graduates speak about how much their school experience had given them, changed them (for the better usually), I don’t say anything at all. It didn’t have to be that way, of course. It could have been different. In my case it wasn’t.

When my college experience was over and I was in graduate school, actually medical school, and I began to read almost for the first time on my own, nothing relating to my medical studies of course, but a number of French writers, in particular Albert Camus and Andre Gide. (Why them? I don’t remember.) And to pursue my growing and real interests in ideas, to begin to fashion for myself a life of the intellect, I returned to school, perhaps for the very first time as a  student, this time in the humanities.

Up until that moment I had attended school, along with everyone else, because that’s what you do, whereas I now was at school because I actually wanted something from what the school was offering. All the difference in the world, this. If somehow kids in school could be helped to understand that difference a bit earlier in their lives, somehow that would really make all the difference in the lives of all of us.

So this was a time if not the time when I began to feel myself most deeply and fully, the time that made the greatest impression on me. Would there be other such times. Or is Solzhenitsyn right and is everything that has happened since then in my life, however significant on the face, an abatement or a lessening of that moment, at best but an ebbing of that high tide of that particular moment in my life?

For as Solzhenitsyn says, in the Whitney translation, “We remember, get drunk on, play over and over in many different keys, sing over and over to ourselves that snatch of a song that sounded just once within us.”

I do have a problem with his idea, with my getting drunk, as it were, for the first time on my discovery of my love of ideas, and that this being like a song a snatch of which I would then play over and over again during the 55 years or so since that moment. For me there’s been no ebbing of that high tide, that moment in my life, and my excitement at my discovery of Solzhenitsen and his ideas in the seventies, as well as myriad moments of discovery since then, all these are no less momentous than my discovery of Camus and Gide in the fifties. The tide of ideas is still high.

So one might say in response to Solzhenitsen, that yes there is a time when one realizes oneself most fully. And although this moment is a discovery, it’s not meant to be the only such discovery, just the first of many. My discovery of ideas, the song I first heard in my twenties, is still very much alive, and when I have a good day it’s because that song or melody has returned, just as strong as it was those nearly 60 years ago.

Now Solzhenitsen wrote In the First Circle in the fifties. At that time he was in his forties, which made him the same age as the Soviet Union itself. He had experienced the war and the Gulag and it was probably hard for him to see beyond that. Certainly the Soviet Union didn’t see beyond itself, and for them all was downhill from that first moment, the 7th. of Novem­ber of 1917 when in St Peters­burg the Bol­she­viks came to power.

It was probably for Solzhenitsen, much as it was for Nerzhin and Shchagov together, that the decisive period in his life was also first war and then prison. And it probably didn’t take much for him while in the Gulag to imagine himself, as perhaps the Soviet Union itself, at a later point in time “mumbling without a tooth in his gums about departed greatness.”

Of course for him, anyway, things were to turn out differently. Greatness was still to come.

Dear Members of the Harvard Community:



We are deeply grateful to law enforcement officials from Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown and from across the state and nation for their apprehension last evening of the surviving suspect in the marathon bombing. Yesterday was a harrowing day in a week of tragedy, suffering, and uncertainty—as well as courage and solidarity. After Monday’s unthinkable violence and loss, we mourned the victims and wondered how such evil could intrude into our beloved city and community. Friday we found its apparent origins terribly close to home….        Drew Faust


Perhaps having a name like “Faust” the word evil was well chosen, for the legendary  personality, Faustus, did know evil, did make his own pact with the devil.

But I would ask, as have countless others on similar occasions before now and before me, is it “evil” that has revealed its presence during the past week? Or is it once again ignorance, an ignorance of right and wrong, that which we all share even with the Boston Marathon bombers, although thankfully in lesser, much lesser amounts.

It is, after all, still our hope that we can work together to combat ignorance, but versus evil, what can we do, except to bear it, to suffer as during the past week, while asking ourselves how could this terrible presence be right here among us, or as Drew Faust would say, have “its apparent origins terribly close to home.”

Teaching requires a professional model, like we have in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, architecture and many other fields. In these professions, consistency of quality is created less by holding individual practitioners accountable and more by building a body of knowledge, carefully training people in that knowledge, requiring them to show expertise before they become licensed, and then using their professions’ standards to guide their work.
By these criteria, American education is a failed profession. There is no widely agreed-upon knowledge base, training is brief or nonexistent, the criteria for passing licensing exams are much lower than in other fields, and there is little continuous professional guidance.

It is not surprising, then, that researchers find wide variation in teaching skills across classrooms; in the absence of a system devoted to developing consistent expertise, we have teachers essentially winging it as they go along, with predictably uneven results.

I sent this comment to Mike:

“I had already read the Jal Mehta piece and was considering writing a lengthy response on my Blog, but as happens often these lengthy responses never get written and I find myself instead playing with the kids.
“Jal has a not unreasonable idea, but he’s wrong. As they say he’s comparing apples and oranges, for lawyer, doctor, and engineering preparation can not be compared to teacher training. Why? Because the ones, the lawyers, doctors, and engineers are not ultimately dealing with the whole person, or the whole student, only the part that is going to receive what they know, be it the givens of law, medicine, and engineering. Teachers, on the other hand, are confronted with the whole kid, with all his bumps and blemishes, with his qualities, and talents, with his inadequacies, with his interests and bad and good habits and on and on… For there will always be much more to the kid than the teacher can possibly be aware of in advance. No teacher preparation, no matter how admirable as at MATCH, can possibly foresee more than a fraction of what the student will confront. In fact, the teacher, especially the new ones, and the honest ones, will be the first to tell you that there was no way they could have been prepared for what they find before them in the classroom. That’s why they wing it, some anyway, probably the most successful ones. They have to. That’s probably the only way. The others, too many of them, and probably not up to winging it, adopt a defensive posture and just try to get through the day and then the semester without attracting too much attention, neither from the administration nor from the kids themselves. They go along.”

Following that Mike replied in an email to me:

Hi Philip, I always like getting your emails.  
Well, I agree that teachers deal with a whole kid.  And that there will always be times where the new teacher is winging it.  And that many newbies just try to get thru the day.
However…..
The question is whether there are common things to expect, and whether ALL those must inherently be “winged.” Right?
I don’t think so.  I think we have pretty good evidence to the contrary, with our program that you helped fund.  And I think we’ll build an even better evidence base over time.
There are a number of very predictable situations that teachers will face, and if prepared for those, the details of understanding each kid as unique are not critical.  
Best, Mike

These exchanges, of course, never end. They just stop. But before this one stopped I replied just this morning to Mike:

“OK, Mike, I’ll give you the middle ground, admit if not accept that there is a middle ground, things that we may expect teachers to encounter and for which we can prepare them, and I’m sure in the best schools of preparation that’s what goes on. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be plenty of the unexpected, that for which even MATCH can not prepare its teachers. Isn’t it more like the training of the “special forces,” where, as you point out in regard to teaching there are also some “predictable situations” for which training is possible, but ultimately what the graduates will encounter in the field will often be the unexpected, that for which they haven’t been trained. Furthermore, and as in the case of your young teachers, the best of them, when they meet the unexpected, will know somehow know what to do in the field. That is, they will successfully wing it. But the enemy will still be out there, always beyond our efforts to contain him or her in our planning. And although I’m not pleased with the comparison, the whole kid to the enemy, that kid will always confound our efforts to “learn” him or teach him, just as the enemy will confound and frustrate our best efforts to eliminate him. (My comparison gets worse!)
“However, I still think that Mehta is wrong to compare teacher training to the training for the law or medicine. To use another figure, our constant battle to educate our young is much more like our no less constant battle to understand and predict the weather, or the fluctuations of the world’s currency markets. Like these the education of our young is not yet, except in part as you point out, within our grasp, even with the help of the latest and biggest super computer.
“The conclusion, and one that is generally accepted, we just don’t do a very good job of educating our young, and so far we are still far from reaching a solution to the problem. W-hy? For me there are still too many variables, too many unknowns.
“Now I confess that I’ve just recently re-read Charles Murray’s 2009 book, Real Education, or Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, and I did have this a bit on my mind when I read the Mehta piece. In case you’ve forgotten (or maybe don’t want to remember, as probably all true believers in the public schools—those whom Murray calls good people, but romantics.) Murray’s simple truths — 1. Ability varies, 2. Half of the children are below average, 3. Too many are going to college, and 4. Our country’s future depends much more on how we educate the academically gifted than, and I add this myself, on our, say, solving the problem of our failing inner city public schools, that which the “no excuses” schools have set out to do.
“Murray says it’s just not true that all children can learn all that we would teach them. And it’s just not true that any more than a minority of our young will ever (“ever” meaning a reasonable amount of time) be able to continue their education in a demanding 4 year liberal arts program in college and be successful. Although of course they’re all able to do something, and be successful. We just haven’t provided them with the opportunities for doing this something, rather subjecting all of them to the same inappropriate college model. And for this reason our teachers are faced with a stacked deck, one stacked against their well meaning efforts to do the impossible and reach all their students. And Mehta’s mistake was to make us think that the law, medicine, and engineering teaching models can be applied to the public schools. They can’t.
It’s fun to read you, too.”

P

Yes, what should we think? Your mother sends all of us pictures of her three orchids now flowering outside of our café window. I harvest our tomatoes, while troubled and wondering what it is that is killing the leaves of our tomato plants.

In the carport our grandson has turned a large cardboard carton from a recently purchased Skutt kiln into a prison with bars (bamboo stalks) and all, and where our granddaughter is held captive, willingly, while making constant demands on her jailor-brother for food and water.

It does seem that while we’re living our normal lives, while carrying out our everyday pursuits, these “hedge” people, while hedging their bets, are pulling in billion dollar annual salaries. How did we grow so far apart. At one point in the past we both hunted and gathered. Now they seem to do it all, especially the gathering.

So what is one to make of it? I read that in France just last week all the talk all week across all the country was all about Jerome Cahuzac, the traitorous budget minister in François Hollande’s socialist government. The traitor had squirreled away some 600,000 euros in one of those Suiss banks or island accounts and then last week standing up before his colleagues in the National Assembly he denied he had done so.

Bad! Although 600,000 euros comes to only .03% of the money that David Tepper of Appaloosa Management gathers in just one year budget minister Cahuzac did betray his President.

A final question, what does David Tepper do with his billions? And then, how much of David’s newly gotten wealth trickles down to the rest of us? Wouldn’t the French love to have David et al. among them and subject to President Hollande’s, struggling to get through the French courts, 75% income tax?

And in answer to your question why didn’t I…?  —well things were different then, and no less important I didn’t have whatever it takes, so now I’m reading about these new Titans while tending my garden and gathering my cabbages.

Your father,

But why just American secularism? Haven’t the secularists of all times and all countries always had that dream? I know that is my dream, and my hope, that the true believers, still today bringing suffering and death on all peoples, especially their own, will disappear.

But this is still a dream. Marin is right about that. For when you wake up in the morning, go out into the world, wherever you are, and if you encounter a prevalent morality, any morality at all, it probably stems from a fear of the unknown, a fear of God, from religion, and not from one’s mostly underused powers of reason.

This, of course, is the ultimate irony, because it’s not religion, but science, the fruit of those who do make great use of their ingrained powers of reason, that has made even the poorest among us wealthier that the tyrants, monarchs and popes of the past.

And if life is to get better for all of us it will depend most of all on the secularists, not the believers, among us. It will depend on those in possession of, as Marin says, a “morality rooted in reflection, a sense of kinship, and a belief in the common good.”

“My God, how nice it is!” he thought. “People, rocks, the fire, the twilight, a monstrous tree — nothing more, and yet how fine it is!”

I remember our own camping experiences in particular one time in the seventies when we were on a way west to our friend’s home in Berkeley, CA, when our children were little and we would spend the nights while on the road out under the stars. 

как хорошо!  It didn’t take much.  —The arrival at the camp site in the dark, gathering wood, getting water, starting the fire and cooking our meal, then eating around the camp table near the fire, seeing the play all about us of light and shadow, the black background all around, the star studded sky overhead.

как хорошо!