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Now I’ve never forgotten what President Reagan’s said while visiting Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987. His words on that occasion, were, as many of you also will remember, “MR. GORBACHEV, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL”

Now lately I’ve been reading with great enjoyment and appreciation the Western writer, Louis Lamour. (He would prefer, of course, that I just say writer, because writer was what he was.) And while following a link from his internet web site I met up with this cartoon drawing:

Do you suppose that with his words at the Gate the President was returning Gorby’s call? He must have found encouragement if not inspiration in the Lamour novel he was reading when Gorby was calling him.

And I’m sure that any of Lamour’s Western heroes would have all said pretty much the same thing and this may very well have been what pushed Reagan to say what he did.

Peoples, countries, states are often asking themselves, “What is to be done?” Certainly since the time of Vladimir Lenin’s question, Что делать, and probably long before. If the problems are acute enough (or the leaders of the revolt unscrupulous enough) the answer is/may be revolution, as in French, Russian, and earlier English (1649 and 1688).

In more recent times the answer is a “spring” or political liberalization, coming at the end of a winter (of authoritarian rule), as in the Prague or Arab springs, and to a much lesser extent, the Beijing, Beirut, Seoul, and any number of others, most recently, as in spring time in Rangoon (Yangon) with the freeing of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Now what about us, America as in the United States of, still for many the “exceptional” land? We certainly have our problems. And in the past we too have gone the way of “revolution” looking for solutions.

At least we called it a revolution, although when we look closely at the time we don’t see the heads rolling, and in spite of George Washington’s harsh 77-78 winter at Valley Forge  (and it could get extremely cold in the new land) what happened in those years was more like telling Dad, in very strong words, where to get off.

Today, however, we seem unable to even confront, let alone solve our problems, in particular those concerned with two of our government’s principal functions, health care and education. We do OK with our defense spending, and we did develop the atomic bomb and we did and on the moon.

In regard to our principal problems there is the evident inability of our elected representatives, including the president himself, to take action, any kind of action, and thereby govern, and do what they/he are supposed to be doing.

Instead our elected representatives spend their time squabbling among themselves, directing whatever energies they do possess, not to solving problems, but to being reelected to office.

Furthermore these same ‘do nothing’ elected officials continue to grow the responsibilities of the Federal government, by in large in the form of national defense and entitlement spending, (which together along with interest payments on our debt, comprise nearly 70 % of our national budget) while being clearly unable to finance the additional expenditures without surpassing our debt limits, that meaning, of course, without growing the debt burden on our children and grandchildren.

Finally while the elected officials are not governing other things are getting out of control. The financial sector, for one, of the economy is growing by leaps and bounds, seemingly outside of the influence of government altogether.

Simon Johnson, in an Atlantic article of May, 2009, “The Quiet Coup,” writes of this  growth:

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. [And pay in this sector rose no less dramatically.]

Now the financial sector shouldn’t be calling the shots in the overall economy, but it is. Our financial house is a loose canon, and so far anyway, out of anyone’s, let alone the government’s, control. No longer is it the farm, or Detroit, but rather Wall Street that is driving the country’s economic health, up or down. Lately mostly down.

While the Federal government may have been able to sensibly regulate first agriculture and then the manufacturing sector of the economy it now seems clueless in regard to the regulation of our financial houses. With the result that extreme risk taking with harmful consequences for the economy overall goes on mostly unchecked.

The problems I’m describing are not explicitly the issues of the various groups clamoring to be heard, principally now two, the Tea Partiers and the Occupy Wall Streeters, there being a number of the latter.

But in my opinion these and other groups are out there making noises only because of such things as the failure of our elected officials to act responsibly, the out of control national debt, and the lopsided influence of the single financial sector on the economy as a whole.

So back to my original question, what to do? New faces in government? There is probably little chance that the elections of 2012 will give us leaders able to make the tough choices, such as, to reduce the growth of unfunded mandates and entitlements, or to increase taxes and thereby federal revenues, both of these actions being at the present time third rail choices for any office holder wanting to hold onto that office.

So again, what to do. As I say we’re no longer able, as much as we’d like to, to make heads roll, such no longer being the way of liberal democracy. In fact it does seem more and more to many of us as though there is nothing to be done.

I’m certainly not alone to recognize our problems, —principally government’s evident inability to govern and a financial sector out of anyone’s control. Two recent articles, one by Tyler Cowen in the American Interest, The Inequality that matters, and the other by D. W. MacKenzie in the Mises Daily, No, Melissa, There Isn’t a Santa Claus, come to the very same conclusion, that the solution to our problems will not, in fact can not come from government bureaucrats or elected officials.

Tyler Cowen writes about the undue influence of the banking sector:

What about controlling bank risk-taking directly with tight government oversight? That is not practical. There are more ways for banks to take risks than even knowledgeable regulators can possibly control; …it is naive to think that underpaid, undertrained regulators can keep up with financial traders, especially when the latter stand to earn billions by circumventing the intent of regulations while remaining within the letter of the law.

We probably don’t have any solution to the hazards created by our financial sector, not because plutocrats are preventing our political system from adopting appropriate remedies, but because we don’t know what those remedies are.

Then, MacKenzie on the cluelessness of bureaucrats:

It is true that Congress often seems ineffective in dealing with modern affairs, but this is what we should expect. The contemporary American government intervenes into nearly every aspect of our lives. How can any senator or congressman comprehend all of the interests at stake in all of the matters that the government tries to regulate?

We live in an extraordinarily complex society. There are literally millions of businesses in America, and a larger number of households. These organizations deal in countless products and services, each of which is produced in complicated ways.

Legislators have staffs to help manage their affairs, but the fact of the matter is that modern economies are complex beyond the comprehension of any staff or committee. Consequently, legislatures that try to manage a modern economy in detail become ineffective talking shops, and must defer to [and] reliance on bureaucrats is a necessary part of government, but hardly desirable….”

Now it could be that our problems will remain without solutions. Certainly it won’t be the first time that a people allows the country’s infrastructure to collapse around it while demanding only bread and circuses and other such for themselves, in our case, while attending national football and national professional basketball events.

But, and it may be that things will get better in time, although not necessarily for us. The dinosaurs didn’t survive but we came along, and, according to most observers, we were/are a more marvelous creature than the dinosaur.

And the hundreds of American Indian tribes, because unable then, as we at present, to join together and take the proper actions for survival, did not last much beyond the coming of Columbus, their hundred fold and more civilizations disappearing into unrecognizable groups of survivors somehow existing on the reservation but no longer alive as they once were.

So things change and those involved in the changes don’t see the changes coming. Just as the Russians never saw the end of the Soviet Union until it was ended. Maybe we are just as far now from seeing our own “end,” this stemming in good part, I believe, from our failure to bring about change ourselves, before change just happens to us, because it will.

Holding on to what one has, not upsetting the applecart, maintaining the status quo, being reelected, all that sort of thing trumps there being any real action, such as that of Alexander when he cut through the Gordian Knot with a single bold stroke of his sword.

Do we have such a stroke of the sword available to us? Might something yet be done? I find a hint of possible actions in the two articles by Cowen and MacKenzie referred to above.

For MacKenzie, as well as for the Mises Institute, there is a savior, and that is the free enterprise system. In brief, this needs to grow while government needs to contract. In his own words:

There is no reason to believe that our current system of politicized crony capitalism will ever improve. There is no reason to believe that we will ever attain, or even agree on, social justice. We should believe in the free enterprise system, not simply because of faith in any ideal, but because theory and evidence indicate that this system works best.

Cowen takes his reasoning a step further. Government can not be a principal part of the solution because the best and the brightest of our young people are not entering government service but rather are going into the financial sector.

Might it not follow from his observation that the financial sector replace the government in selected roles, certainly that of the redistribution of federal tax revenues to those in need, a job that government has failed to do without going into unsustainable borrowing with the burgeoning deficit.

Cowen writes:

In so-called normal times, the finance sector attracts a big chunk of the smartest, most hard-working and most talented individuals. That represents a huge human capital opportunity cost to society and the economy at large.

Would a way out of this situation, an elimination of this cost, be that we turn over our problems to the free enterprise system, to private efforts to find solutions? No longer lose as now, for example, the most hard-working and most talented individuals to an irresponsible financial sector? And no longer going ahead with but bits and pieces of a solution, as now, when we allow a few private foundations and private educational institutions to replace government programs, but totally?

Would not the best and brightest of our young people (for if there are solutions they have to come from them) flock to be a part of this effort, not a moon or Mars landing, but an attempt to create, not rocket science, but autonomous and private structures capable of delivering effective and affordable health care and education to the American people?

So my answers? Take power away from the elected officials who in any case are not doing the job, and have them become at best referees in the game, whose principal players will all be within the private sector, financial or otherwise.

For only when people have ample opportunity to use their talents, and no less important only when they are able to see the results of their work, will things change for the better. In our present government that is not happening. That such does happen has always been the strength of free enterprise. Why would we interfere with that?

On his New York Review Blog  the poet Charles Simic writes, “My own inordinate interest in what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet has to do with my childhood. When I was three years old in Belgrade, German bombs started falling on my head. By the time I was seven, I was accustomed to seeing dead people lying in the street, or hung from telephone poles, or thrown into ditches with their throats cut. Like any child growing up in an occupied city during wartime, I didn’t think much about it.”

In other words Simic was conditioned to the world’s lunacy from early childhood. And in fact isn’t “what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet” what the tv evening news is mostly about, the anchors conditioning us to accept the world’s lunacy by giving us the news of the day with straight faces as if the events and happenings they are describing were normal — actually with sorrowful faces if they happen to be one of the three, Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, or Diane Sawyer? Do the three of them just happen to be sorrowful people, or is it their long exposure to the news that has made them so?

So who are the lunatics in Charles’s phrase, “What the lunatics are up to?” Well, as a start, how about the following individuals whom I take from a Wiki list of some 200 or so of the world’s leaders. (I’m sure that my short list of lunatics is not complete and I invite you to add to it.)

Because of what’s happening, and happening yet once again in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, I begin my list with the de facto ruler of Egypt, the Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who, while generously permitting Mubarak to be pushed out stayed in himself, and whose men are right now confronting the thousands of Egyptian women, protesting the abusive treatment of one of their own right there in the Square.

Then there are the leaders of any number of failed and corrupt states, a few of the most notable and contemptible being Russia’s Putin, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, the Congo’s Joseph Kabila, Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Lunatics all of them.

Then there are a number of odd couples, Pakistan’s Asif Ali Zardari and General Ashfaq Kayani, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei, and most recently in the newly independent Iraq, the warring couple, the Shite Muslim President Nouri al-Maliki and the Sunni Muslim leader Tariq al-Hashimi.

On my list of “lunatics” I would also place Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez, mostly for what they don’t do. These three have the power to make things better for their own people, and for the region, and for the world, but they are blinded by their mistaken beliefs and errors of judgement.

A list of the world’s lunatics might include any number of others, not necessarily leaders of States, —the Republican presidential candidates, for example, and certainly the new leaders of North Korea who will probably be behind the dauphin Kim Jong-un’s every move.

And especially my list would include those most responsible for the failure of the European Central Bank to act responsibly and end the crisis of the Euro.

I’m not sure what the poet, Charles Simic, meant by the word lunatic. What I mean is that the individuals behind the tv news that we are battered with daily are mad to the extent that they are not able to see the world through any eyes but their own.

Isn’t that a kind of madness when one can’t get outside of oneself, put oneself in the place of another? These men seem unable to do so. As I say that I realize there are no women on my list. Is lunacy a male sickness? In regard to what’s happened in the world up until now it would seem that way.

How else could Bashar al-Assad, for example, see, and not see as everyone else sees, the slaughter by his soldiers of 100 defecting soldiers, civilians and antigovernment activists over the last three days in northwestern Syria? How else could Benjamin Netanyahu not see that new settlements, and much else on both sides of the dispute, would have to cease if Palestinians and Israelis were ever to live together in peace?

In Simic’s own words, “What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day.”

I take the following from the Harvard Magazine of Januaary-February, 2012.

My “pick” of Fred Shapiro’s pick of  choice Harvard words:

We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.
—Louis D. Brandeis, LL.B. 1877, quoted in Labor, October 14, 1941

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world: those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.
—Robert Benchley, A.B. 1912, Of All Things (1921)

Nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.
—Margaret Atwood, A.M. ’62, Litt.D. ’04, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce, and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine.
—John Adams, A.B. 1755, LL.D. 1781, Letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.
—Gertrude Stein, A.B. 1898, The Geographical History of America (1936)

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer ’25, S.D. ’47, quoted in In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: USAEC Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board (1954)

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., A.B. 1861, LL.B. 1866, LL.D. 1895, Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue (dissenting opinion), 1927

Go to where the silence is and say something.
—Amy Goodman ’84, on accepting an award for coverage of the 1991 massacre of Timorese by Indonesian troops, quoted in the Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1994

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
—George Santayana, A.B. 1886, Ph.D. 1889, The Life of Reason (1905)

A democracy—that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.
—Theodore Parker, Divinity School 1836, speech at Anti-Slavery Convention, Boston, May 29, 1850

Read this today in a Times op-ed piece by Brian Greene, Waiting for the Higgs Particle:

“Higgs thus suggested a rewriting of the very definition of nothingness, filling otherwise empty space with a substance capable of bestowing upon particles their mass.”

Haven’t we heard something like this before? —Wasn’t it the carpenter Joseph’s son who suggested a rewriting of the very definition of nothingness, at least that of our lives up until then, and in so doing didn’t he fill the otherwise empty spaces where we were living with a spirituality or holy ghost whose presence would bestow upon us our “mass” or substance?

I find the arguments of the libertarians persuasive, as I do no less the arguments of the liberals, of those who would drastically limit the role of government in our lives in order to empower the individual, as well as of those who would grow the role of government in order to lessen the natural and unnatural inequalities and injustices occurring among us.

I find both positions seductive, I find truth in both. But that’s the thing, both positions have some truth, but not all the truth, whereas too often the holders of both speak, write, and act as if they alone were in possession of the whole truth. They’re not, of course, and the right and proper place to be is in the middle, Why isn’t this obvious?

The real debate within our country, within our government ought to be going on between those in the middle, perhaps bit to the left and a bit to the right, a bit liberal and a bit libertarian (and/or conservative). But instead we hear little stemming from the middle ground, the debate being most often between those at the extremes, between, for example, those who would drastically reduce the government’s power to tax, and those who would no less responsibly increase entitlements and the taxes needed to pay the costs.

Why is this so? For there is no lack of thoughtful individuals (although not, alas, among our holders of office in Washington) who have clearly said what we must do to get the country back on track. The President’s own National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, created to address our nation’s fiscal challenges, stated what needed to be done. But the advice and findings of the Commission were almost immediately ignored, and by the President himself.

On the one hand why is it so hard to understand that governments do many things wrong, at the very least are wasteful, and that many government programs do not accomplish their intended aims and continue to operate anyway, often for many years, with little or no benefit to anyone. For there is some truth to what the libertarians are saying.

On the other hand why is it so hard to understand that the free market of free individuals if left to operate without supervision will not care enough for the natural environment, at a very minimum insuring air and water quality, nor will it provide for those individuals who for whatever reason are unable to provide for themselves. And these are only two of the many functions that make government, some government, necessary.

It has been brought to my attention (see HERE —Lawrence Baines), and HERE) that our Education secretary Arne Duncan, while speaking at the 114th Annual National PTA Convention on June 11, 2010, had this to say (among much else):

“For years, we have actually been lying to children and lying to ourselves by pretending that 50 different standards, in 50 different states, will make America competitive and help our children succeed in life. We have to stop pretending. We have to tell the truth. And we have to raise the bar for all children.”

For if the testing materials are different, not only from state to state, but from city to town, even from school to school, how can the test results have any meaning beyond the particular location where that particular test was administered?

So yes, national standards would take us a long way on the road to an objective and national evaluation of our students’ achievement in school. Similar to the advanced placement program that more and more of our public schools seem to be using for this very purpose.

For at the present time the achievement, as well as the native intelligence of our students, is measured much more by just a few national tests, such as the advanced placement exams and the college boards, than by the still widespread traditional grading systems that reflect at best a degree of mastery of only those particular skills and materials favored by the people of the local school.

So yes, wouldn’t it be progress if grades, in fact mostly reflecting good behavior, did reflect how well the student had mastered a national curriculum, that which would make it possible for the students in Mississippi to be placed right along side, say, the students in Massachusetts, and be compared in regard to their respective masteries of the very same subject matters and skills.

So yes, it’s understandable that our Education secretary, and our President, are caught up in this movement. But, and this may have something to do with the fact that neither the Secretary nor the President has ever been a public school classroom teacher, “50 different standards in 50 different states” are no where enough. There should be many more. For, how many parents, for example, of more than one child would ever say that one standard for his children would ever be enough?

Here is the delemma, for the parent of more than one child, for the classroom teacher, for the school principal, and yes, it ought to be a dilemma for the Education secretary and the President. What children can learn, ought to learn, can best learn, can’t profitably be imposed upon them from without.

The dilemma? Well, you and I, all of us, are “without.” Whatever we do with the children, whatever help we give them, we have to do it from without. Yet children will learn most of all and first of all, not from us on the outside, but from within, from what they bring to the learning process, and from what each one brings, different from what everyone else brings. For no child is like any other child.

The dilemma? No child is like any other child. Yet in our schools, in learning situations whatever they may be, even in the home where there is more than one child, we have to have the learners together, and somehow help them to learn, even when what they learn will be unique to them. The secretary of Education is lying to himself by pretending that there is one standard that somehow fits all.

There can’t be, there can’t be a single standard. The very best we can do, and even here we risk leaving something important out, is to determine what subject matters and what skills will be most helpful to the child as he or she sets out on a long course of life-long learning.

So yes, mathematics is one of them, also art and music, languages, and much else. But a single standard for mathematics? If you’ve ever been a classroom teacher you’d know that was not possible.

In fact that’s what so many try to do now, set up standardized math goals for all children with the result that most children learn that they’re not good at math, with many of these dropping out of school entirely, and, according to their own words, because of math.

We’ve had it right in the past, by having many different standards, as in the one room school house. We ought to have as many standards as there are kids. What’s the expression, “let a 1000 flowers bloom?” Evidently Chairman Mao never said that, and what he did say (100 flowers?) probably meant something else.

But this is what the Secretary should have said to the assembled parents, let a 1000 flowers bloom, let there be as many standards as there are children. Let the child be tested, but only tested in regard to what he is and what he can become by his own efforts.

It’s generally felt, often articulated by both business leaders and politicians, that our public school system is not graduating enough STEM college majors, and that of all those who do go on to college intending to major in math and the sciences, too many of them are now switching majors along the way.

According to Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs, while talking to President Obama, told the president that Apple employed 700,000 factory workers in China because it couldn’t find the 30,000 engineers in the U.S. that it needed on site at its plants. “If you could educate enough engineers,” he said at the dinner, “we could move more manufacturing jobs home.”

Fareed Zakaria in an article in the current Time Magazine points out that while other countries have focused on math and science, in America college degrees have proliferated in “fields” like sports exercise and leisure studies, [implying not in STEM fields].”

President Obama himself, while speaking with industry leaders, perhaps remembering Jobs’ words to him, called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in STEM, that is science, technology, engineering, and math.

In other words it seems a general perception that our public schools are not now satisfying the needs of this country for engineers. For we need engineers, and if we don’t produce them ourselves we will have to go elsewhere to find them. And still more foreign students no less than foreign oil is what we don’t want propelling our economy forward.

Now at this moment the assumption is still that we can produce the engineers that we need ourselves. And that in order to do that we need only to encourage more young people to become STEM majors in college, and then do whatever it takes to insure that they do not switch majors along the way. For at the present time “roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects, or fail to obtain any college degree.”

It’s true that by making STEM studies, —the lectures, classes, laboratories, the whole nine yards, more attractive to the takers we can probably increase the number of STEM majors, while at the same time decreasing the numbers of those who switch majors. But is that what we want?

For example analogously we know that we can increase the numbers of our high school graduates who go on to college by making the college path less daunting, more attractive. But also is that what we want? For it’s probably true that getting more kids into college has also grown significantly the numbers of kids who fail to graduate from college.

Rather than pushing kids into situations, STEM or college, where they shouldn’t be, shouldn’t we be paying much more attention to the kids themselves, in particular whether a four-year liberal arts college, let alone a STEM major, corresponds best to their own needs and special talents, their interests and abilities.

The conclusion to Christopher Drew’s article, Why Science [STEM] majors change their mind is that “the work is just too hard.” Doesn’t that mean that they’re in over their heads, probably been pushed there for the reasons given. That they’re trying to do things for which they’re not well prepared, let alone interested?

We Americans have perhaps reached a kind of natural barrier to increasing the numbers of math and science majors that our economy needs. It may very well be that the schools are already doing all they can in that respect?

President Obama may be pursuing just another pipe dream when he calls on our colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math. The potential for our doing so may not be there.

Whether it is or is not is not easy to say. And then in regard to education we tend to disregard natural barriers, always saying that there are no limitations on what young people can do if they want to badly enough. This may be true, but probably not within the time frame of the school years. Twelve years of school or study will not make everyone fluent in chess, the calculus, or Chinese, or any number of other disciplines, all of which demand from most of us much more time than that, for some of us perhaps a entire lifetime.

We may or may not be now doing all we can in respect to the numbers of STEM majors we are graduating from our colleges. But the fact that we’re graduating from our own schools twice as many science PhD.s from the foreign student population than from our own suggests that we are, that is doing all we can with our own.

So rather than continuing to try to fill up the ranks of STEM college majors with those who in respect to their math and science abilities do not measure up, and will not in any case probably end up among the engineers that Steve Jobs and others are looking for, perhaps there is something else we might do, another direction in which we might go.

But first a little background to the discussion. Our society, and to a greater extent our schools, now stress the overriding importance of an education in math and science, and our educational establishment as well as our politicians and corporate CEOs are always telling us that these are the areas where the good paying jobs are to be found.

But those of you, most of you, with or without children of your own, know that math and science activities will reflect only a part of what children are, correspond to only a few or just some of their interests and talents. If the interest, the ability was not clearly there you wouldn’t try to make them engineers.

According to Howard Gardner children possess seven, perhaps more, perhaps as many as nine fundamental “intelligences.” As things are at present only two of these are stressed in our schools, only two of them hold out the promise to our students of acceptance at a four year college, and following college either a good job or additional years at a university.

The two favored “intelligences” are the Linguistic — meaning reading, writing, and story telling skills, and the Logical-Mathematical — meaning being skillful with numbers, patterns, relationships, categories, the solutions to math problems, playing strategy games, doing experiments, all that sort of thing.

Now those, probably most of our public figures, who would increase the numbers of STEM majors, and the numbers of engineers graduating from our schools and universities, are assuming that these two intelligences, and most especially the logical-mathematical one, can be made to grow and prosper within most if not all of our children.

But isn’t it obvious that this is not the case? Logical-mathematical intelligence, the genetic portion of it anyway, that which comes with one’s birth, is not equally distributed among us.

If you’re not convinced of this attend for a year or more (much less time would probably be enough) an untracked class in mathematics in any of our public schools and note the differences among the students in respect to their understanding of the course materials.

And while you do this you might even ask yourself how many of the students you’re observing in the classroom might be legitimate candidates for STEM majors in college.

How many is it now? That is, how many of our high school graduates do go on to college and major in STEM subjects? I have no idea, but probably the number is less than half, maybe only a quarter or less than that. In the classroom you’re observing it may be even fewer.

In any case we’re not going to, by our efforts, by anything we might do, create a strong logical-mathematical intelligence when the potential for such is simply not there.

Now math in relation to the STEM subjects occupies a special place. In addition to being a discipline in itself, like science, technology and engineering, math is often the language of the other three.

As a result STEM majors are often going to sink or swim in regard to their ability in math. When the work is just too hard, it’s usually, as Christopher Drew makes clear, because of the math.

The sorts of things that teachers might do in elementary, middle, and high schools to make math and science more attractive to their students, such as building robots and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion, all that sort of hands-on stuff is not going to determine or guarantee math and science futures.

Math ability, talent, or gift, whatever you may choose to call it, is probably more like musical ability, athletic ability, artistic ability, and other such.

And we would never propose “growing” an additional 100,000 musicians, athletes, or artists. We know that we don’t have that power. We know that in regard to most career choices we have to listen first to the child. Why don’t we do this also in regard to math and science?

There are things we can do. We need to make opportunities for learning, for learning all sorts of things, available in school, because for so many children the opportunities are just not there outside of school.

But we should not be using persuasion to lead kids to where we want them to go. We shouldn’t want them to go anywhere of our choosing. In any case uncovering mathematical ability is not a question of persuasion, persuading young people with the offer of a good job if they work hard in their math class for example.

You don’t persuade kids to have artistic, musical, athletic or any other ability. Appreciation, perhaps, but appreciation was not what was on the President’s mind when he talked of graduating an additional 10,000 engineers.

In particular about math, since math is the language of all the sciences (some of course more than others), while it is often for the few the wings enabling them to fly ahead in their chosen STEM field, for many others, probably the majority, mathematics acts like a break, forcing them to come to a stop and change majors.

In fact math may be the single most important reason that kids drop out of high school. For nearly all children, certainly all children who graduate from high school, take math every year of twelve years in school. If they are not well endowed with the Logical-Mathematical intelligence, what are they doing during all that time spent in all those classes?

Probably all sorts of things other than demonstrating their ability in math. They may even be getting good grades. While perhaps struggling with this or that particular concept, such as the addition of fractions in fifth grade, or in high school with partial fraction decomposition, the student may show the teacher that she is obedient, is listening and responsive, has whatever she needs with her in the classroom, now perhaps an  iPad and calculator as well as paper and pencil.

In these classes when the students are judged much more in respect to their having good study and work habits than in respect to their particular mathematical ability, that ability, whether or not it’s there, may remain hidden, its presence or absence unknown to both teacher and student.

It’s probably no different in areas, such as music and art where the classes also may not uncover whatever special musical and artistic talents the students may or may not have.

It probably is different in athletics, when just demonstrating good and responsible behavior on the court or field will not be enough, not mean much, whereas how fast you can run and how high you can jump will be most important, and evident to students and coaches early on, thereby influencing decisively your future career choices.

So if it is possible to grow our STEM graduates, and see more of them continuing with STEM subjects in college all the way to college graduation we would have to provide all along the way greater opportunities for those with the requisite talents to uncover these talents, to discover this about themselves, and to learn that this was an integral part of what they were and not something they should neglect while young and growing in possession of skills for life.

But again by how much we can grow that number we don’t yet know.  For it’s not clear that we’re not now uncovering all the Logical-Mathematical talent that’s out there (although I don’t think we are.)

Meanwhile we might do well to grow our STEM graduates from our immigrant student population (after all, we are a land of immigrants), grant more H-1B visas as well as green cards to the foreign students here in our schools who have shown natural ability in these areas. For we may have no more of our own.

In our favor, helping us to do the right thing, even though it may seem cruel and harsh to stress while in school the child’s natural talents and abilities, is the fact that all kids are talented, all kids have abilities, and our job is to help them to find them for themselves, not to impose our needs upon them from the outside.

Our job is to help them discover their own potential early enough in their lives when it can be developed and become a source of life long satisfaction.

How many kids ever discover their own and unique abilities in our present educational system? Well, OK, we probably don’t know the answer to that one. But in my own case I know I didn’t. School never taught me much about myself. I did what I was told.

It’s a great irony that I have since discovered that what I love most, languages and mathematics, representing the first two intelligences of Howard Gardner, correspond to where my own natural abilities are weakest of all. What we love most may not at all be what we most are.

This another reason for having students experience while in school the full gamut of opportunities. And probably even this won’t be enough. Most kids, like myself, will need more time than the time in school to find out about themselves, about who they are.

In any case it doesn’t seem fitting for the schools to be primarily taken up by our supposed need for more engineers.

The month of October is almost over and I have posted nothing. That this not happen, that I allow a month a pass, I’ll share with you a couple of ideas that I take from Hanna Arendt’s Crisis in Education.

First this: “… the essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world.”

If nothing else this statement does have a certain beauty of its own, our being born into the world. But what does it mean —that the essence of education is natality, and being born into the world? Of course we’re born into the world.

Perhaps it means that when we look at the child the world into which the child is born should determine the child’s education? Or that when we look at the child we can’t ignore that his education has to be all about that world?

Is it that the schools are not paying enough attention to the world? And if not doing what instead?

Second there is this: “In America education plays a different and, politically, incomparably more important role than in other countries. …the explanation lies in the fact that America has always been a land of immigrants.”

Now at one time or the other every place on the surface of this earth has been a “land of immigrants.” The movement of peoples out of Africa and into other lands is, or at least was for nearly all of the 100,000 or so years of homo sapiens’ time on the earth, what history, our history anyway, is most about.

If America is exceptional in this regard it has to be because of the speed, the rapidity with which this movement has taken place during the most recent centuries. And it’s still going on.

I note daily that there are politicians who would, perhaps to protect what they see as their native interests, no longer have us be a land of immigrants. Apparently in their eyes those who continue to come here are no longer the same as the millions who came before them.

Whereas for Arendt the education of successive waves of immigrants into our world should be what most characterizes our schools these politicians would now, in flagrant denial of our history, and perhaps greatness, deny the newcomers, the most recent wave of immigrants, the right to attend our schools.