The Homeschooling Physicist

Will the Election Matter? (And Some Predictions)

2010-10-11T21:48:00.000-07:00

Robert Samuelson, the economic columnist for Newsweek, has a current column, “The Age of Austerity,” that argues:

We have entered the Age of Austerity. It's already arrived in Europe and is destined for the United States. Governments throughout Europe are cutting social spending and raising taxes -- or contemplating doing so. The welfare state and the bond market have collided, and the welfare state is in retreat. Even rich countries find the costs too high…

Clearly, most European nations waited too long to overhaul their welfare states. (The same is true of the United States.) The added costs of the global recession have now forced them to do the politically unthinkable: chop social spending and raise taxes in trying economic times. They have little choice, but it may be a mission impossible.

Last week, a friend, who is a Tea Party supporter, and I were talking about the election, and I suggested, “The real problem is how to repeal the New Deal.” Samuelson is a mainstream journalist and certainly not a “Tea Partier,” and he put the matter less bluntly than I. But I think his message is essentially the same.

A few weeks ago, I saw Paul Ryan, a rising star in the conservative wing of the GOP, on Charlie Rose’s show. Ryan explained very clearly the conception of the Founders that rights were innate to human beings, not privileges granted by government, and explained that the current idea of “entitlement rights” was not what the Founders had in mind. The Founders supported natural rights, essentially the right to be left alone to develop one’s abilities as one chose.

Then, Ryan went on to claim that the main mission of the GOP was to protect Social Security and Medicare!

The irony is of course that Social Security and Medicare are the primary examples of the “entitlement rights” Ryan had just so articulately criticized.

The problem really is how to repeal the New Deal, but I do not think the GOP has the guts even to attempt that task.

Don’t get me wrong: the Obama Administration needs to be sent a message, and only a tidal wave of defeats for the Democrats can send that message. Yes, it is time for a change.

But, no matter how big the tsunami of November 2, I doubt it will solve the basic problem: the onerously expensive, unsustainable, and unconstitutional welfare-warfare state that goes back to FDR. It is going to be a very long road to move forward to the ideas of Thomas Jefferson.

Now, for predictions: even though I am generally not an optimist when it comes to the outcome of the democratic process, I do love elections – I should’ve been a pollster.

I predict that the Republicans will pick up nine seats in the Senate. I’m assuming they will win the “Republican-leaning” toss-ups: Illinois, Nevada, Colorado, and West Virginia. I doubt the GOP can take Connecticut, even though Linda McMahon is a much more credible candidate than Blumenthal (who repeatedly lied about serving in Vietnam). And, I do not think Fiornia can take out Barbara Boxer out here in California, as happy as I would be to see Ms. Boxer enjoy her long-delayed retirement.

The real question mark is Washington: if Dino Rossi can beat Patty Murray, that should be enough for the GOP to take the Senate. And, the most recent polls show Rossi taking the lead.

It might happen.

I predict the GOP will pick up forty-five seats in the House of Representatives, enough to take control with six seats to spare.

And, one thing I am absolutely certain of: there will be some surprises on election day.

Incidentally, I find the Real Clear Politics site to be the best single place to follow the horse race and political commentary: RCP does a great job of summarizing the polls, and their links to pundits and commentators are more evenly divided among leftists, conservatives, and libertarians than the old, now dying, “mainstream” media.

For one single pundit who is the first in class in predicting elections, I recommend Charlie Cook

After the votes are counted, the pundits will tell us how this election is of earth-shaking importance. In fact, it will not turn things around: it has taken eighty years to dig ourselves into the hole FDR, and politicians of both parties, created for us, and it will take decades to dig ourselves out.

But perhaps this election can be a small beginning. So, get out and vote, and, if you have friends who are utterly clueless about the problems the country faces, encourage them to relax and stay home and ignore the election. Some people are not a plus to the democratic process.

Homeschooling Economics: Economics as the Key to a Civilized Society

2010-04-22T03:25:00.000-07:00

Economics is the study of how human beings satisfy their needs and desires by mutually beneficial exchanges and interactions and thereby create a prosperous and civilized society.

The ignorance or rejection of the principles of economics leads to the boom-and-bust cycle, ongoing inflation, and, at the most extreme, the Soviet Gulag, the mass murders of the Maoist “Cultural Revolution,” and the “killing fields” in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

Studying economics may, peripherally, help one pursue a career in business or manage one’s own finances. But the primary reason for studying economics is to understand how to create and maintain a free, civilized, and affluent society.

The study of economics is therefore a crucial part of a classical, humane education.

Following is a discussion of what I consider the twelve over-arching, core principles of economics, followed by a detailed discussion of how to integrate the principles of economics into one's education. These core economic principles emphasize not the technical details of supply-and-demand or the operation of the money supply but rather the broader concepts that make sense of all those finer details. Those finer details cannot be ignored, but they only make sense within this broader context.

(I came close to switching to economics after completing my Ph.D. in physics: I actually had an offer to do a post-doctoral fellowship in economics. My interest in economics goes back nearly as long as my interest in physics.)

-------------

The Twelve Core Principles of Economics

The economy is individual people working together to solve human problems

Crack open an economics textbook or listen to the news and you will get the idea that economics is about abstract concepts such as consumer demand, the business climate, the unemployment rate, etc. It is all too easy to get caught up in such abstractions and forget that economics is about nothing more than individual human beings working together with each other to solve human needs and wants.

Used properly, the graphs in an economics text (e.g., supply-and-demand graphs) can help explain the interactions of all the individuals that make up an economy. But, if those graphs and abstractions hide the reality of individual people solving problems, working out how to get a job done, figuring out where to get the tools or supplies that they need, etc., then the analyses supplied by the textbooks are simply obfuscating the true reality of economic behavior.

Anyone who has worked for any length of time in a successful private business and who has paid attention to the overall operation knows that real economic life involves juggling schedules, figuring out what customers want and what suppliers can deliver, working out new procedures to carry out tasks more efficiently, looking for improved tools to get the job done better, faster, or cheaper, etc.

That is economics.

Any approach to economics that tries to make the student forget all this is an attempt to obscure reality.

The result can be catastrophic.

A concrete example is the recent attempts to end the current “Great Recession” by injecting money into the economy, by bailing out unsuccessful businesses, by increasing consumer demand, or by making it easier for businesses to borrow money.

The recession began because workers and businesses were engaged in unproductive activities, notably in the area of real estate. The federal government, via the Federal Reserve System, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, etc. encouraged and subsidized an unsustainable bubble in the real-estate field.

Reality popped that bubble.

The only road to a sustainable recovery involves individual workers, investors, and businesses working out for themselves all the messy details of how to move away from unproductive activities and into more productive lines of activity.

There is no short-cut here: stimulating demand, encouraging investment, etc. cannot solve the problem. There are millions of separate detailed problems that have to be solved, a separate problem for each individual worker, for each failing business, etc. No central authority can do this. No one else can vicariously solve your detailed personal problems, just as no one else can lose weight for you or get into good physical condition on your behalf.

You have to do it yourself.

When we understand that the economy consists of many millions of people working out complicated, detailed problems, and that interfering with their doing so only worsens the economic situation, we understand the key reality of economics.

Economics is about millions of human beings applying their own intelligence and problem-solving ability to solve human problems and satisfy human wants. Impede their ability to do so and you wreck the economy.

Private property = accountability

There is an old saying that we do not own our possessions but that our possessions own us.

That, in a sense, is the point of private property: people can be expected to take full responsibility for their decisions only when they themselves bear the consequences of those decisions. When you own something, you take care of it because it is yours, because you yourself will have to deal with your failure to be responsible.

People protect, defend, maintain, and care for their own property.

That which is “owned” by everyone is in fact owned by no one.

This leads to the “tragedy of the commons”: we have, for example, a problem with air pollution because no one owns the air. Add a bit of pollution to the air and you do not feel that you have diminished the economic value of something that belongs to you.

Indeed, “Coase’s theorem,” the result which won Ronald Coase the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics, maintains that all economic “externalities” are due to improperly defined or inadequately enforced property rights.

The connection between having personal authority over one’s personal property and taking responsibility for that property is, at a simple level, obvious to almost everyone. But many people have trouble seeing that the same point applies at a larger level. The reason that Walmart is much better managed than the Post Office or the Department of Motor Vehicles is that there are people who own Walmart and who will suffer economic losses if Walmart is run badly. Unfortunately, we all supposedly “own” the Post Office and the DMV, so no one really owns them: no one feels that he must see that the Post Office or DMV runs well in order to protect his own personal property.

Prices as signals

If private property makes accountability possible, it is the price system of a market economy that sends the signals and provides the information that makes it possible to carry out that accountability wisely.

If a worker can make twice as much money being a carpenter as he can being a plumber, that difference in wage rates sends him the message that the economy currently needs carpenters more than it needs plumbers. If a manufacturer could make twice the profit selling electric cars as he could selling internal-combustion cars, then the price system would be sending him the message that consumers prefer electric cars over conventional cars (his profit of course depends on the price he can sell the cars for versus the price he must pay for labor and for raw materials – prices are the key to making estimates of profitability).

If you prevent prices from moving freely by setting price controls, minimum or maximum wage rates, etc. then you destroy the communication system of the economy: you are, metaphorically speaking, cutting the phone wires, shutting down the network, that transmits the information that allows the economy to operate.

Capitalists keep workers from starving

The stereotype of the greedy capitalist goes back centuries. Yet, in a free market, workers are perfectly free to build the factory, create the tools, gather the raw materials for themselves, without any capitalists, and thereby avoid “exploitation” by “greedy” capitalists.

So, why don’t they?

Because it takes time, often many years, between the beginning of a project and the final point where one can sell the products resulting from that project. It takes a long time to erect factories, to design and build machines, to extract and transport raw materials.

And, in the interim, the workers need to eat.

The capitalist buys time for the workers. He enables them to do productive work in the present, work that will not pay off for quite a while, and yet, thanks to the capitalist, the workers can be paid now instead of waiting until the factory finally starts selling products.

If the workers think that this is unfair, they can always go it alone, and somehow figure out how to eat until the factory is finally in operation. Or, they can stay in other activities where there is no significant delay in time between the initial work and the final sale.

Most workers prefer the income security and the higher wages made possible by the capitalist.

Capitalists allow workers to reap the fruits of more productive, long-term methods of production while still enjoying an income before their labor yields its final results.

As a result, workers under modern capitalism enjoy a standard of living exceeding that of kings and emperors in millennia long past.

The interest rate is the price of time

It is often worth a great deal to have money now instead of having money later. Sometimes, one needs money immediately for a personal emergency; sometimes one can reasonably expect to have more money in the future, and it is useful to borrow money today and pay it off in the future (e.g., when buying a house).

Most importantly, in an industrial economy, the building of factories, machines, etc. takes a good deal of time, but that investment in time can ultimately pay off handsomely in increased productivity.

The interest rate is the price of time: it sends messages throughout the economy of the availability and cost of doing something now versus later.

If the government or the central monetary authority attempts to interfere with interest rates, it is distorting one of the most crucial forms of communication in the economy.

Trying to set interest rates is a form of price control, and it distorts and damages the economy as any price controls do. But, in an industrial economy, where production processes throughout the economy are based on lengthy, time-consuming projects, distorting interest rates is especially destructive.

In an industrial economy, “bubbles” are typically due to the monetary authority attempting to set interest rates. Attempts to control interest rates ends in depressions when those bubbles inevitably pop.

Government control over the monetary and financial system, largely via “central banking” (the “Federal Reserve System” in the United States), induces bubbles and the resulting depressions by interfering with the natural rate of interest.

Economic advance comes not from labor but from those who make labor more efficient and productive

The “labor theory of value” maintained that the economic value of a good or service is measured by the labor that went into producing that good or service.

If that were true, economic progress would be impossible.

Long ago, Benjamin Franklin pointed out a simple point of economic arithmetic. Suppose that everyone in an economy labors for forty hours a week. Then, on average, each person can enjoy the fruits of forty hours of human labor, no more.

A few wealthy people may employ a retinue of servants and assistants. But, it is mathematically impossible, for simple arithmetic reasons, for everyone to employ a full-time butler, a full-time cook, etc. The numbers cannot add up (i.e., there would have to be more butlers and cooks than there are people!).

The only way to improve the living standards of the average human being is for everyone to work much harder for much longer hours (which is hardly an obvious improvement in human welfare!) or to figure out how to make each hour of human labor more productive.

We know only three ways to do this: give workers more and better tools (machines, trucks, computers, etc.), have workers employ newer and better technology, organize workers in a manner so that their efforts and activities are better coordinated to produce more productive results.

In practice, all three of these approaches generally involve pursuing more long-term, more roundabout processes of production: i.e., they require more capital.

That is why “capitalism” is indeed an appropriate designation for a modern industrial economy that brings affluence to the mass of the people: only capitalism can physically alleviate widespread human suffering and poverty.

Optimal methods of economic organization are worked out by the market

It is easy enough to see that the wonders of personal computers, cell phones, etc. are the product of the innovative capabilities of a free-market economy – i.e., of millions of human beings freely trying out new ideas, freely deciding what jobs to offer to prospective employees, freely deciding what products to buy, etc.

But it seems harder for many people to understand that the same applies to modes of economic organization. Shouldn’t we “protect” the corner variety store from Walmart or the corner burger stand from McDonald’s?

It was not that long ago when many people wanted to protect tiny, antiquated steel mills from technologically modern, large-scale mills, or tiny inefficient oil refineries from modern efficient refineries.

The huge increase in worker productivity since the Industrial Revolution may well owe more to changes in business organization – everything from marketing and finance to the actual physical operation of factories – than to improvements in technology.

The key point to understand is that there is no surefire analytical method for predicting what new organizational methods will end up working. How many people realized that eBay or amazon.com were the wave of the future? And how many people gambled and lost on “dot coms” that sounded promising but failed?

There is sometimes talk about “running government like a business.” The problem is that there is not a single, distinct way in which to “run a business.” A free economy consists of thousands or millions of people trying out a plethora of different ways to run a business and finding out what works.

And, it therefore may turn out that a college dropout comes up with a better way of running a business than was ever envisioned by hordes of MBAs.

The “Red Queen Principle”: the market erases “sure thing” opportunities

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen declared, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Everyone would like to believe that he has stumbled upon a “sure thing,” a gravy train guaranteed to keep money rolling in forever, without requiring ongoing effort and innovation.

There can be no such “sure thing” in a free-market economy.

“Just invest in blue chips.” If that really is an ideal investing strategy, sooner or later other investors will pick up on it. They will bid the price of blue chips up to a point where they are so pricey that they are no longer great investments.

“Real estate can only go up.” It is perhaps mean-spirited to bring up that particular fallacy after the recent bubble has popped. But, wait a few years, and we will hear it again. The fallacy of course is that if real estate really is a great investment, the price of real estate will be bid up to the point where it no longer is a great investment, maybe to the point where it has become a disastrous investment.

This principle goes beyond avoiding investment bubbles.

Whenever you think you see some area of the economy where the market seems to be operating inefficiently, ask yourself why someone has not moved in to make some profit off of that inefficiency. If you are right, someone either has moved in, or soon will be moving in, to offer goods or services to eliminate the inefficiency: if you are sure of the inefficiency, and in a position to take a risk, move into the area yourself.

You think some industry or profession is making “exorbitant” profits? Move into that industry or profession, or watch others move in, and see the increased competition eat away those exorbitant profits.

It is “exorbitant” profits and unrealized opportunities that drive a market economy: they drive people to take advantage of those profits and opportunities in a way that creates new businesses, new jobs, and new products. In very short order, the “exorbitant” profits and unrealized opportunities have vanished, to be replaced by a higher standard of living for everyone.

There is one exception: if the government can restrain or prohibit new entrants into an industry or profession, exorbitant, truly exploitative incomes and profits can indeed be sustained indefinitely at the cost of consumers. This need not consist simply of laws prohibiting competition; it can also consist of onerous governmental regulations that can be more easily monitored and complied with by large existing firms than by new, small start-ups.

Whether intentionally or not, government regulations tend to favor large, established, bureaucratic corporations over small, innovative start-ups: the large corporations can hire lobbyists to protect their interests and gain special privileges; they can afford large legal departments; they can absorb the costs of complying with regulations. A start-up company cannot.

Indeed, economists have recognized for decades that regulatory agencies created to restrain business tend to get “captured” by the established firms in the industry they are supposed to regulate (see, e.g., the 1970 classic The Crisis of the Regulatory Commissions edited by MIT economist Paul MacAvoy): the Carter Administration abolished the Civil Aeronautics Board for precisely this reason.

The need to run rapidly in order to stay in the same place can be unappealing to the incompetent, the lazy, and those who are already affluent and powerful. They may therefore appeal to the government to try to preserve the status quo.

The result is the stifling of economic growth. The “Red Queen Principle” is the engine of economic progress and the only means to better the material condition of humankind.

“Market failure” = utopian speculation or government intervention

Economic textbooks, media pundits, and politicians go on at great length about areas in which the market has “failed.”

Keeping in mind that the economy is nothing but individual human beings, a “failure” of the market in fact means a failure of human beings to work together to solve their problems.

What could cause such a failure?

Well… the market has indeed “failed” to create an elixir of immortality or turn base metals into gold or invent a means to travel faster than light or…

But, all of those “failures” are simply due to the fact that humans do not know (yet) how to do those things.

More commonly, market “failure” means simply that someone wants other people to pay for his own desires or pet projects and they choose not to do so.

The market has “failed” to provide for everyone free childcare, or free health care, or free sirloin steaks or…

Yes, the free market allows people to decide for themselves what charities to contribute to, and most people are reluctant to contribute to charities to provide free childcare, health care, and sirloin steaks to others who are unwilling to provide those things for themselves.

Aren’t there cases where people really could provide, and want to provide, some good or service, but for some reason cannot do so through the market?

Yes, when government regulation makes that impossible. Someone, for example, wants to do yard work for you at a mutually agreeable wage, but for you to pay him that wage would violate minimum-wage laws, ignore regulations requiring you to pay half of his Social Security payments, etc. Government regulations prevent a mutually beneficial exchange from occurring.

“Market failures” are due either to inadequately defined and enforced property rights (vide “Coase’s theorem”) or to government intervention in the economy.

I know of no exceptions.

If you think you are wiser than the market, prove it

Again and again, we hear that the market has its place, but that it needs to be properly guided, controlled, or restrained by some wiser, over-riding authority.

For example, we were told for many years that the market was failing to offer enough loans to low-income, minority borrowers. Government regulators pressured lenders to relax their standards for such borrowers. Many of those borrowers, of course, ended up defaulting when the real-estate bubble popped: it turned out that the market’s standards had been wiser than the well-intentioned regulators’ judgment.

If minority borrowers had really been under-served, there would have been a wonderful profit opportunity here: the regulators who truly believed this could have quit their government jobs, opened new lending institutions focused solely on worthy minorities, and made a bundle financially while also serving the cause of social justice.

You believe women or minorities are underpaid in the workplace? Start a business that only hires women and minorities and outshine your competitors by getting good workers cheap.

This is not hypothetical: Malcolm Forbes, Sr. claimed to do just that by hiring largely female employees, whom he thought were undervalued in the market.

It apparently worked.

But it will not work forever – as the “Red Queen principle” reminds us, others will soon notice your success, and everyone will soon be following the wiser and more profitable (and socially more just) approach to business.

You’re wiser than the market? The market is just other people – maybe you are smarter than they are. Put your money, time, and energy where your mouth is and prove it. If you’re right, you will make a bundle, and everyone will end up better off.

If you are not willing to do that, well… talk is cheap. An economy progresses on action, not talk.

“Economic harm” = fraud, theft, or just whining

We often hear that foreign competition “harms” American workers, that Walmart “harms” smaller, older retailers, etc.

What such “harm” usually means is that the group being “harmed” had a good thing going by overcharging consumers and wanted to preserve their exploitative position: they wanted to be granted immunity from the “Red Queen principle.”

The freedom offered by a free market is the freedom to buy or sell what you want to whomever you want, to employ whomever you wish, to work for whomever you wish, provided that the person on the other end of the deal finds that the deal works for him.

If you want to hire a worker at a lower wage than he can get elsewhere, if you want an employer to pay you more than he can pay for other workers, if you want consumers to shop at your store when another store offers lower prices or more variety, none of that is guaranteed to you by a free market.

A market economy is millions of human beings figuring out the best way they can solve their own and other people’s problems. If you think they are “harming” you by passing you by, because someone else makes them a better offer, you had best understand how the “Red Queen principle” works in a market economy.

The free market advances human well-being and eliminates human suffering by allowing people to constantly invent new and better ways of solving each other’s problems and meeting each other’s needs. If you refuse to participate in that constant round of change and innovation, you will not participate fully in the benefits.

Yes, in that sense, you will be “harmed”: you will not reap the benefits of a process in which you yourself decline to participate.

Of course, in any human society, there can be real physical, not merely metaphorical, harm: theft, fraud, murder, rape, etc. That is the province of the criminal law, not the economy in general. Arguably, the primary source of theft and fraud in most contemporary human societies is the government itself: the monetary cost of ordinary crime is trivial in comparison to the cost of taxes, and the fraudulent promises of government certainly exceed the fraud most of us encounter in our everyday economic lives.

A free-market economy economizes on love

Lewis Carroll wrote:

“’Tis love, ’tis love,” said the Duchess, “that makes the world go round.” “Somebody said,” whispered Alice, “that it's done by everybody minding their own business.” “Ah well,” replied the Duchess, “it means much the same thing.”

Several decades ago, the British economist D. H. Robertson published a brilliant paper that opened with this quote; his essay was entitled “What Does the Economist Economize?”

Robertson concluded that the ultimate resource that is economized in a free-market economy is “love.”

That may sound paradoxical in light of the widespread belief that the market not only allows but demands untrammeled greed.

However, as I have tried to emphasize, “the market” is nothing but millions of people trying to solve each other’s problems and satisfy each other’s needs in a mutually beneficial fashion.

The genius of the market is that both sides expect to benefit in a market exchange: we receive benefits from our fellow participants in the market even if they have no love for us personally but are merely pursuing their own self-interest, “minding their own business,” in Alice’s words..

This does not in any manner preclude participants in a market economy from acting out of altruistic motives. Indeed, I myself have again and again engaged in economic transactions where the other person seemed genuinely proud and pleased to be of help – everything from the craftsman who built our fireplace mantle to friends who run a local Greek restaurant. Conversely, I can only recall one occasion where a government employee, a civil “servant,” truly went out of his way to be helpful beyond what his job required (strangely enough, he was a supervisor at the Department of Motor Vehicles).

The difference is that a government employee who provides service beyond what is required is not serving his economic interest, but someone who does so in the market economy helps himself by helping others (I recommend the Greek restaurant to friends).

While a market economy does not require altruistic behavior, it does cause people to serve the interests of others simply by pursuing their own self-interest.

A market economy thereby allows people to focus their limited altruistic impulses on efforts that are not adequately served by the larger, money-based economy: charitable and cultural activities, physical and moral defense of the society at large and of civilized values, and, above all else, their own friends, family, and children.

The human capacity for altruism is not unlimited. We cannot spend every breathing, waking minute thinking about how to save the world. A free market allows us to tend to our own needs by also serving others, and, in our time away from the job, we can exercise our purely altruistic impulses as we judge best.

Socialism works in exactly the opposite way: citizens of a socialist society are exhorted to constantly put the needs of the larger society above their own needs in all of their everyday activities.

The effort is morally exhausting: socialism means life as an ongoing emergency, a constant need to sacrifice oneself, just to create a viable society.

Human beings cannot do this: the demands on human altruism made by socialism exceed the supply of altruistic impulses that are available to us as human beings.

The result is bizarre monstrosities such as the Maoist “Cultural Revolution,” Stalinist “Stakhanovism,” or the “killing fields” under the Khmer Rouge, which physically consumed human lives.

A market economy is millions of human beings working to solve each other’s problems. It works so brilliantly because, as I have emphasized above, the free market decentralizes accountability via the institution of private property, disseminates information via the price system, and encourages innovation and the alleviation of human suffering via the “Red Queen principle.”

But above all else, a free economy allows a flourishing of human altruism by allowing altruism to be used where it is truly needed and allowing more mundane, “selfish” motives to operate when they are sufficient.

It is still fashionable to ridicule “Victorian values.” But those “bourgeois” values, the values of laissez-faire capitalism, saw an outpouring of charity (vide Andrew Carnegie, and many others), a diminution in poverty, and the well-known emphasis on family life, all hitherto unparalleled in human history.

“Bourgeois” capitalist values make a peaceful, civilized, humane, affluent society possible.

The twentieth century consisted largely of a rejection of those values – the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Cambodian “killing fields” were all quite insane from the perspective of bourgeois capitalism and were all motivated by an intense rejection of bourgeois values.

Economics is the study of how a market economy is possible, how and why it works, and why the alternatives to a market economy produce human suffering, poverty, incivility, and death.

In short, economics is about how human beings can acquire their daily bread and still live in a civilized society. And that is why the study of economics is necessary to a liberal and humane education: we need to understand that the ultimate object of economics is, as Robertson wrote, “to economize on love” so that we may live good and fulfilling lives as human beings in a humane society.

----------

These twelve principles are, of course, by no means the entirety of the discipline of economics. There are other basic principles – the “sunk-cost” fallacy, the importance of “thinking at the margin,” the law of comparative advantage, basic supply-and-demand analysis, cost as being foregone alternative opportunities, the effects of varying incentive structures, etc.

And, there is the application of all of this to specific areas and problems:

applying supply-and-demand theory to money to see how inflation of the money supply causes prices to rise

showing why international trade helps consumers and why protectionism reduces economic welfare

explaining how consumer demand directs resources to different uses and creates the overall structure of the economy

discussing how the banking system functions (and malfunctions)

demonstrating how capital markets allocate resources across different firms and industries in the economy

understanding why socialism always fails

exploring how government causes recessions and depressions

discovering the different forms of contractual and institutional relationships that people have created for different economic settings

exhibiting how governmental controls, regulations, and interventions impede the operation of the economy and distribute special privileges to the members of the government and their supporters

and much more.

One of the features of the discipline of economics that is strange to those of us trained in the natural science is the division of economics into a number of competing “schools”: Keynesians, Chicagoites, Marxists, neo-Ricardians, Austrians, etc.

Nonetheless, this is the reality in economics. Several of these “schools” have as their primary purpose justifying the predatory role of the state and obfuscating the damage that an interventionist government inflicts on the economy.

Several of these “schools” also have a somewhat strange fixation on a rather bizarre use of mathematics: my own mentor in physics, Richard Feynman, labeled this “cargo-cult science.” On certain Pacific islands after the Second World War, “cargo cults” arose in which the natives would construct imitation airfields hoping that these would magically bring back the American airplanes and all the goodies the Americans had brought with them.

In the same way, Feynman argued, some people in the “social sciences” imitated the mathematical form of physics, although there was no real substance behind this form. I was told by one of Feynman’s colleagues in the economics department that Feynman was particularly disdainful of Paul Samuelson’s famous Foundations of Economic Analysis, often considered the seminal book in this move to mathematize economics.

Much of this mathematization of economics is simply navel-gazing, but some is positively harmful. For example, one can find in many economics texts quite rigorous mathematical proofs that if we possessed God-like knowledge of the economy then we could arrange it in a better way than the market. That is of course quite true – if we possessed God-like powers, we could do many things better than mere human beings can do.

(Essentially, these mathematical proofs assume knowledge of certain complicated mathematical functions, often represented in the textbooks by graphs of supply curves, demand curves, production-possibility curves, etc. The problem is that these functions are not actually known to any human being: indeed, economic activity can be thought of as people’s inventing or discovering the small portions of those curves that are relevant to their own economic activities. To assume that these curves are known and can be used in formal mathematical calculations is therefore like assuming that dinner is ready when one has not yet done any cooking. The curves assumed by the textbook are not inputs to economic analysis; rather, those curves (or portions of them) are the output of economic activity in the market – i.e., the result of the very difficult and complicated problem-solving activities and decisions of millions of hard-working people. To take those curves, or the mathematical functions they represent, as “given” is to make, as the philosophers say, a “category error.”)

Alas, we lack the God-like powers required to grasp all the information needed to replicate the results of a market economy. The whole point of a market economy is that the market allows real human beings, lacking God-like powers, to use their own knowledge and intelligence to solve a myriad of difficult, concrete problems in a decentralized yet cooperative manner. To assume that we have God-like knowledge of the economy is to basically assume away the economy itself.

Unfortunately, these rigorous but irrelevant mathematical proofs are commonly used to justify governmental controls over the economy, ignoring the fact that the government is made up of people notably lacking in God-like knowledge or wisdom!

Of course, the proponents of mathematizing economics could prove us critics wrong quite simply: they could make verifiable, testable predictions of future developments in the economy.

They have tried. Repeatedly. And failed. Spectacularly.

There have been numerous attempts to escape this cul de sac in mathematical economics for more than half a century: input-output analysis, game theory, rational-expectations theory, behavioral economics, Arrow-Debreu theory, evolutionary economics, etc.

I will not try to deny that there has been and continues to be some interesting work in some of these areas. But none of it has lived up to the standards of natural science and none of it, I think, has significantly invalidated the basic principles of economics I outlined above.

Furthermore, even some brilliant economists, notably Milton Friedman, have argued that economics can and should take a “positivist” approach, similar to that taken by the natural sciences, in which one forms broad theories, deduces hypotheses from those theories, and then tests the theories by rigorously testing the deduced hypotheses against actual empirical data.

An interesting idea – except anyone familiar with economics knows that almost none of the major economic theories and principles have actually been developed and tested in that way.

There are several reasons why this sort of “scientific” approach to economics has in fact proved to be a will o’ the wisp.

I have already alluded to one of these reasons – physics and astronomy have relied on detailed and successful mathematical models. Such empirically-successful mathematical models just do not exist in economics. The subject matter of economics is human desires, human innovation, human problem-solving, etc.: it is doubtful that such matters can ever be quantified and subjected to empirically-meaningful mathematical analysis in the manner in which we can measure and analyze mass, forces, etc. in physics.

At any rate, attempts to do so have simply not resulted in broad mathematical models that make detailed empirical predictions that have been rigorously tested by observation and proven to be correct.

Furthermore, as the sociologist Randall Collins pointed out in his 2005 paper, “Why the Social Sciences Won't Become High-Consensus, Rapid-Discovery Science,” one key to the rapid progress of the natural sciences has been constant innovations in research equipment used for observations and measurements, resulting in the accumulation of new sorts of observational data and the discovery of hitherto unsuspected natural phenomena.

Astronomers build increasingly powerful telescopes, physicists create higher energy accelerators to make new subatomic particles, biologists supplement light microscopes with electron microscopes – all of this means that natural scientists are constantly able to uncover new clues revealing the secrets of nature.

It is hard to see how anything like this can ever occur in economics or the other social sciences: we already have far more data about human beings than we have about subatomic particles, for we ourselves have an “inside view” of human beings.

And, indeed, in the last half century, there have been monumental advances in the natural sciences – the discovery of quarks in physics, the recognition of plate tectonics in geology, the cracking of the genetic code in biology, the discovery of quasars, pulsars, etc. in astronomy – that have revolutionized the natural sciences and that will remain important parts of those sciences as long as they exist.

I doubt that anyone can point to similar “discoveries” in economics (or the other social sciences) in the last half century – i.e., discoveries that have revolutionized our understanding of social reality, that are universally accepted within the discipline, and that are certain to remain central to the discipline throughout its future history.

There has been a huge amount of “research” published in the social sciences in the last half century, but it is hard to claim that any of that research truly, radically, and permanently changed our understanding of reality in the way that new discoveries in the natural sciences have done.

“Research” in the social sciences tends not to be cumulative: to put it bluntly, it tends to consist of academic fads, in fashion for a decade or two, and then largely forgotten and ignored as new fads become fashionable.

In all of these respects, I think that the present-day school of economics that best preserves the fundamental insights of economics, without succumbing to the ever-changing fads of the moment, is the so-called “Austrian school,” which began in Austria in the nineteenth century but which now exists largely in the United States. Among the most prominent figures in the Austrian school have been Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and the Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek.

The Austrians have been particularly strong in exploring how the economy uses the problem-solving abilities of millions of human beings to bring about economic progress, explaining how government policies can wreck that progress (e.g., by producing the “boom-bust” cycle by interfering with the monetary and financial system), and showing why socialism does not work because it cannot utilize the human capacity to solve problems, coordinate actions, and create new ideas.

Much of what I have presented here I myself learned from reading the Austrian economists; some of this I learned from my own experiences in industry and from talking with my father about his experiences in manufacturing (thanks, Dad).

However, there are certainly other schools of economics that have also shed important light on economic reality – e.g., the “public-choice” school, notably Gordon Tullock. And, the concepts of “information costs,” “transaction costs,” and “bounded rationality” associated with economists such as the Nobelists Oliver Williamson, Ronald Coase, and Herbert Simon, are also, I think, crucial to understanding economic reality.

On the other hand, some “schools” of economics have been wholly negative in their impact: I do not know of any positive result from the revered J. M. Keynes (and, yes, I have read and studied carefully, in its entirety, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money). The same can be said of Karl Marx.

How, then, does this connect to homeschooling?

Some of the basic principles of economics that I have outlined above can be and must be integrated into history and social studies very early in grade school. As soon as a child is old enough to understand that construction workers build buildings, he can understand that someone has to pay them so that they can eat while they are building a factory, before the factory is completed and ready to churn out clothes, toys, etc.: that is the essence of the idea of “capital” and “capitalism.”

The idea that ownership equals responsibility is also a concept that can be and should be taught in early grade school: even young kids understand that it is our job to mow our own grass, gas up our own cars, etc., but that we have no reason to mow other people’s grass, gas up their cars, etc. A yard that is owned by no one is likely to go ummown. This is why private property is necessary.

Even kids early in grade-school can understand that some countries once tried to run things so that “everyone” – i.e., no one – owned all the stores, farms, factories, etc. in the country, and that this worked horribly, just as a yard owned by no one is likely to be horribly overgrown with grass.

The failure of socialism, and the tens of millions who died in the name of making socialism work, is the central historical fact of the twentieth century. Any attempt to discuss twentieth-century history that ignores this fact and fails to explain the economic principles that the socialists themselves insisted on ignoring, is almost criminally negligent.

But, of course, it is not enough simply to integrate economics into discussions of history, politics, etc. Students also need to explicitly and seriously study economics as early as feasible.

The only books that I know that seriously try to do this at a grade-school level are Richard J. Maybury’s “Uncle Eric” books – e.g., Whatever Happened to Penny Candy. I happened to be going through that book with my grade-school kids when the financial collapse occurred in late 2008: it was very illuminating to watch the nightly news and then read a section in the book with the children that presented the economic principles that explained what we had just seen on the news.

Maybury’s perspective is similar to mine: i.e., he sees economics as an intellectual tool that enables one to understand what makes a humane and decent civilization possible.

Let me emphasize that one can find books that talk about some basic concepts of economics without engaging the broader perspective I am discussing. Such books are counter-productive, indeed inimical, to acquiring a broad education: this is true not only of many economics textbooks at the high-school and college level but also of many of the “gee whiz” pop economics books published in recent years. (Some of those pop-economics books try to apply economics, in very dicey ways, to issues of love, sex, etc. That no doubt helps to sell the books, but it is missing the central point: economics is about the large-scale structure of cooperation that makes an affluent, civilized, and humane society possible via the free market, not about topics better suited to Oprah.)

David Gordon’s An Introduction to Economic Reasoning introduces much of the basic apparatus of economics (e.g., supply and demand curves, the idea of marginal utility) in a brief, readable format (upper-grade school to middle-school reading level) that also stresses the broader framework of economics.

Henry Hazlitt’s classic Economics in One Lesson is at a somewhat higher reading level but avoids any technical apparatus to focus on the central point of thinking about the actual actions of participants in the economy in a number of detailed, illustrative discussions.

Murray Rothbard’s The Mystery of Banking and What Has Government Done to Our Money present the basic theory of money and banking in a readable form that emphasizes the broader context: the deleterious effects of government intervention in the monetary and financial system.

At a middle-school / early-high-school level, I like Alchian and Allen’s Exchange and Production and University Economics, both out-of-print but available at any decent university library.

The basic goal of a high-school economics course should be to read and understand Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State, which unifies economic and political analysis in a careful, detailed, readable text (make sure to get the recent edition that includes “Power and Market” – the original, abbreviated edition is inadequate).

For seventy years, the reigning conventional wisdom in economics has been the Keynesian synthesis. Keynes was simply wrong: he did not understand the fact (known as the “real-balance effect” or “Pigou effect”) that a declining price level increases the effective quantity of money (since the same money goes further at lower prices) and that an increased demand for money can therefore be satisfied by a decline in the price level. Failing to grasp this, Keynes convinced himself that an increased demand for money would result in people “hoarding” money and shutting down the economic system: he did not see that an increased demand for money would simply result in lower prices (i.e., cheaper goods). Focused on a mistaken explanation, Keynes failed to understand that depressions are created by government meddling in the monetary and financial systems leading to “bubbles,” and that the recovery process is impeded by governments' trying to prop up failed businesses and dying sectors of the economy.

While Keynes’ errors were simple, the massive treatise in which he presented these errors, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, comes close to being unreadable.

However, I myself, as a high-school student, did manage to make it through the entire book with the help of Hazlitt’s The Failure of the New Economics and the collection of essays Hazlitt edited, Critics of Keynesian Economics.

To really understand modern economics, this truly is necessary. Although Keynes was obviously, embarrassingly, wrong, Keynesian views are so embedded in the news media and in introductory university texts, that anyone who does not carefully work through the Keynesian morass cannot see how radically misguided modern economic policy really is.

If a student masters all of this, where then should she turn, later in high school and as she moves on into college?

Most of us are interested in economics largely because of its intersection with politics. None of the books I have mentioned above ignore that connection (how could they?). But there are books that focus on this connection, more from the political side, by Gordon Tullock, Rothbard, H.-H. Hoppe, and others that are well worth reading. I’ll go into some of those in another post that focuses on political science.

The history of economic thought is also important in understanding economics, partly because economic fallacies never seem to die but merely metamorphose into new forms: an interesting discussion of the history of economics is Rothbard’s two-volume An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Economic history is interconnected with the history of economic thought, because what people believe about economics helps determine the economic policies they actually pursue: Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression and The Panic of 1819 illustrate that interconnection.

It is important to understand that a lot of popular economic history is written by authors who lack an adequate understanding of economics themselves, who do not grasp the core principles of economics I have laid out above, and who therefore reduce economic history to a soap-operaish tale of good-guy governments or labor unions versus evil, “greedy” capitalists. Rothbard does not deny that there are indeed “bad guys” in economic history – government officials who pursued policies based on misguided or malevolent economic theories, businessmen who used their connections in government to line their own pockets and wipe out competitors, thereby exploiting consumers, economists who obtained cushy positions for themselves by providing justification for predatory governmental actions, etc. But he does insist that these judgments must be based on sound economic understanding, not on uninformed emotional musings.

Finally, isn’t all this just too much, way, way too much?

Well… I started studying economics as a sophomore in a traditional high school, and I did work through most of the above in high school, while I was also teaching myself a good deal of advanced physics and math.

What I have outlined here is really doable: as I said above, I myself made it through Keynes and the Hazlitt books (as well as Mises’ massive Human Action) as a high-school student in a traditional school: I had less freedom, and less time to spend on serious study, than homeschoolers do.

But, the main point is that homeschoolers do not need to start that late. Start with Maybury in fourth or fifth grade, then move on to Gordon’s introductory text and Rothbard’s books on money and banking.

Tackle Alchian and Allen in middle school, and, yes, by high school it should be feasible to at least handle Man, Economy, and State, Keynes, and the two books by Hazlitt that are critical of Keynesian theory.

Yes, this is a serious course of study, but economics is about serious things – inflation, depression, unemployment, and, ultimately, war and peace, freedom and slavery, and life and death.

How can human beings, through mutually beneficial interactions, create a free, prosperous, and humane society? That is what economics is about.

It is a subject worth mastering.

__________

Most of the books I have mentioned are available through the Mises Institute, the premiere site for economics on the Web. Alchian and Allen’s books and, of course, Keynes' can be found in any decent university library. Thanks to my kids for helping to proof-read this essay, to several friends and relatives for countless discussions on these subjects, and to Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and all those others who helped me understand the critical importance of economic knowledge to sustaining a prosperous, humane, and free society.

The World We Have Lost

2010-03-18T01:50:00.000-07:00

All of us homeschoolers have rejected, to some degree, the modern, bureaucratized society in which we live, simply by the fact that we have chosen the alternate path of homeschooling.

But, I think, most of us still do not realize how unthinkingly we are caught up in the values and attitudes of the modern world and how radically, and often disastrously, that world differs from the world of our forebears.

My great-grandmother was born in 1883: she passed away when I was a senior in college, so I knew her well throughout my childhood. It is very revealing to compare the world she grew up in to the society and culture we ourselves, our parents, and our own children inhabit.

Child-rearing and education

The most obvious difference, especially in the context of homeschooling, is in the area of child-rearing and education.

My great-grandmother only finished fourth grade. Yet, unlike many high-school graduates today, she had acquired basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

There was no “teen-age” rebelliousness, no “teen-age” youth culture, in her generation simply because there were no ‘teenagers.”

There were of course young people whose ages lay between thirteen and nineteen, but there was not a general expectation and acceptance of young people’s having a unique “culture” that took an adversarial stand against the adult world, intentionally creating music, dress styles, etc. calculated to annoy or outrage adults.

“Teenagerhood” – both the word and the idea – was an invention of the first half of the twentieth century, largely a result of the “consolidated” high school created in the first half of the twentieth century. Partly because of a desire to keep adolescents out of the workforce so that they would not compete with working fathers during the Depression, partly out of the “progressive” belief that more schooling was better for everyone, American adolescents were forced to spend twelve years in the school system.

As Grace Palladino explains in the first chapter of her comprehensive Teenagers: An American History:

The Great Depression had finally pushed teenage youth out of the workplace and into the classroom.... a shift that helped to create the idea of a separate teenage generation. When a teenage majority spent the better part of their day in high school, they learned to look to one another and not to adults for advice, information, and approval.... they revolutionized the very concept of growing up. This remarkable transformation had as much to do with the high school experience as with raging hormones or adolescent insecurity...

(It is interesting to recall that Golding's dystopian novel, Lord of the Flies, involved a group of schoolboys left on their own.)

Since many of the kids forced into the new comprehensive high schools lacked either the desire or the ability to engage in serious academic work, the curriculum was dramatically “dumbed down” (for a non-polemical, scholarly study of this “dumbing down,” see Kliebard’s The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893 – 1958), forcing kids to pursue pointless make-work until they could “graduate” from high school.

Is there any surprise that this has created anger, rebelliousness, and a youth culture based on contempt and resentment towards the adult world?

In the nineteenth century, there was a real purpose to the lives of most adolescent kids: they were working, on the farm, in the home, or at outside jobs, doing things (or learning to do things) that actually needed doing.

That is not true of most “teenagers” today.

Thomas Hine, in the final chapter of his The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, a broad-ranging study of youth through American history, concludes:

By looking at history as we have done, we see that the teenager that emerged in the mid-twentieth century was but one of many ways in which American young people have responded to the circumstances of their times... If we are going to persist in our notion that all young people should spend their teems simply waiting for adulthood, we have to find ways of making this teenage experience more satisfying and effective.

Alternatively, we can decide that the idea of the teenager is one that has outlived its usefulness, then move on to other possibilities

Hine does not deny that serious, rigorous, challenging academic work makes sense for those children willing to pursue it and able to benefit from it. But does it make sense to warehouse kids who are unable to or unwilling to pursue serious academic work in “schools” that serve only to artificially prolong adolescents' period of irresponsibility and dependency?

Our forebears were not convinced that Lord of the Flies was inevitable adolescent behavior.

Culture and the attitude towards learning

American (and British) culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was imbued with the ideal of intellectual self-improvement: to recognize that, one need only read Franklin or Emerson or recall Lincoln’s eagerness to acquire learning however he could. To be truly well-educated before the twentieth century was at least to know Latin (and, ideally, ancient Greek), and also a modern language (French or German).

There is a story that Lincoln, as a lawyer riding circuit, took a copy of Euclid’s Elements with him so that he could sharpen his reasoning powers.

How many American adults today seriously try to learn an intellectually difficult subject – a new area of mathematics, a new foreign language – unless they are required to do so for their job?

In fact, the idea of actually doing proofs – the axiomatic method of axioms / theorems / proofs – that has dominated serious mathematics since the time of the Greeks – has been largely eliminated from American high schools in recent decades (see this lament published in the LA Times, written by then-chair of the math department at Caltech, the most selective science university in the country).

We live today in a society that despises learning.

Consider:

How many living sports stars or entertainers can the average American name off the top of her head?
How many living scientists, mathematicians, or medical researchers can the average American name off the top of her head?
How many American teen-agers can identify who Babe Ruth was vs. who Jonas Salk was?

We have more leisure today, more access to tools of learning such as books, libraries and the Internet than ever before in history, and, yet, there is active contempt, bordering on hatred, for the idea of learning simply for the sake of learning.

No doubt part of this is due to memories of the “twelve-year sentence” that most Americans were forced to endure in the public schools.

But there is also a positive respect for delinquency and irresponsibility: the “trend-setters” of our popular culture are often the dregs of our society. It is not just the kids who are enraptured by “gangsta rap” or whatever the latest symbol of youth rebellion happens to be, but also adults who hold up failed human beings as objects of emulation or even veneration, whether “celebrities” such as Michael Jackson or fictional characters such as Holden Caulfield.

This is not the historical norm. Our forebears did not model themselves on petty thugs, juvenile delinquents, and people who clearly lacked the ability to live a normal life.

Rather than publicly honoring real, substantive achievement based on serious intellectual effort, we accept as our public “role models” the products of our “cult of entertainment”: professional sports is, of course, a prime example of modern entertainment. Again, this is not the historical norm: sports heroes and popular entertainers were not national icons throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

One result of our modern obsession is such an exaltation of style and personality over character and substantive achievement that even the Presidency is filled not on the basis of actual ability but rather on how well the candidate can theatrically play the role of being President on television (“he looks Presidential,” as we say).

During the recent 2010 Winter Olympics, General Electric ran a funny commercial in which physicians ran into a stadium and were cheered by a crowd of thousands. What makes the ad funny – and poignantly sad – is that we all know that the cure for cancer, the replacement for fossil fuels, etc. will be found by some studiously nerdy drudges who will never be cheered by tens of thousands in a stadium in the way football players and baseball players are normally cheered.

On the contrary, we all know the insulting terms and jokes aimed at those who strive to develop their intelligence. To spend hours and hours every day training for athletic competitions makes one a hero, but to put similar effort into developing one’s intellectual abilities makes one a “nerd, “a “geek,” etc.

Have Americans acquired so much hatred for serious learning, due to their experiences in the public schools, that they cannot admire those who develop the intellectual skills needed to move the world forward?

There is far more to learn than there has ever been in human history, yet, paradoxically, most of our children are learning less than educated people learned a century ago.

During the course of the twentieth century, more was discovered about the nature of the natural world via science and about the possible structures of space and number in mathematics than was discovered in all of human history prior to the twentieth century. Even in learning about the human past, archaeologists and historians have dramatically expanded our knowledge during the last hundred years.

And, yet, those who pursue serious intellectual effort, especially as adolescents, are now denigrated in much the way that drunkards or tramps were despised when my great-grandmother was a child.

The loss of middle-class independence

The old middle-class ideal was self-sufficiency and independence: a self-respecting person would not let himself be on the government dole and would plan for his and his family’s long-term personal and financial needs.

That is no longer true: most Americans believe they are “entitled” to Social Security, Medicare, public schooling for their kids, etc. – all at taxpayers’ expense. A large number of Americans believe they are “entitled” to government-provided daycare, to government-provided medical insurance, etc.

Government policies have systematically engineered this culture of dependency: during the last ninety-seven years, since the government founded the Federal Reserve System, the inflation of the currency by the “Fed” has destroyed more than ninety-five percent of the value of the dollar, according to the government’s own statisticians.

Combined with a plethora of new taxes never paid by Americans before the twentieth century, notably FICA (“Social Security”), and the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment (legitimizing the federal “income” tax), this has made it much more difficult for families to become financially independent by saving the money they have earned, and has therefore encouraged dependence on the state.

Even what is now considered a “modest” rate of inflation of, say, three percent per year, will eat away half of one's savings in less than a quarter century. And any rise in interest rates that partially offsets the price inflation will be taxed as “income,” making it even more difficult to keep up with the inflation created by the ongoing expansion of the money supply by the government.

These financial depredations against the American people have also encouraged both spouses to join the workforce. This “liberating” of mothers (how odd that women being forced to enter the workforce to make ends meet is considered “liberation”!) has meant that the functions traditionally provided at home by a parent are increasingly expected to be filled by government.

This loss of middle-class independence is of central importance to all the changes I am discussing. Specifically, when middle-class families no longer have the financial wherewithal to allow one parent to stay home with the kids, it is inevitable that responsibility for the kids is handed over to “experts,” to the schools, and to a barbaric “youth culture.”

More broadly, citizens who feel that it is neither necessary nor even possible to take personal responsibility for their own retirement, for possible periods of unemployment, for health care, etc. are taught the lesson that they are not responsible and competent adults in general. It is no wonder that such adults doubt their ability to tend to their children's education and child-rearing and instead abdicate those responsibilities to irresponsible “experts.”

Bureaucractization and the rule of experts

We have entrusted “experts” with everything from education to the criminal-justice system to the proper approach to child-rearing to regulating the nation's financial system.

Those “experts” insisted on “whole-language” reading instruction instead of phonics, on “rehabilitating” violent criminals instead of punishing them, on a “permissive” approach to child-rearing, and on economically insane policies for the nation's financial system.

None of that has worked.

We all know this, and, yet, we continue to entrust such “experts” with enormous power in education, the criminal-justice system, the “helping” professions, and even business management.

Numerous jobs that, fifty or a hundred years ago, did not require a college (or even high-school) diploma now require applicants to be college graduates. Sadly, there is evidence that college graduates today are only about as literate as the average high-school graduate of a half century ago. In 2002, the Zogby polling organization, at the behest of the National Association of Scholars, carried out a study to test the general academic knowledge of Americans today compared to a half century ago by repeating questions used in a series of polls taken at mid-century. The result was:

The overall average of correct responses for the entire general knowledge survey was 53.5% for today’s college seniors, 54.5% of the 1955 high school graduates, and 73.3% for the 1955 college graduates.

In short, although college is demanded for more students today, it seems to be accomplishing no more for most of those students than high school accomplished half a century ago: we are insisting on educational credentials that are in fact meaningless. Our “experts” are not experts; our “educated” college graduates are not in fact educated.

We have a society based on credentials that guarantee knowledge and expertise, but those credentials are in fact fraudulent (see sociologist Randall Collins' classic work The Credential Society.)

The issue of turning over large fractions of our lives to bureaucracies goes beyond the enormous economic waste and the everyday frustrations of dealing with bureaucracies. Millions of reasonably intelligent Americans spend decades of their lives acquiring a meaningless “education” to get themselves “jobs” that are utterly pointless, often positively destructive: for example, simply pushing paper to comply with (or, worse, create) meaningless, often economically destructive, regulations. Anyone who doubts this should look, for instance, at the huge salaries paid to those who wrecked “Fannie Mae.”

The rule of experts, the dominance of bureaucracy, a society of paper-pushers engaged in meaningless, pointless jobs – this is not the America that once existed. It is not a society that produces free and independent human beings that live meaningful, purposeful lives.

Regimentation, militarism, and the dominance of the “group”

The twentieth century was the century of “total war”: hundreds of millions of human beings died horrifying deaths as the result of the numerous wars and “civil terrors” pursued by the world’s governments during the last century.

War means militarization, and the results of that militarization has spilled over into society at large.

The traditional middle-class virtues – prudence, caution, independent thinking, planning for the long-term future – are not the military virtues.

A military high command does not want its “cannon fodder” to consist of thoughtful, cautious, calculating individualists.

Combat soldiers, whose life might end tomorrow on the battlefield, tend to have short “time horizons”: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for, tomorrow we die.” There is truth in the stereotype of the hard-drinking soldier or sailor; it makes sense that soldiers are known for short-term sexual liaisons formed without concern for long-term consequences.

Furthermore, a military runs on “esprit de corps,” which, pragmatically speaking, boils down to “submerge yourself in the group.” “Individualism” is not a military virtue.

The majority of Americans of course have never served in the military, but the never-ending wars in which the U.S. government has chosen to involve the United States for more than a century have resulted in a widespread acceptance of the military mindset, even among those (perhaps especially among those) who consider themselves not to be militarists.

This is evident not only in the contempt for cautious, prudent, middle-class behavior, but, above all, in the fervent belief in the need for “group activities” and “socialization” for children to teach them to “fit in” with the group.

To put this “groupism” in a historical context, recall that Thomas Jefferson never played on a Little League team; Abe Lincoln was never a Cub Scout.

Indeed, as Robert H. MacDonald explains in detail in his Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement – 1890-1918, Lord Baden-Powell created the Scouting movement in imitation of his own wartime experience as an actual military Scout. Scouting employs military rituals such as uniforms, bugle calls, salutes, etc. because one of its major purposes was to accustom young boys to military attitudes so that they would be prepared to “do their duty” as soldiers to advance the imperial cause when they became adults.

Progressives who stress the need for “group activities” and “socialization” may not consciously think of their goals as being militaristic. But, the military is in fact the very model of a bureaucratic, regimented institution. To raise children to think of themselves not as independent individuals but as members of a group is to encourage in them a militaristic mindset.

Of course, there are some worthwhile activities that can only be achieved by being part of a group: one cannot perform a symphony, play a basketball game, or dance the Nutcracker without being part of a team. I am not suggesting that it is wrong to be part of a team when that makes sense to achieve a common goal. But all of human history shows that it is not necessary to be immersed in formal group activities throughout one’s childhood in order to become a happy and productive adult.

The radical change from the traditions of our forefathers is not that we encourage our kids to do some activities that may involve them in groups. Rather the change is the belief that doing things in a group is good in and of itself, conveying to our children the belief that submerging one's individuality in the consciousness of group membership is proper and desirable.

That is the heart of militarism.

Can Homeschoolers Repeal the Twentieth Century?

Haven’t I grossly oversimplified?

Sure – I am talking about very broad social and cultural changes spanning a century. To blame the insistence on “group socialization” solely on the need to get everyone to share the proper group attitudes in our never-ending wars against never-ending enemies (first the Kaiser, then Hitler / Tojo, then Stalin / Khrushchev / Brezhnev / Mao, promptly followed by Qaddafi / Saddam / bin Laden, etc.) is of course over-simplifying.

After all, “group socialization” was also a key part of the “progressive” agenda, which in turn was one of the main sources for the cult of “experts.”

These cultural changes are indeed intertwined in many, very complicated ways.

But these changes are nonetheless very real: most Americans have come to accept regimentation, bureaucratization, control of their lives by “experts,” dependence on government, a collapse in education, a collapse of the currency, a punitive tax system, and a strange new approach to child-rearing that would have stunned and outraged most Americans when my great-grandmother was born in 1883, much less the American Founders.

My central point really is the inter-linking and reinforcement among these different changes. The contempt for serious learning produces “citizens” who are willing to be controlled by bureaucrats and by self-proclaimed “experts” and who are willing to accept the multiple lies of our “Commander-in-Chief,” whoever he may be. The emphasis on “fitting in” with the group discourages people from becoming self-reliant, independent individuals who can think for themselves. The collapse of parental responsibility for raising their own kids means that those kids are turned over to the tender mercies of the self-proclaimed “experts.”

Let me emphasize that I have said nothing about the explosion in crime, or illegitimacy, or broken homes in the last one hundred years. The social changes I have discussed have occurred even among normal, stable middle-class American families: most of what I have described is not even viewed any longer as “social pathology.”

What I have described is now taken for granted as “normal” American life. And yet it differs radically from the life and culture into which my great grandmother was born.

This transcends the hackneyed liberal vs. conservative political divisions. Liberals may be the ones insisting on “group learning” in the schools, but it is conservatives who focus on the Pledge of Allegiance to insure that we are all part of one “indivisible” nation (officially “under God,” ignoring the fact that God might have His own opinion on the matter!).

If there is any single source for these changes, it is probably the “progressive” movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We tend to forget that progressivism was a bipartisan movement (Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was the first “progressive” President) and that it was the two “progressive” Presidents, Wilson and Roosevelt, who initiated the policy of never-ending wars to fight never-ending enemies.

Why should all this matter for homeschoolers?

First, because if we think that our homeschooling is a response simply to the failure of the schools, we are missing the broader picture. The collapse of education in the U.S. is just a small part of a much broader web of social change.

Second, if we do not understand those changes, we risk replicating much of the worst aspects of present-day society in our own homeschooling: e.g., a belief in the need to be “socialized” in order fit in with the group, or to swear our “allegiance” to the government, or to trust in “experts,” or to take “celebrities” and contemporary “entertainment” seriously.

Finally, the changes I have sketched out are the history of the United States during the last century. Understanding these changes matters far more than understanding the historical influence of John F. Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton, or Newt Gingrich.

Indeed, one of the most important things to understand about Gingrich and Reagan is that they accepted and perpetuated this disaster in American society just as much as Clinton or Kennedy.

Why should our kids bother to learn this history?

Primarily because learning is, despite the contrary spirit of our time, a good thing in and of itself; but also because our kids cannot understand where we are unless they understand where we have come from.

Those who do not understand the past are prisoners of the past.

Can we repeal the twentieth century and simply turn the clock back to 1883 when my great-grandmother was born?

No, of course not, and no one really wishes to do that – no one wishes to give up antibiotics or airplanes or weather satellites. The point is not to “turn back the clock”; the point, rather, is to recognize that the changes that have happened during the last century in American society were not inevitable: they were the result of human choices.

We can consciously judge those changes and actively make decisions as to what our own values should be. We can welcome antibiotics and yet reject “gangsta rap.” We can fly on airplanes but also reject the present-day contempt for serious learning.

One of the first step towards helping our kids to avoid the mindset in which most Americans are trapped, so that our children can make serious, conscious choices for themselves, is to help our kids to understand that the contemporary American mindset is, in so many ways, a historical aberration, that most of our ancestors did not think this way, and that our kids can themselves choose to reject the attitudes and values that now pervade our society.

But to reject those attitudes and values, we must identify them and understand their source.

We must look back at the “world we have lost,” and help our kids to do so, in order to understand the values that were once taken for granted by most Americans and to understand how those values were so catastrophically lost.

Homeschooling Political Philosophy:Natural Rights – “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident…”

2010-02-01T18:00:00.000-08:00

This blog is about homeschooling, not politics, but, of course, learning about political systems, political thought, etc. is a necessary and important part of a serious education.

For that reason, I want to mention a fellow homeschooler’s essays on the natural-rights principles that are the basis of the Declaration of Independence and that were central to the founding of the American republic (see her section titled “The Proper Role of Government, My commentary as I study his article”: the essays are written from an LDS perspective) and also to expand further on her comments.

There is a tendency nowadays to view “natural rights” as simply a fuzzy rhetorical flourish used by the Founders to justify their breaking away from Britain.

The Founders, specifically Jefferson, did not see it that way: they thought they were actually describing some important, central, objective facts about human life and the nature of government.

I think they were right.

I despise fuzzy thinking, and I certainly would not put it past even the Founders (who were, after all, politicians) to engage in political propaganda.

But, the principles of natural rights did not in fact simply advance the interests of the Founders: for example, as Jefferson himself recognized, slavery stands condemned as a horrendous crime from a natural-rights perspective. Jefferson and the other slaveholders among the Founders were faced with that uncomfortable fact when they advocated natural rights.

There is also a tendency nowadays to view “natural rights” as simply an old-fashioned religious concept, inappropriate to our modern secular age.

Again, the Founders disagreed.

Of course, anyone who believes in God will believe that everything from natural rights to quarks and neutron stars are, ultimately, due to God.

But, the Founders came from a wide variety of religious perspectives, ranging from evangelical Christians to deists or agnostics: they did not find that their religious differences impeded their common understanding of the concept of natural rights.

The idea of natural rights is not specific to any particular religious tradition.

The natural-rights perspective is in fact based on a careful, systematic analysis of the nature of human action that combines abstract logic with a keen awareness of the realities of human history.

Most of us homeschoolers are rightly reluctant to get into the typical Republican vs. Democrat, liberal vs. conservative “flame wars.”

But, in various conversations with other homeschoolers, I am seeing an increasing interest in the broader philosophical issue of natural rights. Aside from the essay I linked to above, a homeschooling friend recently recommended to me Bastiat's classic The Law, and I think there is also a growing interest among homeschoolers in understanding the underpinnings of the Founders' thinking.

That interest among homeschoolers is, I think, not only understandable, but vital. I’ll go into this in more detail in future posts, but I’ll mention here some basic sources from which one can learn about the concept of natural rights..

One of the best-known sites on the Web that consistently advocates natural rights is LewRockwell.com. The Mises Institute is the best site both for serious, scholarly work from a natural-rights perspective, as well as for popular introductions, commentary on current events, etc.

The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand wrote two essays that succinctly summarized the classical natural-rights perspective: “The Nature of Government” and “Man’s Rights.” (I do not entirely agree with Rand’s political perspective, and I disagree strongly with some of her current followers, but these essays do very clearly present the classical limited-government version of the natural-rights perspective.)

My own views on natural rights come largely from an economics perspective (I considered majoring in economics, and actually had an offer to do a post-doc in econ after I got my Ph.D. in physics). The single greatest influence on me was the late economist Murray Rothbard – see, e.g., his books Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, The Ethics of Liberty, and For a New Liberty.

Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience is generally remembered for its anti-militarism and its emphasis on the importance of individual conscience, but it is in fact a passionate, humane, and readable defense of the natural-rights philosophy, which emphasizes the danger that any government poses to individual rights. Thoreau’s opening declaration could well serve as the motto for defenders of natural rights:

I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government is the classical formulation of the idea of natural rights (although the basic concept of natural rights originated among the radical Protestants of the English Civil War such as Roger Williams, John Lilburne, and the heroic Anne Hutchinson, and the idea has roots in the Middle Ages and ultimately in Classical civilization).

Locke is difficult reading for those of us educated in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, but anyone seriously interested in natural rights or the founding of the United States ultimately has to read it.

Most of the sources I have linked to above are available online, though I would recommend getting hard copies of Locke's Second Treatise and Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty.

Isn't this an awful lot to read?

Well, yes. But spread out over the course of the middle-school and high-school years, it really is not that burdensome.

After all, learning math, from arithmetic through calculus, requires a lot of reading, too. And, any reasonable study of English and American literature requires thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of pages of reading.

Isn't it possible to read just one or two of the essays or books I have linked to above?

Well... yeah, just as it is possible to read one play by Shakespeare and one book by Dickens and declare that you have finished English literature.

But, you're fooling yourself.

Any serious education involves the study of history and of human nature. The idea of natural rights is central to the history of our own country, and, the Founders believed, central to understanding both history in the broader sense and the nature of human beings.

The Founders were, I think, correct.

If the idea of natural rights is central, as the Founders thought it was, to understanding human nature, history, economics, and politics, then it merits serious and sustained study. It is not a topic that one should try to briefly “slip in” to one's schooling, as one might “slip in” origami or basket-weaving if you and your child happen to have some spare time (nothing wrong with either origami or basket-weaving – but neither are essential parts of a serious education).

In all honesty, I think a firm understanding of natural rights does require reading, at the very least, all of the essays and books I have listed above.

Locke and Thoreau are, of course, the most demanding of these, but they are also key historical documents that any educated person must read: unfortunately, they are not likely to be required reading nowadays even at good universities, so it is important to include them in your homeschooling. Rand's essays are quite brief, and Rothbard's books are quite readable.

Am I then suggesting that kids should learn about the idea of natural rights only in middle school or high school?

No. The Founders expected ordinary people to grasp the references to natural rights in the Declaration of Independence. The basic concept is not difficult: natural rights are those rights human beings possess automatically by nature, granted neither by other human beings nor by any rulers or any government.

To give a concrete example, humans can, after birth, normally breathe on their own. Normally, breathing is therefore a natural right. On the other hand, humans are not automatically provided by nature with free health care: therefore, free health care is not a natural right.

The distinction is straightforward and obvious: even a child in early grade school can grasp it.

Why this distinction matters, what it implies about the nature of politics, economics, history, etc. – all of that cannot be fully grasped by a first-grader, of course. But we tell first-graders that the earth moves around the sun, even though they cannot yet grasp Kepler's laws of planetary motion. A similar point applies to teaching the idea of natural rights.

Further along, as a student learns history, economics, etc., the idea of natural rights should be deepened and used to illuminate those other subjects.

In short, reading Locke, Thoreau, etc. when the student is older should be not the first introduction to the idea of natural rights, but rather an opportunity to see how the idea was created and fully developed historically.

Of course, the concept of natural rights, and its centrality in the thought of the American Founders, has pretty much disappeared from American education, so that even highly educated adults in contemporary America do not generally understand natural rights as well as the average farmer in the era of the American founding.

So, as is so often the case for us homeschoolers, educating our kids necessarily starts with educating ourselves – i.e., if you have not read the sources I listed above, you have a bit of reading to do before you can help your child understand the principles that lie at the foundation of our country.

Is it worth the trouble? Yes – if you want your kids to have a solid grounding in history, economics, and the founding principles of our country.

The End of American Hegemony?Bye-Bye, Copenhagen and Obama; Hello, Beijing!

2009-12-23T02:45:00.000-08:00

Much of the discussion of the collapse of the Copenhagen Climate Summit has missed the real story: the collapse of the climate conference symbolizes a significant turning point in world history, not simply because of the issue of global warming, but rather because it represents the collapse of American leadership in the world.

I pointed out shortly before the conference began that the Chinese had clearly determined beforehand to reject the proposals of the United States and its allies (“a major offensive on rich nations at the Copenhagen conference on climate change,” to quote the exact words used by The Times of India ) and that the Chinese had put together an international coalition able and willing to advance their goals.

The course of the Conference was indeed controlled by the Chinese: the UK Prime Minister whined that the Western powers were “held to ransom by only a handful of countries” led by China.

And, the President of the United States was treated with contempt.

In a report by NBC News environmental correspondent Anne Thomspon on the final day of the Conference, December 18, 2009, President Obama referred to the Chinese proposal by saying, “That doesn’t make sense. It would be a hollow victory.”

Changhua Wu, China Director for the Climate Group, brusquely dismissed Obama’s statement by sharply declaring, “It’s not only an attack; it’s humiliating to a certain level.”

The full extent of the humiliation suffered by the American President was described by Ms. Thompson:

For thirteen hours, the President went from room to room, meeting with various world leaders, trying to figure out what they could agree on. Frustrations reached a crescendo when, waiting to meet with the Chinese Premier and Brazil’s leader, Obama found out they were already meeting and walked in uninvited.

The President of the United States was left waiting by the Chinese because they were meeting with the leadership of Brazil. And he managed to get in to the meeting only by barging in “uninvited.”

Thompson summed up the President’s experience by declaring:

The final agreement, which even the most optimistic environmental groups called insufficient, left the President clearly exhausted and dejected.

Exhausted and dejected indeed.

What does this have to do with homeschooling?

As I pointed out recently, we Westerners view and teach history as if the ascendancy of the West during the last several centuries was natural and inevitable.

The perspective from much of Asia is rather different: the period of Western ascendancy seems a peculiar but brief historical anomaly that is ending now that Asia is reasserting its natural supremacy.

The real issue here is not partisan politics, Barack Obama’s personal political skills, or even global climate. What we observed in Copenhagen is a reassertion of Asia’s sense of its natural superiority over the West, and the collapse of the United States’ position as the natural, and generally acknowledged, leader of the world.

Twenty years from now, the whole Copenhagen fiasco, possibly the whole issue of “global warming,” will be a distant memory, rather like earlier environmentalist frauds such as the supposedly disastrous “population explosion”: try reading the 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb by Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, and have a laugh over how ludicrously wrong their prophecies turned out to be (I myself actually read Ehrlich’s book a year after it was published at the urge of my high-school history teacher, so I can remember how serious people once took Ehrlich seriously).

However, while the Copenhagen conference may strike our grandchildren as ancient history, the collapse of American preeminence and the rise of Asia will strike our grandchildren as very real. At some level, this is no doubt inevitable: the physical size of Asia and the fact that the majority of the human race lives in Asia means that Asia was always destined to be of key historical importance.

Of course, the foolishly irresponsible financial, educational, political, and environmental decisions pursued by the American political and cultural elite make the American decline even more certain and, potentially, catastrophic.

But, however one views the decline of the United States of America and of the West in general, it is of historic importance, and it is clearly illuminated by the collapse of US influence at Copenhagen.

The news of the last few days makes a very good history lesson for us homeschoolers to discuss with our kids.

Climate Scientist Allegedly Threatens New York Times Reporter with the 'Big Cutoff'

2009-12-07T17:41:00.000-08:00

Allegedly, Michael Schlesinger of the University of Illinois recently e-mailed the following message to New York Times science reporter Andy Revkin:

Andy:
Copenhagen prostitutes?
Climate prostitutes?
Shame on you for this gutter reportage.
This is the second time this week I have written you thereon, the first about giving space in your blog to the Pielkes.
The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists.
Of course, your blog is your blog.
But, I sense that you are about to experience the 'Big Cutoff' from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.
Copenhagen prostitutes?
Unbelievable and unacceptable.
What are you doing and why?
Michael

This, of course, is bizarre on several levels – the Copenhagen prostitute story is simply a silly story about Copenhagen politics that should not have worried Schlesinger or any serious scientist.

More importantly, this is apparently the second time in one week that Schlesinger tried to tell Mr. Revkin how to do his job as a reporter.

But, the most significant point is the threat to punish Revkin with the “Big Cutoff,” presumably denying him access to “superstars” like Mike Schlesinger.

Except… Mike Schlesinger is no superstar – I’d never even heard of him before this incident (although he does indeed seem to be senior faculty at U. of Illinois).

Being cut off from access to Mike Schlesinger is not exactly a catastrophe for the New York Times!

I’m sorely tempted to believe that this is just some bizarre practical joke… except that it fits in with this leaked e-mail from the CRU Team (note the “p.s.”):

At 17:07 27/10/2009, Michael Mann wrote:

Hi Phil,
Thanks--we know that. The point is simply that if we want to talk about about a meaningful "2009" anomaly, every additional month that is available from which to calculate an annual mean makes the number more credible. We already have this for GISTEMP, but have been awaiting HadCRU tobe able to do a more decisive update of the status of the disingenuous "globe is cooling" contrarian talking point,
mike
p.s. be a bit careful about what information you send to Andy and what emails you copy him in on. He's not as predictable as we'd like [emphasis added]

In fact, Revkin has not been noticeably hostile to the climate fraud folks. Note the complaint: he’s “not as predictable as we'd like.” Exactly what level of predictability did they expect from Mr. Revkin?

I'd planned on writing a post here about the serious issues of scientific method involved in the global-climate fraud and the need to discuss these issues with our kids: the fundamental problem with the global-climate modeling is that real science makes predictions that the scientists accept as make-or-break tests of their models. The global-science-modelers, on the contrary, treat failed predictions as simply an excuse for further tweaking of their models, not as proof that their science is simply and provably wrong.

They are not real scientists.

However, rather than going into the needed details on that issue, I felt compelled to address this current, truly bizarre behavior from Professor Mike Schlesinger.

Mike, let me give you some advice: it is not cool to threaten a reporter from The New York Times with the "Big Cutoff" in an e-mail since, given the current situation, that e-mail is likely to be published all across the Web.

Mike, you're nearly sixty-seven years old. Maybe, it is time to step aside in favor of a younger person who has some understanding of how the modern world works: you know, modern things like e-mail, the Web, The New York Times?

You're only making this whole scandal worse, much, much worse.

And, someone, please tell me that this is really some weird prank, and that senior faculty at the University of Illinois, once one of the country's great public universities, are not really this stupid!

Note added: A few minutes before posting this, I watched Anderson Cooper on CNN discuss the scandal. Representing the climate establishment was Bill Nye the Science Guy! Nye is not a scientist -- he has a Bachelor's in engineering and has been a successful children's entertainer, a younger version of "PeeWee Herman." Nye made a fool of himself. Was CNN really unable to find an actual Ph.D. scientist to represent the climate establishment? The critic of the climate establishment was Pat Michaels, a serious scientist whose book I recommended in a previous post. Perhaps by choosing Nye to represent the establishment view, CNN is trying to send the subtle message that the climate-alarmist view should only be taken seriously by children. The whole story just gets weirder and weirder -- Bonfire of the Vanities meets Waiting for Godot.

(For my earlier comments on Climategate, see here, here and here. Here are my comments a couple months before Climategate became public, in which I pointed out that those of us who are scientifically competent had known for some time that there was something seriously rotten within the media-governmental-scientific global-warming establishment.)

MIT Meteorology Professor on Climategate

2009-12-06T19:20:00.000-08:00

Those of us scientists (and there are a lot of us) who have tried for years to warn of the scientific misconduct that has been occurring among global-climate modelers have often been dismissed on the grounds that we have not done work in the climate field ourselves or that we do not hold positions at sufficiently prestigious universities.

It was therefore with some glee that I saw that, on the same day that I initially published my own views here on the Climategate scandal, Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT (and a member of the National Academy of Sciences), published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Climategate.

What makes me rather gleeful is that Professor Lindzen’s views so nicely confirm my own conclusions.

Lindzen’s key point is:

At this point, few scientists would argue that the science is settled. In particular, the question remains as to whether water vapor and clouds have positive or negative feedbacks.

Exactly. As I have said again and again, it is true that CO₂ produced by humans has made the globe at least slightly warmer than it otherwise would have been. But how much warmer? Will it be enough to be a real problem?

The only honest answer is that we do not know. Contrary to the lies in the mainstream media, the magnitude of global warming is not “settled science.”

Lindzen’s other key point is:

The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe.

Yes, if the CRU crew did intentionally destroy their raw data to keep it out of the hands of their scientific critics, that is serious scientific misconduct (and perhaps a crime). But, the real scandal in the field of global climate change is the repeated claims by some prominent climate scientists, repeated incessantly by scientific illiterates in the American news media, that it is “settled science” that “the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe.”

The CRU gang’s misconduct is comparatively minor. The real fraud is the claim of settled scientific results that do not in fact exist, and the attempt to use that fraudulent claim to impose controls on the global economy that may not be at all necessary.

Let me reiterate what I have said before. Yes, the CO₂ we have dumped into the atmosphere will almost certainly make the world at least a bit warmer than it otherwise would have been. Yes, this might be a big problem.

But, it might not be a problem at all. It might even be beneficial if, perchance, we are entering a natural cooling period.

We just don’t know.

Lindzen also has a brilliant and fascinating, though much longer, paper, well worth reading, that discusses in more detail the science at issue here as well as the underlying sociological, political, and economic motives that have caused some climate scientists to engage in scientific fraud, aided and abetted by many politicians and by the mainstream news media. Again, I am in nearly complete agreement with Lindzen’s paper: to be specific, his points about how academic science can suffer severe dysfunctions as the result of government funding matches my own personal observations.

In particular, he makes a crucially important point about some scientists' discovering that dishonest fear-mongering was the way to gain funding and advance their careers:

It is my impression that by the end of the 60’s scientists, themselves, came to feel that the real basis for support was not gratitude (and the associated trust that support would bring further benefit) but fear: fear of the Soviet Union, fear of cancer, etc. Many will conclude that this was merely an awakening of a naive scientific community to reality, and they may well be right. However, between the perceptions of gratitude and fear as the basis for support lies a world of difference in incentive structure. If one thinks the basis is gratitude, then one obviously will respond by contributions that will elicit more gratitude. The perpetuation of fear, on the other hand, militates against solving problems.

Yes. If your job depends on convincing people that global warming is a massive threat to civilization, then you certainly do not want to publicize the conclusion that it may not be that much of a problem after all, now do you?

Note that this paper is dated a year before the Climategate scandal broke; yet, the paper explains in detail the underlying problems that have led to Climategate.

Let me make clear that I reached my own conclusions on all this, before I had ever heard of Professor Lindzen, based on my own personal knowledge of math, physics, and computer modeling, and my own observations as to how academic scientists behave. (Indeed, I posted here back in September, a couple months before the current scandal broke, a warning about the scientific and media misconduct in the area of global warming.)

But, since both Professor’s Lindzen’s knowledge and his prestige in this area are so much greater than my own, I am very gratified to see his essays confirming my own conclusions.

Let me also make clear that, of course, I am not claiming that Professor Lindzen is right on every single detail concerning global climate change: he would not claim that himself. But, he is a credible guy who has disagreed for a long time with the now-discredited “consensus.” That alone should have been enough to keep people from saying that the old fake “consensus” view was “settled science.” If serious people with excellent credentials, such as Lindzen, had serious, detailed scientific objections to the fraudulent “consensus” then the science was not at all “settled.”

Furthermore, as a serious and active climate scientist himself, Professor Lindzen has had a ringside seat to the long chain of misconduct, abuse, and chicanery, which many of us strongly suspected and which has now been publicly revealed thanks to the CRU whistleblower.

From now on, when the issue of global warming comes up, I plan to start by saying that I agree with the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT.

Try it with your friends – that is, if you actually know anyone who still believes in the lies about global-warming.

(For my earlier comments on Climategate, see here and here. Here are my comments a couple months before Climategate became public, in which I pointed out that those of us who are scientifically competent had known for some time that there was something seriously rotten within the media-governmental-scientific global-warming establishment.)

The New “Classical Carnival of Homeschooling.”

2009-12-04T18:26:00.000-08:00

Back in October, Ritsumei began a “Classical Carnival of Homeschooling.” I'm happy to say that my post on homeschooling world history and how we divide history into periods was mentioned in the first edition of the carnival (this is a belated announcement due to my vacation and illness).

The newest edition just became available today.

I hope the new carnival will be complementary to, not competitive with, the long established “Carnival of Homeschooling.” The CoH deals with homeschoolers of all varieties; I think it also does make sense to have a Carnival that centers on those of us who are focused on an academically classical approach to homeschooling.

I have provided cute little links somewhere over on the right of this page to both carnivals, and I hope to contribute form time to time to each of them.

And, Ritsumei, thanks for your efforts in setting up the new Carnival!

The Collapse of the Global-Warming Fraud?

2009-12-03T20:59:00.000-08:00

The Times of India reports that the rising Asian powers have decided to reject the attempts by the United States and Europe to stifle the global economy in the name of the global-warming fraud:

In an unprecedented move, India on Saturday joined China and two other developing countries to prepare for a major offensive on rich nations at the Copenhagen conference on climate change next month.

The four countries, which include Brazil and South Africa, agreed to a strategy that involves jointly walking out of the conference if the developed nations try to force their own terms on the developing world, Jairam Ramesh, the Indian minister for environment and forests (independent charge), said.

“We will not exit in isolation. We will co-ordinate our exit if any of our non-negotiable terms is violated. Our entry and exit will be collective,” Ramesh told reporters in Beijing…
...
The developing nations will also not accept any pressure from developed countries to establish legally binding emission targets at Copenhagen.

No “legally binding emission targets” means, of course, that they will wait and see if global warming turns out to be a real problem (and, yes, that is possible) or if it turns out to be of little consequence (and, yes, that too is possible) before agreeing to any action of any real substance.

Until there is real scientific evidence – all we have now are the results of deeply flawed computer models – that is the only sensible approach.

The times they are a’changin’ – who’d have thought, a few decades ago, that India and China would be teaching the West the virtues of common sense and the dangers of over-regulation of market economics?

I also recommend a wonderfully fair and balanced discussion of Climategate on the Freakonomics blog: Steve Dubner points out that, quite aside from all the sound and fury over the whistleblower's publishhing of the CRU e-mails, “the central scientific issue here” is:

that the most prominent climate scientists’ computerized models may be neither as robust nor as predictive as many people think…

He goes on to quote from my fellow physicists Nathan Myhrvold (of Microsoft fame) and Lowell Wood, explaining why the computer models should not be trusted.

At The Atlantic, Clive Crook explains why he is more outraged now that he has waded through the leaked CRU e-mails than he expected to be:

The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And, as Christopher Booker argues, this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process. It is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David Henderson called the environmental policy milieu [subscription required]. It goes to the core of that process.
...
I'm also surprised by the IPCC's response. Amid the self-justification, I had hoped for a word of apology, or even of censure. (George Monbiot called for Phil Jones to resign, for crying out loud.) At any rate I had expected no more than ordinary evasion. The declaration from Rajendra Pachauri that the emails confirm all is as it should be is stunning. Science at its best. Science as it should be. Good lord. This is pure George Orwell. And these guys call the other side "deniers".

Perhaps what Crook had particularly in mind was CRU head Phil Jones' allegedly declaring:

The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone...

The “two MMs” are mathematician Steve McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have been trying to uncover the details of the global-warming fraud for the last several years

Now, reports indicate that the original raw data, absolutely vital to judging the scientific validity of CRU's global-climate work, have been either "lost' or, possibly, intentionally destroyed.

Obviously, the e-mail from Jones raises the possibility that he carried out his plan and actually did intentionally delete the vital information, perhaps to cover up scientific malfeasance.

If anyone ends up going to jail for all this, the destruction of data to illegally evade "freedom of information" requests may be the reason.

Anyone who wants to get their hands dirty actually digging through the leaked documents might start at the blog Shadow of the Olive Tree, which has kindly posted the infamous "Harry Read Me" file for everyone's enlightenment.

Let me emphasize once again that of course the CO₂ we have dumped into the atmosphere will almost certainly make the world at least a bit warmer than it otherwise would have been. And, yes, this might be a big problem.

But, it might not be a problem at all. It might even be beneficial if, perchance, we are entering a natural cooling period.

We just don’t know.

The fraud comes not from those who claim that global warming might happen and that it might be a problem. The fraud is from the handful of scientists, and the large number of scientific illiterates in the mass media, who keep saying that it is “settled science” that global warming will be huge and hugely damaging.

That is not settled science. The fraud of global warming consists of the false claim that global warming will be a major problem when neither the empirical data nor the deeply flawed computer models are yet able to indicate how large global warming will actually be.

In a way, the CRU gang have become the fall guys for a much larger scandal: yes, we know from the published e-mails that the CRU guys played nasty little unprofessional games to silence their critics, that they were more concerned with protecting their turf than with advancing science, and that they are incredibly poor computer programmers.

But the real scandal is the larger group of climate modelers around the world who have falsely claimed to know how big a problem global warming will be when they do not really know at all but are simply relying on very dicey computer models.

Over my career, I have been involved with numerous computer simulations, ranging from elementary-particle physics detectors to satellite-communication systems. No responsible scientist fully trusts such simulations until they have been well validated by experimental data.

The global-warming simulations are more speculative, less embedded in accepted science, than the simulations I have worked on. Yet, the global-warming simulations have not been validated by making detailed, unambiguous predictions and then rigorously checking those predictions against reality.

This is not science: it is pseudo-science.

The real fraud in the area of global warming is the covering up of this fact by the mass media, by the political establishment, and by so many climate scientists themselves.

(See also my September post, published before the current scandal broke, explaining why the global-warming scam is fraudulent, and my previous post on the Climategate scandal.)

Global Warming Revealed As Fraud?A Chance for Teaching How Science Really Works

2009-11-30T16:39:00.000-08:00

Reportedly, a hacker has gotten into the e-mails of a major research institute on global warming and publicly released e-mails that show that the whole global warming thing is just a scientific fraud.

What’s it all mean? Well… first of all, if this is legit, it does not really prove outright fraud, at least not from what I have seen so far.

What it does show is scientific politicking, scientific infighting, attempts to outflank one's scientific opponents, etc. And, the most recent news does suggest carelessness bordering on scientific incompetence (the researchers have, it seems, lost their original data, which means that other scientists cannot check their calculations but merely must accept them on faith. “Faith” is not a good basis for science.). A couple of scientists from within the climate-change establishment have had the honesty to concede that “Climategate” does show that there are real problems with the attitudes and procedures followed by the pro-global-warming camp.

Contrary to what many members of the news media and the public seem to think, all this is not, alas, behavior that is actually that unusual among scientists (who are, after all, simply human beings). Most scientists are not coolly objective, Vulcan-like pursuers of abstract truth: I speak from rather painful personal observations here. On the contrary, most scientists have fairly large egos, are eager to defend their own pet theories, often bear grudges against their scientific opponents, etc. A few (not the majority, happily) are outright liars. And, truth be told, a significant number of scientists are incompetents.

Does this mean that the theory of evolution is just a fairy tale pushed by scientists with an anti-religious agenda, that the theory of relativity is just a left-wing conspiracy imposed by those who shared Einstein’s political views, etc.?

Well… no. Over the long run, things balance out. In fact, they balance out largely because of the combative nature of scientists. As an adolescent, I myself thought I had found an error in Einstein’s theory of relativity. Alas, all I had actually found was a lack of clarity in the particular book I had been studying.

But… I would still love to achieve everlasting fame by showing Einstein was wrong, by showing that quantum mechanics is mistaken, etc. Most scientists have similar desires. The eagerness of the young whipper-snappers to prove that their elders got it all wrong does, almost always, correct scientific errors in the long run.

In the long run – that is the key. A century from now, the global-warming issue should all be nicely sorted out: present personal and political animosities will have been long since forgotten, and good science will have triumphed.

In the long run – but not yet.

I’ve been following the issue of global climate modeling since the late ‘60s. I’m not a climate modeler myself, but I do understand the underlying physics, the basic issues involved in computer modeling, etc.

And, I can testify that we are still in the “shake-out” period, when politicking, personal feuding, and the sheer difficulty of the scientific research make it impossible to really see what the final result will be.

Let me be clear: I am nearly certain that the earth is warmer than it otherwise would have been because of the massive amount of CO₂ we humans have dumped into the atmosphere.

But… exactly how much warmer? Is it even possible that the globe is entering a natural cooling period and that we need the anthropogenic CO₂ simply to maintain a stable climate?

No one really knows.

So, don’t take the current “scandal” as a sign that global warming is a monstrous conspiracy tied to the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, etc.

But do take it as a sign that scientists are human beings, that it takes a long time to get the right answer to complicated questions, and that the real issue concerning global warming – how big a problem will it really be for human beings? – is still unanswered.

And, discuss the whole thing with your kids – this is an excellent chance to see how science is really done, to see all the uncertainties, personal conflicts, and grand debates involved in the process of scientific research, and, ultimately, over the next few decades, to see how everything will be sorted out in the end.

If you want intelligent, informed, non-political introductions to some of the scientific difficulties involved in climate change modeling, try reading Patrick Michaels' book, published earlier this year, Climate of Extremes and S. Fred Singer's book, published in an updated edition last year, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.

Please note: I am not suggesting that Michaels or Singer has all the right answers; I am merely suggesting that they show, contrary to what the scientific illiterates who anchor the network news claim, that the scientific debate is not yet over. The biggest problem in the global-climate debate is the extraordinary ignorance combined with unspeakable arrogance of the mainstream media on this subject – and I am including “conservative” pundits as well as “liberals.” The American people need to learn to stop listening to blowhards – whether Rush Limbaugh or Al Gore – who have no idea what they are talking about (cf. Gore's recent comment about the temperature of the earth's core).

Also see my post from early September discussing the fact that there apparently are simple technological fixes to global warming if it does turn out to be a problem, technological fixes almost never mentioned by the mainstream media.

UPDATE: In the comments, silvermine posted a link to a site with some interesting insights see the November 21-30, 2009 posts specifically.

A Thank-You Note to the Real Heroes of History

2009-11-30T16:22:00.000-08:00

Well… I’m back. We left on a lengthy (almost three-week long) vacation to Hawaii in mid-October. The day before we returned, I came down with a bacterial infection (in three different areas of my body – no, the doctors don’t know how that happened): I spent several days in the hospital on an IV drip. Fortunately, I’m now pretty much recovered.

Anyway… when I get a chance I’ll blog about homeschooling on a Hawaii vacation – there are lots of things to do in Hawaii, many quite educational, besides swimming and snorkeling (yes, we did also swim and snorkel). And, I have a lot of other topics, from teaching complex numbers to kids to a possible scandal concerning global warming to the idea of natural rights that I want to talk about. I'll also try to reply to some of the comments I missed during my absence. So, back to my regularly scheduled blogging…

Oh, and I am really grateful to the people who invented antibiotics in the middle of the twentieth century. We tend to forget that infections that are now an inconvenient nuisance once used to kill people in very, very large numbers.

The real heroes of history? Those who invented anesthesia (imagine a root canal, much less abdominal surgery, without anesthetics!) and the folks who discovered antibiotics.

Math Interlude:Homeschool Math by Rotating Wheat Thins Boxes

2009-10-11T16:30:00.000-07:00

I have a theory that if you cannot explain an idea in some form to a bright, attentive six-year-old, then that may be a sign that you do not really get the idea yourself.

So, here is a very simple math exploration that can be done even with a homeschooled six-year-old and that in fact connects to some quite advanced mathematics.

3-D Rotations Need Not Commute:

Get two identical boxes – we used a couple of Wheat Thins boxes.

Put both boxes on the table or floor in front of you facing towards you.

Now, the idea is to perform two rotations on the boxes, but in different orders.

First, take the box on the left and rotate it a quarter turn counter-clockwise towards yourself (i.e., 90 degrees counter-clockwise around the vertical axis): call this rotation Z.

Now, take the box to your right and rotate it a quarter turn so that the front face ends up face down on the floor (i.e., 90 degrees around an axis going from left to right): call this rotation X.

Now, let’s perform rotation X on the left box: i.e., rotate it so that the face which is now vertical and facing towards you is rotated forward and down onto the floor.

Finally perform rotation Z on the right box: i.e., rotate it counter-clockwise around the vertical axis a quarter turn.

In math we usually write transformations like this in reverse order: i.e., the first one performed in time ends up on being written on the right.

So, the left box ends up as X * Z * Box.

The right box ends up as Z * X * Box.

(By the way, the reason for the reverse order is that it seems natural, at least to mathematicians, to put the operation that operates first on the box to the immediate left of the word “Box.” Why does the word “Box” have to go on the right? It doesn’t, of course, but it is usually done that way.)

You’ll see that the boxes end up in very different positions.

In short, X * Z * Box is not equal to Z * X * Box.

So what?

Well… first, this is pretty weird. I would have thought they would end up the same! That such a simple geometry experiment gives unexpected results is rather a surprise.

Second, this invites various other experiments. What if we rotate by half-turns instead of quarter turns? What if we let X be a quarter turn and Z a half-turn. (By the way, I chose “X” and “Z” because the axes we are rotating around are what are usually called the “x-axis” and the “z-axis,” but I did not need to use those particular letters.)

Third, kids nowadays are expected to learn the “commutative laws” of addition and multiplication in early grade school. It tends to be hard for kids to see why these are really a big deal: how could things not commute!

Well, rotating Wheat Thins boxes by quarter turns is something even young children can do, and yet these operations do not commute. Commutativity can fail in fairly simple ways.

Finally, this ultimately connects with some quite advanced math, that is of interest both in pure mathematics and in applied fields ranging from computer graphics and robotics to elementary-particle physics.

Rotations are normally represented by matrices, but they can also be represented by “quaternions,” invented by the nineteenth-century mathematician William Rowan Hamilton: the fact that rotations can fail to commute is therefore a sign that matrices and quaternions will also have to exhibit this kind of non-commutativity.

Hamilton’s invention of quaternions (and their generalization to “octonions”) is an interesting story all by itself, and it connects to another simple math demonstration: the fact that you can rotate a teacup (with tea in it) by two full turns, holding it rigidly in your hand, without spilling a drop and without dislocating your shoulder (this is known variously as the “Philippine Wine Glass trick,” the “plate trick,” etc., but it is not magic, but a simple fact of mathematics).

More broadly, the group of rotations in three-dimensional space is what is knows as a “Lie group” (after the nineteenth-century mathematician Sophus Lie), and most Lie groups have this same property, i.e., that most members of the group fail to commute.

In physics, this failure to commute is one of the most important differences between the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force: the electromagnetic force is due to a commutative Lie group, the strong nuclear force to a non-commutative Lie group.

In short, there is a whole lot of math and science hidden behind a couple of Wheat Thins boxes!

So, what does all this have to do with homeschooling?

Well, this is about as simple a homeschool project as you can get in terms of necessary equipment and preparation time.

But, more than that, it illustrates a central point I am trying to make in this blog: ideas that are usually considered very advanced and complex in math, science, etc. can actually be introduced at a very early age.

Young kids cannot of course understand everything (indeed, neither can adults), but they can understand at least a bit about most things.

More than that, nobody can grasp complex ideas in one huge gulp: the idea in American schools – whether public schools or universities – that you can grasp algebra or calculus (or Lie groups) in just one nine-month period is a horrible mistake.

(In fact, I myself recently learned something about Lie groups – a simple proof of a theorem called the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff theorem, which shows how the violations of the commutative law are almost the only thing that really makes Lie groups complicated. If not for the violation of the commutative laws, Lie groups would turn out to be rather like the surface of doughnuts – hyper-tori, as mathematicians say.)

This belief in teaching subjects in one huge gulp is connected to the “developmentalist” fallacy: i.e., the belief that kids are not ready to learn anything about many subjects until they reach a certain “developmental” level, and then, all of a sudden, the whole huge subject can be shoved down their throats.

Human beings do not learn that way.

One of the greatest advantages of homeschooling is that we can dump this dogma of “developmental appropriateness.”

We can talk to our kids about black holes, or have them see that rotations do not commute, in first grade. They can read about knights and castles, pharaohs and mummies, fossils and plate tectonics, early in grade school.

They will not grasp everything, but they will grasp much more than the dogmatic disciples of “developmental correctness” claim they can grasp.

So, get a couple of Wheat Thins boxes (or Cheerios boxes, or whatever you have in the pantry) and show your kids how simply rotating simple objects is much stranger than it looks.

And, tell them that understanding this strangeness is not only useful in robotics and computer graphics but that it also helps explain what holds protons and neutrons together inside the nuclei of atoms.

Slicing Up History When We Homeschool: Beyond Ancient/Medieval/Modern

2009-10-06T03:00:00.000-07:00

The traditional approach to dividing up human history is:

Ancient 3000 BC - 500 AD (3500 years)
Medieval 500 AD - 1500 AD (1000 years)
Modern 1500 AD - 2000 AD (500 years)

The disparities in the lengths of time encompassed by each of these periods is striking: the Ancient Period is approximately seven times as long as the Modern Period!

It is natural that we are more interested in what happened in 1700 AD than in what happened in 1700 BC. But to make the Ancient Period seven times as long as the Modern Period risks badly biasing our understanding of the past: surely human life and thought must have changed rather significantly between 3000 BC and 500 AD.

The elapsed time between the building of the Pyramids and the death of Caesar is greater than the time from Caesar to ourselves. To lump Caesar in with the Pyramids as "ancient" is deceptive.

Of course, the origin of this framework goes back to early modern times, and is really simply a division among:

Greeks and Romans
The Feudal Period
The Renaissance and Post-Renaissance Age

I.e., this way of dividing human history comes from Early Modern Westerners who were largely ignorant both of history prior to the Greeks (early Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc), and of non-Western history (China, India, etc.).

A more balanced division of history is:

Archaic Period 3000 BC - 1000 BC (2000 years)
Ancient Period 1000 BC - 500 AD (1500 years)
Period of Barbarian Conquests 500 AD - 2000 AD (1500 years)

It is not simply that this division gives periods that are more equal in duration; this division also helps us think more clearly about long-term historical processes.

When we talk about the “Bronze Age” vs. the “Iron Age,” we are already implicitly recognizing some such division: the Bronze Age world of the Pharaoh Khufu or the Great King Sargon of Akkad was a very different world from the Iron Age world of Qin Shi Huang Di and Julius Caesar, of Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus.

The Archaic Period could be described as the period of “temple-states,” where the gods were largely the affair of the rulers and their dependent priests. During the Ancient Period, that system was replaced by wide-ranging thought and speculations about the nature of human life and reality. The Greek philosophers, the competing schools of thought in late Zhou China, the creation of the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, the creation of Judaism and then Christianity in Palestine – none of this has much precedent during the Archaic Period. (Because the central religious and philosophical perspectives that are still widespread today arose during the Ancient Period, the central part of this period has been labeled the “Axial Age” by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers.)

Belief systems during the Archaic Period tended to focus on the relationship between the gods and the entire community as mediated through the rulers and the priests. The transition during the Ancient Period to systems of thought and belief that focused on the individual and his relationship to the gods and to reality is a dramatic shift in human thought.

It's not that all of these revolutionary thinkers – from China to Greece – had similar thoughts. Quite the contrary! It is rather the diversity of thought in the Ancient Period that is so startling. Is the goal of life to be part of a society structured like a family (Confucianism)? Or is the goal of life to escape the cycle of rebirth through extinction of the self (Buddhism)? Or should we strive to live up to our potential as rational beings (Aristotle)? Or must we atone for our innate sinfulness by accepting the ultimate sacrifice made by Christ?

These are incommensurable goals for human life.

Why the “Period of Barbarian Conquests”?

To Westerners, the big news of 500 AD to 10000 AD is the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the loss of classical culture, and the Dark Ages.

But, from the perspective of most of the Old World civilizations, the fate of the Western borderlands was of limited interest. The real news of those years was the explosive expansion of Islam due to Arab barbarians who conquered the original heartlands of human civilization in the Near East and beyond.

Similarly, the real news of 1000 AD to 1500 AD was the repeated irruptions of the Turkish and Mongol peoples out of Central Asia, overpowering, at one time or another, almost all of the civilized areas of the Old World, except of course the Western borderlands of Europe.

And, after 1500 AD, the conquest of the rest of the world by the West was, from the perspective of most of the civilized world, simply one more wave of barbarian conquests.

One of the key characteristics of the Period of Barbarian Conquests is the dominance of much of the world by the two religious systems descended from ancient Judaism: the sister religions of Islam and Christianity.

Christians and Muslims may see each other as the ultimate heretics, but from the view of much of the world, and from the perspective of pre-Christian pagan culture, the two monotheistic religions are remarkably similar, not only in their beliefs but also in their relentlessly expansionist, missionary, imperialist activities.

I think the most important aspect of the general perspective I am proposing here is that it sheds some light on where we stand today.

First, is the Age of Barbarian Conquests now at its end, and are China and India re-asserting their position as dominant civilizations?

Second, will Christianity and/or Islam dominate human systems of belief in the future or is a new pattern of belief arising?

Of course, it is not possible to answer those questions with certainty.

But it is clear that the rise of science during the last five hundred years is radically changing the old games of civilization: physics is the same in Beijing as in London; chemistry is the same in New Delhi as in New York. Is it possible that the wild and lush diversity of systems of thought created during the Ancient Period are now being replaced by a single unified system of belief – natural science?

How does all this affect homeschooling?

I know of no textbook that does an adequate job of restructuring the narrative of human history along the lines I am suggesting here. Some high-school and college texts try to present a more balanced view of world cultures that moves beyond the narrow Greece-Rome/feudalism/Modern-West framework, but I know of none that adopt the broader framework I have sketched out here.

But we homeschoolers do not need to use a single textbook. There are a number of excellent books, at an upper-grade-school through high-school level that discuss separate civilizations and cultures. Homeschoolers can selectively use those books to create a broad curriculum that explores the pattern of human history that I have laid out.

Time-Life published two very nice series, The Emergence of Man and Lost Civilizations, that include a number of useful volumes: e.g., we have used The First Farmers and The First Cities in the former series and Early Europe: Mysteries in Stone in the latter series. Lost Civilizations, incidentally, is not about silliness such as Atlantis, but rather focuses on archaeological discoveries relating to ancient humans. Other Time-Life series, such as Time-Frame and The Great Ages of Man are also worth checking out. (All of these are long out of print, but generally available through public libraries and used book sources on-line.) It is important to cover the prehistoric agricultural revolution and the urban revolution: the two books I mentioned from The Emergence of Man series are helpful in doing that.

Lucent Books, in its World History Series, has a number of well-written books at a middle-school level: we have used, for example, Don Nardo's Ancient Mesopotamia.

Dorling-Kindersley's beautifully produced Voyages Through Time series, all written by Peter Ackroyd, is much better written then most DK books, but of course still has the wonderful illustrations that DK is famous for. We have gone through most of the volumes in this series: these books are our kids' favorites among all the history/social-studies books we have used up till now in our homeschooling.

At a beginning grade-school level, I recommend Anne Millard's and Particia Vanags' Usborne History of the World (this is the “white” book, not the “Internet-linked” book), which uses cartoons to give a nice, brief overview of world history up to 1900. The book is admirably neutral – not pro-Christian nor anti-Christian, not “politically correct” nor hiding past atrocities, but just a nice description of the broad course of world history at an early to mid-grade school reading level.

None of these books explicitly lays out the picture of history I have described here. But they do provide detailed and interesting factual narratives that can serve as the basis for a broad view of human history.

It is then the homeschooling parent's job to present the broad picture of history over the last five millennia, and explain how all of these historical details fit into that broad picture.

How we slice up history, how we categorize the past, can of course never tell us why past events occurred as they did, much less predict the future. In the end, one needs not simply a broad framework but also knowledge of detailed historical facts.

But, thinking about the periods of the past more clearly, and fitting all of the details of history into a broader narrative, can help us ask better questions not only about the past but also about the future.

Why Taking Classes is a Lousy Way to Learn

2009-10-04T03:08:00.000-07:00

I suppose that most homeschoolers get questions of the sort “But where will she take algebra class?’ or “Won’t he at least take the normal classes in high school?”

Most American adults’ own experience has ingrained in them the idea that “taking classes” is the natural way to learn “academic” material.

From a “human engineering” viewpoint, I find this bizarre.

Suppose that you were starting from scratch to design a system that would do the best possible job of teaching serious, challenging material to children (or, indeed, adults).

On the face of it, would the best way to do this be to have one teacher simultaneously servicing a very large number of students? Or would it be better to have a single tutor dealing one-on-one with each student throughout much of the day, meaning of course that the tutor could only have a handful of students?

Would it be best to toss a couple dozen students together and have them move at the same pace despite their varying abilities? Or would it be best to let a student move at his own pace, depending on his innate abilities and the ease or difficulty he is currently having with the material?

Is it best to learn a subject from a single textbook expressing the style, perspective, and knowledge of a single author? Or is it better to read several books on a subject to see different perspectives and approaches?

Do most subjects naturally fit neatly into a three-month or nine-month time frame (i.e., a school quarter or school year)? Or should the natural, logical structure of the subject itself, and the needs of the student, determine the time-frame during which the subject is covered?

Those questions readily answer themselves.

A normal classroom situation, with one teacher presenting the material to dozens of students at once, with the students moving in lockstep together through the material, in a time-frame determined not by the logic of the subject but by the constraints of the school-year, is quite obviously not the optimal way to learn.

For most subjects, there are really only two reasons for using traditional classes as the framework for learning.

First, treating children as if they were interchangeable parts, subject to a factory model, is easy and cheap for adults. One teacher for thirty students is a lot cheaper than one teacher for two or three students. And, if a teacher has thirty students, it is certainly convenient for her to pretend that all those students can proceed at the same pace, that they should read from a single textbook, etc.

The second reason is “socialization”: all of us who went through traditional schools know that the traditional schools certainly do not “socialize” all students to be kind, trustworthy, or tolerant. But traditional schools do serve to accustom all students to the idea that the way society works is like an assembly line.

To put it bluntly, taking traditional classes trains you to accept the hassles of dealing with the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles), the IRS, etc.

Are there no situations where group learning makes sense?

There are a few activities that are inherently group activities: I don’t see how you can learn to play football without being part of a team or to play a symphony without being part of an orchestra. Also, there may be situations where equipment is so expensive (e.g., lab equipment) that it has to be shared among a group of students.

So, yes, there are times when something like a classroom situation might make sense. But, these are rarer than one might think, simply because the disadvantages of group learning are so great.

For example, three years ago, our kids took a weekly Chinese class: I had been teaching them Chinese, and, since I am not fluent in Chinese, it seemed obvious that the class would work better.

It didn’t. Even though the other kids came from homes where Chinese was spoken in the home, and even though our kids were the youngest in the class, our kids read Chinese characters better than any of the other students. The teacher was a native Chinese speaker, but almost all of the speech one actually heard in the class came not from the teacher but from the other students, who spoke Chinese even worse than I do. Our kids’ learning of Chinese slowed to a crawl.

So, even in this case, where there were some obvious shortcomings to homeschooling, the disadvantages of group learning proved so great that homeschooling still turned out to be better.

Let me make clear that I am not arguing for an education that is lacking in structure or planning. You are not likely to master French or calculus simply by random, casual reading (although random, casual reading might be the initial impetus that got you interested in French or calculus). Nor are you likely to master French or calculus by having good intentions to learn those subjects “someday,” without any planned time-frame (though the process of actually learning the subjects may cause you to revise the time-frame that you originally laid out).

Nor am I suggesting that kids (or adults) should simply kick back and forget about serious learning once they are free of “classroom discipline.”

On the contrary, my point is that serious learning means not slipping in to some pre-fabricated one-size-fits-all classroom situation but rather proactively working out a means to teach each individual student in the most efficient, thorough way one can find for that individual student.

Getting an “A” from the teacher in a classroom is an easy way for a student (and her parents) to be convinced she has achieved something.

Too easy.

The real question should be: what have you really learned? What skill or knowledge do you now possess that you did not have before you studied all this?

Does this mean all kids should be homeschooled?

If taken literally, “homeschooled” is perhaps too narrow a term. Kids can be and should be, to some degree, “library-schooled.” Almost all adults are, to some degree, “on-the-job schooled.” And, you learn theater by being “on-the-stage schooled,” sports by being “on-the-sports-field schooled,” etc. If finances allow, it may make sense to hire a tutor outside the home (an obvious example would be a piano teacher) to tutor a “homeschooled” child one-on-one in a particular subject.

So, no, I am not saying that it is optimal for all education to be within the walls of the home, carried out solely by the parent.

But, if “homeschooling” means schooling primarily under the family’s control and not carried out within a traditional classroom format, yes, in that sense, it would be a good thing if all children were “homeschooled.”

A classroom environment is not an effective means of using a child’s time and energy to enable him or her to develop his intellectual capability to the fullest.

We place very little value on children’s time. Although we know that the period from birth to their early twenties is, for most people, the last period of their life when they will have the time and energy to devote much of their effort to learning, adults do not generally care whether children are learning efficiently or whether the time and energy they put into schooling is largely wasted.

They’re “only” kids.

That is why the majority of American children grow up so woefully uneducated. We adults are willing to waste their childhood, their best opportunity to become educated human beings. Why should the kids themselves value learning when we adults seem to care so little about whether they are provided with an optimal framework for learning?

The traditional classroom approach for educating children is certainly convenient for adults. But it is almost never the optimal way for a child to learn.

How We Homeschool: Some Nitty-Gritty Details

2009-10-01T02:00:00.000-07:00

A friend who is seriously considering homeschooling recently asked how we actually do our homeschooling, on a day-by-day basis.

And, of course, I had trouble giving a coherent answer: like so many homeschoolers, we do not clearly demarcate our homeschooling from dance and piano practice, from our vacations (we do try to make our vacations “educational,” but not in the sense of studying textbooks), from going swimming at a friend’s house (isn’t that “physical education”?), etc.

But I’ll try here to be a bit more coherent for the sake of our friend and anyone else interested in the general approach we try to take to our homeschooling.

We homeschool seven days a week, twelve months a year.

But that does not mean we actually do homeschooling all 365 days of the year.

The kids officially get their birthday and Christmas off. For obvious practical reasons, we also do not do “official” homeschooling (textbooks, workbooks, etc.) when we are out of town on vacation (I tried a few times taking textbooks with us on vacations – the only result was to strengthen my arms carrying the heavier luggage).

And, naturally, in the course of our lives, things happen.

If we spend a couple hours one day at a friend’s house or at a musical or theatrical performance, we can still get in a fair amount of schoolwork. But, if we spend the whole day at a friend’s, or go to some day-long event such as the state fair, that day is pretty much dead for “official” schooling.

So, realistically, I estimate we do about 240 days a year of “official” homeschooling.

That is still about thirty percent more than the number of schooldays for traditional public-school students.

Except… traditional students do often have homework on weekends. All of our schoolwork is “homework,” so if you include public-school students’ “homework days,” there may not be a dramatic difference here.

In short, I think we may have more “official” schooldays than traditional public-school students, but not dramatically more.

The big advantage we do have is flexibility in our schedule: we can go to Hawaii in October, Legoland in March, etc., without worrying about officially missing school.

How many hours a day do we do school?

Well… I consider piano practice (each of our kids practices between half an hour and a hour and a half a day), dance and piano class, and going to the library to be part of school. But, kids in traditional schools do those things too, and they are not counted as “school.”

So… excluding such activities, I estimate our kids average from six to eight hours a day on “official” schooling (more on some days, less on others, depending on the other activities that are occurring on that day). That may seem to be a bit more than kids in traditional schools; however, kids in traditional schools have homework, not counted as part of their schoolday, and, as I said, our “homework” is part of our schoolwork (in fact, by definition, homework is all of our schoolwork).

So, our kids might spend slightly more time each day on schoolwork than traditionally schooled kids, but not dramatically more.

Did I mention that our official homeschool time includes time for daydreaming, staring out the window, and squabbling with each other?

No. I didn’t mention that to the kids either, but these are kids – it happens. (They do have “official” permission to go to the window and watch an interesting new bird when one happens by.)

I do try to keep them relatively focused, especially when we are working together, but my main concern is that they are actually getting significant work done over the course of the day – I know they will not be focused every single minute.

While we do have times of the day that are officially “schooltime,” this varies somewhat from day to day, depending on our schedule. The kids have had a pretty broad choice from the beginning as to exactly when they do each particular subject, how many pages they complete in a particular workbook or reading book each day, etc. Within reason, they choose for themselves where to do their work: they're not confined to the kitchen table, the desk in their bedroom, or whatever.

I make sure they are not simply skipping a subject day after day, and, if it becomes clear that their progress has slowed to a snail’s pace in some subject, I encourage them to focus more on that subject.

What do they do the rest of the day when not “officially” doing schoolwork?

They have an hour or so after they get up to do “serious” unassigned activities – recreational reading, writing fantasy stories on the computer (which they love to do), writing computer programs (they are just beginning this), etc.

Since they are not rushing off to school in the morning, they can usually get as many hours of sleep as they need and can also eat a leisurely breakfast (sometimes a bit too leisurely!). They have various non-academic activities that they have chosen to commit to, such as piano and dance class.

And, of course, they play and goof off.

Their television viewing tends to be limited to the news and, occasionally, science or nature specials or the Food Network (how can any homeschooler not love Alton Brown?). We have no video games, and computer gaming and Web browsing are severely limited.

I hope this does not sound utopian (or dystopian!): I think they have a fairly normal childhood, except, like most human children throughout history, they learn at home, rather than at some official site outside the home with dozens of other children who are the same age.

Is there any way then in which this differs dramatically from traditional schooling, except that, since we are at home, I know in detail how they are doing in their schoolwork?

Yes, our “curriculum” differs rather dramatically from traditional schools’.

Since they started kindergarten, we have not yet used a single traditional textbook designed primarily for the American public schools. We may bend a bit on this as they reach high-school level (I like the BSCS biology “Blue Book,” for example). But, by and large, textbooks designed for the American public-schools are high in meaningless glitz and color and very low in interest and content: they encourage mindlessness and short attention spans and breed boredom.

I’m not real keen on workbooks, but I find them sometimes necessary – I am not willing to spend my time making up a bunch of math word problems or grammar exercises. But, I try to be selective about workbooks, and try to find ones that will encourage thinking rather than simply repetitive drill.

In math, we’re using Singapore Math and Life of Fred and trying out the “Art of Problem Solving” series. Our main “language-arts” book has been the Editor in Chief workbook series, and we will soon start sentence diagramming. They are also working through Julie MacIntosh Johnson’s Basics of Keyboard Theory workbooks.

I try to get them to write a couple book reports a month, with my helping them to correct organization, grammar, punctuation, etc. (they are on their own for the first draft). And, they write fiction stories (basically to amuse each other) outside of my supervision.

We are seriously trying to learn Chinese and dabbling in some other languages – I’m not sure if they will attain fluency in anything except Chinese, but a bit of knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek (starting with Karen Mohs’ grade-school workbook series, Hey, Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek! and Latin’s Not So Tough!) is both fun and, I think, worthwhile. I’ve written a computer program to help drill them on language vocabulary (it’s basically an automated flashcard program).

The biggest respect in which our curriculum differs from traditional schools is that we put a heavy emphasis on serious science and history.

I consider science and history to be the real core of our curriculum: science is the sum of the knowledge we have of the natural world; history is the sum of the knowledge we have of the human past.

That covers pretty much everything.

As I said above, we are not using any US public-school textbooks in those areas: science textbooks below the high-school level are often factually wrong. Even at the high-school level, many are disasters (check out the reviews from the Textbook League ). And history texts for US public schools tend to be utterly boring and bloodless: how they manage to transmute the reality of history – heroes and villains, nobility and murder most foul – into stunningly unappetizing pabulum is a great mystery.

So, our science and history texts are generally books we get from the library, published by non-textbook publishers: Dorling-Kindersley, Usborne, Lucent, Benchmark/Cavendish, Rosen Publishing Group, etc. – much more interesting and much more accurate than public-school texts.

My own direct interaction with the kids is focused on whiteboard work on math (I teach them stuff not in their books or material that they have not yet reached in their books), on working together on Chinese, and, most importantly, on science and history.

We try to spend ten to fifteen hours a week together reading science or history books out loud or discussing what the kids have read on their own.

My own total time spent directly interacting with the kids therefore tends to range from fifteen to twenty hours a week – not counting my time planning things, choosing books, reminding them to do their work instead of staring off into space, etc.

Our friend asked me how carefully I plan our long-term schedule.

I’d say it is a “conceptual plan”: I have in mind (often in hand) books I know I want us to get to in the next year or so; I know what topics I want to teach them in math that are not in their books; etc. Our plan is subject to revision on the fly if we find a new and better book, if we find some other topic that deserves some real study, or if we find that we are going faster or slower than anticipated.

Our kids have been fairly consistently testing at twice their grade level in the “three Rs” (according to tests administered by a local school district, not by me). That gives me some flexibility: I don't really need to worry about their performing at “grade level” – I can focus simply on what is worth learning and on what makes logical sense in terms of what they have already learned.

E.g., we have never formally done spelling, but, as advanced readers who learned phonics, they test well on spelling.

Perhaps the single most important goal of our curricular approach and of my planning is to be radically “developmentally inappropriate” – to steal E. D. Hirsch’s phrase.

Learning should be rewarding, but it is hard work. It is made unnecessarily hard if basic concepts are kept hidden until, all at once, they are unveiled and the student is expected to grasp them immediately.

No one can fully grasp algebra or calculus, chemistry or relativity, world history or the history of life, in one huge gulp swallowed over one nine-month period during one school year. So, I started explaining evolution in kindergarten, black holes in first grade, calculus in fourth grade, etc.

No, they did not fully “get” those ideas at those ages. But, then, few adults fully “get” those ideas either.

But my kids did start being “eased in” to those ideas at an early age. As the years roll past, we re-visit all of that, they understand more and more, and, by the time they are ready for college, I am confident that they will have a real mastery of calculus, world history, etc.

Most of us adults know a lot about pop music and entertainment, the historical events that transpired during our own lifetime, etc. Yet, we did not study all that in one huge marathon effort: we simply lived through it.

I am trying to see to it that science and history are subjects that my kids have “lived through” since kindergarten, so that they can no more forget who Oliver Cromwell or Erwin Schrödinger or Felix Mendelssohn was than most Americans could forget who Oprah or Michael Jordan or O J Simpson is.

Yeah, quarks, genes, and the curvature of spacetime are more complicated than basketball, rock music, and the Oprah show. All the more reason to start learning about them from an early age!

I’ve given a pretty exhaustive description here, and, yet, I still have left out a lot of details as to textbooks, math, etc. I hope eventually to post much of that in my “Math Interludes” on this blog, in lists of all the books we have used on my central (and currently empty) Website, etc. I hope other homeschoolers will do the same.

Anyway, I think many homeschoolers are following a course not that different from ours. On the whole, for over half a decade so far, it has been fun and rewarding. Of course, we do have our days… but the storms come and pass.

Again, I think the most important point that is distinctive about our approach is the emphasis on teaching significant content about science and history as early and as fully as possible. This would be very hard in the public schools because of the “urge to test.” Someday, I suppose, my kids may have to take a test on black holes, but they did not need to take a quiz after we first discussed black holes in first grade. They could focus on grasping the idea and slowly improving their understanding of the subject, and I could probe, through direct personal interaction, their understanding of the subject and help them correct misconceptions.

And, for that reason, if and when they do take a test in college on black holes (and evolution and world history and molecular biology and all the other things that we started casually discussing early in grade school), I am confident that they will be very well prepared.

Besides, black holes are fun.

Math Interlude*: Lagrange Interpolation as Self-Checking Algebra Practice

2009-09-22T21:05:00.000-07:00

My kids started algebra last year, and, while they seem to get the basic concepts, they need practice – practice using the distributive law correctly to simplify algebraic expressions, practice dealing correctly with all those negative signs, etc.

Of course, I could just give them a huge number of polynomials to multiply, but, aside from being boring, that would require me to work out the answers myself in order to check their answers!

I’ve found a simple alternative that goes back to the great eighteenth-century mathematician Lagrange. “Lagrange interpolation” is actually interesting and useful in itself (although even well-educated technical people seem often to be ignorant of it nowadays), it happens to require quite a lot of multiplying of polynomials, checking of signs, etc. so that it is good algebra practice, and, best of all, it is automatically self-checking.

Here in a nutshell is how it works:

You are given a table of values for the variables x and y, and you want to find a polynomial that gives exactly the correct values of y when you plug in the values for x.

Suppose, for example, you are given the following values:

x y
1 1
2 4
3 9
5 9

and you want to find a polynomial

y = a x³ + b x² + c x + d

that goes through those points.

There are various ways to solve this problem -- for example, you can use linear algebra if you view (a,b,c,d) as a vector in a four-dimensional space.

The method published by Lagrange uses a much simpler idea.

What we do is find four separate polynomial, each of which vanishes at all but one of the values of x.

For example, expression A:

(x - 2) * (x - 3) * (x - 5)

obviously vanishes when x is 2, 3, or 5, but obviously does not vanish when x is 1.

What is the value of expression A when x equals 1? Well, just plug 1 in for x and you find that the value is -8.

Now, when x is 1, according to our table, we need y to have a value of 1, not -8. So, we will just divide expression A by -8 and multiply it by 1, getting expression B:

1 * (x - 2) * (x - 3) * (x - 5) / (-8)

If you do the same thing for the case where x is 2, you get expression C:

4 * (x - 1) * (x - 3) * (x - 5) / (3)

Run the same trick for x equal to 3, and you get expression D:

9 * (x - 1) * (x - 2) * (x - 5) / (-4)

Finally, for x equals 5, you get expression E:

9 * (x - 1) * (x - 2) * (x - 3) / (24)

Now, expression B gives the right value for y when x is 1, and, it is created so that it will vanish at the other three values of x, so it will not mess up the values of y there. Similarly, expression C is created so that it gives the right value for y when x is 2, and it is zero at the other three values of x.

So, if we simplify expressions B, C, D, and E by multiplying each one out, and then add them all together, combining like terms, we will get a polynomial that gives the right values of y for each of the four values of x.

I don't need practice on algebra, so I had my kids do this. Their answer is expression F:

y = (-2/3) x³ + 5 x² + (-22/3) x + 4

How do they (and I) know that they did the algebra right?

Simple – they plugged into expression F the values 1, 2, 3, and 5 for x. They should find that the values of y will then be 1, 4, 9, and 9 as planned. If they do not get the right values of y, they need to find their algebra error!

Note that Lagrange interpolation always works: you can choose any real numbers, positive, negative or zero, integral or fractional, for x and for y. (You can even use complex numbers if you wish.)

In particular, the values of x do not have to be evenly space: in my example, I “skipped” 4, and it worked fine. Nor do the values of y have to be in any pattern: 1, 4, and 9 in my example seemed to be starting a pattern, but I wrecked that pattern by using 9 twice instead of using the “obvious” choice of 16.

The values of x do have to all be different (although, you can play some interesting tricks by letting two values of x get “infinitely close” – basically, you can then control the slope at x as well as the value of y).

You can in fact prove that this is the only polynomial of degree three or lower that goes through our four points. (In general, if you have n points, with different values of x, there is always a unique polynomial of degree n-1 or lower that goes through those points.)

The more points you use, the more complicated the algebra gets. I'd start with only two or three points for someone who is just learning algebra.

Isn't this too hard for kids in first-year algebra? No, my kids have learned it without too much trouble: there is no division of polynomials here, no quadratic formula, no trig functions, etc. This really is just first-year algebra.

But, isn't it complicated?

A little.

But this is the kind of complication that you get in real math applied to real problems. No one in real life (not even in science or engineering) ever faces the problem of multiplying ( x - 2 ) times ( x- 3) just for the fun of it. And, it is very, very rare that anyone ever faces the familiar textbook sort of algebra problem: “A train leaves Albuquerque going towards Santa Fe at 70 mph and a train leaves Santa Fe...” or “Jane had five times as many dolls as Ginger, but after Jane got two more dolls....”

Algebra is an abstract science; traditional algebra is about understanding the abstract properties of the four basic arithmetic operations: what does and can happen when you use the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in a systematic way? (Modern university algebra is about the properties of more general systems of mathematical operations that can operate on elements very different from ordinary real numbers.)

Mathematics is not really about balancing your checkbook or calculating the amount of tile you need to re-tile the kitchen – we have electronic calculators to do that for us.

Mathematics is about the possible abstract structures that can logically exist.

Those structures are often based on arithmetic and geometry, so you do need to know traditional math to understand modern mathematics.

But really learning math means trying not just to learn to get the right answer but actually exploring the universe of mathematics much as traditional explorers explored newly-discovered continents.

Lagrange interpolation is a very simple example of such exploration. Actually graphing the polynomials you get through Lagrange interpolation can also be enlightening: while the method always works, it can give some pretty “snaky” curves if you fit more than three points (for three points, the resulting curve is much nicer).

Is it too complicated? Well, someone unwilling to tackle topics such as Lagrange interpolation is not really learning math. If you want to know what math is really about, rather than just working you way through the watered-down, over-simplified picture of mathematics portrayed in American public-school textbooks, you need to try to wrap you mind around ideas such as Lagrange interpolation.

____________
* From time to time, I plan on posting a “Math Interlude,” in which I’ll try to explain some significant idea in math not known to most educated American adults, that I have in fact taught to my own kids in grade school or middle school, and that a bright middle-school student should be able to grasp.

Socialization and the Carnival of Homeschooling

2009-09-22T20:42:00.000-07:00

The current Carnival of Homeschooling links to an insightful (and truly hilarious!) post on the homeschooling socializtion issue.

It is mentioned in the same paragraph as my recent post on a Chinese-American perspective on the issue of whether homeschooled kids are not independent enough. I had thought my post was pretty decent, but the post from The Learning Curve wins out. Check it out.

Are Homeschooled Kids Too Dependent? Chinese vs. American Perspectives

2009-09-19T23:12:00.000-07:00

The question of whether homeschooled children are too “dependent” on their parents is related to the oft-encountered “socialization” question, but the “dependency” question seems to get less attention among homeschoolers.

Because I married into a Chinese family (my parents-in-law were born in mainland China), I try to think about such issues from a “multicultural” perspective: how does our American idea of children’s “independence” compare to Chinese ideas of “independence”?

Chuansheng Chen, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, has done research in the area of Chinese vs. Western adolescence, and has noted:

Feldman and Rosenthal (1991) found that U.S. and Australian adolescents had earlier expectations for autonomy than did Hong Kong adolescents. The largest cultural differences were found for behaviors that would fall into the category of misconduct (e.g., smoking and drinking alcohol) and those related to peers (e.g., "attending boy-girl parties," "dating," and "preferring to do things with friends than with family")…

For example, peer factors play a less important role in Chinese adolescents' misconduct than in American adolescents' misconduct because Chinese adolescents spend less time with their peers (Chen et al., 1998).

Does the fact that Chinese have “less expectations of autonomy” than Americans imply that Chinese kids are more “dependent” than American kids?

My wife has explained to me that it is more subtle than that.

Consider which of the following sorts of children should be considered truly dependent:

Those kids who spend a lot of time with their parents and whose parents work hard to instill mature values and an understanding of the consequences of one’s decisions, so that, when the children finally become adults, they can independently make intelligent and informed decisions

Those kids who lack an adult’s perspective on values and consequences and are therefore, in reality, heavily dependent on the ill-formed judgments of their adolescent peers.

The American concept of a child’s independence tends to be that the independent child makes decisions on his own, even though those decisions may show no regard for his parents' values or judgments or what the parents have tried to teach him.

The Chinese concept of independence is that a child shows independence when he has properly internalized the parents’ teaching and is able to make a judgment similar to the judgment that the parents would have made had the parents been present and privy to all the relevant information.

The American concept of independence means ignoring the value of adult (especially parental) judgment. The Chinese attitude is that true independence comes when the child has acquired and accepted adult standards of judgment.

Most importantly, when a child makes an “independent” decision as a result of bowing to peer pressure, Americans still see this as a sign of the child’s independence, even if the decision is obviously unwise.

To Chinese, this is a sign of a very unhealthy form of dependence: dependence on the ill-informed and immature opinions of other children.

To Americans, a child’s spending more time with his peers is therefore a sign of his growing independence. Chinese have a different perspective.

I think this helps illuminate the “dependency” question we homeschoolers face.

If “independence” means kids’ making decisions without having internalized an adult’s understanding of values and consequences, then, yes, our homeschooled kids are less “independent” than many American kids.

At least, I hope so.

But, if “independence” means that a child is not dependent on peer pressure and can make mature decisions because he has acquired and internalized an adult perspective on decision-making, then I think that homeschooled kids may often be more independent than typical American adolescents.

Carnival of Homeschooling

2009-09-19T22:16:00.000-07:00

My post on “Should Homeschooled Kids Study Philosophy?” is mentioned in the September 7, 2009 Carnival of Homeschooling.

I did not submit anything to this week’s Carnival , and I will probably only submit something once every month or two. I do think the Carnival is a good way for homeschoolers to hear about other homeschoolers’ blogs.

I notice that my blog seems to be less personal, less about family activities, than most of the homeschooler blogs. I’m not sure if this is because I am a male and most homeschool bloggers are females, or, perhaps, as a physicist, I am less inclined to focus on personal matters.

One blog that is a bit more similar to mine is Kitchen Table Math : this is not specifically limited to homeschoolers, but does have a large homeschooler presence. Kitchen Table Math also has a lot of nice links that are good for learning about math education.

Tyranny vs. Chaos: The False Dichotomy of “Progressive” vs. “Traditional” Education

2009-09-17T12:32:00.000-07:00

Alfie Kohn has a revealing essay* posted on Education Week, currently available for free to the public.

Kohn is a well-known advocate of “progressive” education and his article exhibits nicely the basic error that “progressives” make, as well as the opposite error made by far too many advocates of “traditional” education.

On the one hand, Kohn criticizes the traditional teacher-as-lord-and-master approach as consisting of “mandates handed down from on high… where test scores drive the instruction and students are essentially bullied into doing whatever they’re told.”

I think that is a fair rap.

“To divide fractions, invert and multiply.” (Why?)

“Democracy is the best system of government.” (Then why not carry out open-heart surgery democratically?)

“Humans are descended from fish.” (How do we know this?)

To simply order children to believe the “right” answer causes them to accept that one can only learn the truth from authority, and that they, and humans in general, lack the ability to reliably determine the truth for themselves.

And, if kids ever start to wonder how the “authorities” learned the right answer, since the authorities themselves also are mere humans, the kids may fall into a naïve skepticism, thinking that no human can ever really know any truths at all.

But, sadly, Kohn offers, as a false alternative, the old “progressive” solution of giving kids the “opportunities to discover answers to their own questions,” i.e., the “constructivist” approach where kids have to create knowledge for themselves rather than systematically being taught what humans have discovered, at enormous effort, during the last three thousand years.

That really would be a swell approach – if kids had a spare three thousand years to work out everything, and if all kids were as bright as Euclid, Einstein, etc.

So, how to avoid the false choice of “progressive” vs. “traditional” education?

The answer should really be obvious from everyday life.

In real life, we explain to kids that you need to brush your teeth because you will otherwise get cavities, you need to wash your hands because there are germs on your hands that can make you sick, etc. We give explanations.

The idea of giving rational explanations, as opposed to the false dichotomy of either issuing irrational commands or forcing the students to discover everything for themselves, is really not that complicated!

E.g., why “invert and multiply” to divide fractions?

Well, division is the inverse operation to multiplication: if you multiply by some fraction and then wish to undo the multiplication, inverting and multiplying will indeed undo the original multiplication.

Liping Ma, in her brilliant Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, a “must-read” for all homeschooling parents, goes into much greater depth on this issue of dividing fractions: this is one of the toughest things to explain clearly in elementary mathematics.

But it can be explained. It is unrealistic to expect kids to discover for themselves how to divide fractions, or to fully understand on their own why it works, even if they do stumble upon it. However, it is also not necessary to teach the standard algorithm as an arbitrary rule imposed, for some mysterious reason, by adults.

As Ma explains, if one wishes to use division as the inverse of multiplication, if one wants division to be a means of carrying out repeated subtractions, if one wants the “cancellation law” to apply to division, one has no choice: there is only one right answer, the one given by the standard algorithm.

Ma advocates a “profound understanding of fundamental mathematics”: i.e., both a serious conceptual understanding of elementary math, as well as a practical mastery of the elementary math facts and the standard algorithms.

That indeed should be the goal in all academic (and non-academic) subjects: a conceptual understanding of American history combined with detailed factual knowledge of dates and historical events; an understanding of the experimental bases for scientific theories as well as detailed knowledge of the important scientific facts; etc.

As a practical matter, it is sometimes necessary to say to a student, “We will see the justification for this next month or next year.” Sometimes, one cannot fully understand the evidence for a theory until one has grasped exactly what the theory is. And, it would be foolish to slavishly imitate all the false starts and errors made in the historical development of scientific theories, in the historical creation of various concepts in economics, in the historical discovery of various methods in mathematics, etc.

A student’s learning need not and should not recapitulate the historical process by which knowledge was originally discovered. The whole point is to make it easier for the student than it was for the original discoverer.

Often, the historical experiments or reasoning that led to a discovery are relevant: this is true, for example, of Rutherford’s discovery of the nucleus. But the important thing is to present the best proof and justification we possess today for a particular piece of knowledge.

The other error to avoid, which tends to be shared by both “progressive” and traditional approaches to education, is the false belief that kids have to wait until they are mature to be told of discoveries that the human race only stumbled upon in the last century or so.

It may have taken humans a long time to discover the Big Bang, the fact that humans are descended from fish, etc. But a six-year-old can grasp those ideas – they are not that complex. Even the basic evidence for those facts – e.g., the fossil record, the fact that the galaxies are expanding outward – can be explained at a simple level to six-year-olds.

That the human race had to be “mature” to discover such things does not mean that young kids cannot understand those discoveries.

An educational approach based on giving rational explanations, as opposed to the false dichotomy of either issuing irrational commands or expecting the students to discover everything for themselves, is really not that hard to grasp. Both progressivism and the traditional approach to education are wrong.

We need to teach our kids that humans can and do have a rational understanding of reality. Neither the “progressive” nor the “traditional” approach to schooling really achieves that.

Our kids deserve a "content-rich" approach that teaches them, at an early age, the marvelous and amazing facts that human beings have discovered about reality.

____________

* Thanks to Barry Garelick at Kitchen Table Math for bringing Kohn's essay to my attention.

Science vs. Religion: Teaching the Controversy

2009-09-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

Scientific American has just published “a new column that examines the intersection between science and society,” an essay by my fellow physicist Lawrence Krauss that argues that science is fundamentally inconsistent with traditional religion. As Krauss’s conclusion states:

Until we are willing to accept the world the way it is, without miracles that all empirical evidence argues against, without myths that distort our comprehension of nature, we are unlikely to bridge the divide between science and culture and, more important, we are unlikely to be fully ready to address the urgent technical challenges facing humanity.

So, what does all this have to do with homeschooling? Like most scientists, I disagree with so-called "young earth creationists” as well as the more subtle creationism of “Intelligent Design.” But, on one point, I think the creationists are absolutely right: the “tolerant,” “moderate” position that holds that of course religion and mainstream, established science are compatible, and that, if they aren’t, at least we should be quiet about it, leads to an educational disaster.

Religion has been of crucial importance in human history; it is still extremely important to a large number of Americans.

Whether religion and mainstream science are compatible is not just a sophomoric question that can and should be quietly ignored by mature people. It is a question that is central to our understanding of ourselves, our civilization, and our future.

Krauss points out, quite correctly, that science does not disprove the existence of “a God that does not directly intervene in the daily operations of the cosmos.”

However, science does have a perspective and orientation that differs quite radically from traditional, organized religion.

The central ethic of science is that scientists should actively work to undermine existing theories, to find little details that do not fit into accepted theories and that push us onwards to new and better theories.

I know of none of the major religions that similarly urges its practitioners to do their best to undermine the beliefs of that religion!

Furthermore, science as it now exists is based on a mechanistic perspective that is antithetical to both common sense and to religious sensibilities.

Common sense thinks of flowers as striving to grow upwards towards the air and sun. Modern science thinks of a flower as a strange, squishy little machine, “designed” only by the long process of evolution, in which the banging about of atoms, the pushing and pulling due to the quantum electronic interactions of molecules, is all that is happening. To modern science, there is no real purpose, no real goals, exhibited by a growing plant – just the large-scale result of all those atoms banging into each other.

Similarly, common sense thinks of the difference between a peach and a zucchini as consisting of all the properties that a peach has that a zucchini lacks and vice versa: a peach has the property of being reddish orange, sweet, and so on; zucchinis have contrasting properties.

To a scientist, peaches and zucchinis are simply slightly different ways of arranging carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms (with a smattering of other atoms): all the apparent differences between peaches and zucchinis are due to how these different arrangements of atoms reflect light, interact with various molecules in our taste buds, etc.

Just atoms (and photons) banging into each other – the peachiness and zucchininess have no separate existence.

I think it is hard for most non-scientists to grasp how certain scientists are of the correctness of this perspective: the shining of the sun, the eruption of a volcano, the growing of a rosebush, the internal operation of our own nervous system – nothing but tiny particles of matter (and force fields) pushing and pulling on each other.

I hope it is obvious how radically this view conflicts not only with common sense and traditional philosophy but also with traditional religion.

This conflict is central to contemporary human civilization. Science cannot simply be ignored – its stunning successes not only in creating material comforts and clever gadgets but also in explaining everything from the interior of a neutron star to the functioning of our own genes makes science an overwhelming intellectual and cultural force.

Any education that ignores this conflict between science and the traditional perspectives embodied in religion and philosophy (and “common sense”) is failing horribly either to teach about traditional religion, or about the full scope of the current scientific viewpoint, or both.

So, as a scientist, am I claiming that the scientific perspective is the final word, and everyone must meekly surrender to it?

Well… the perspective of science has been stunningly successful in understanding nature, and I think that needs to be acknowledged.

But, in the interests of full disclosure, let me present here the three little clouds on the horizon that suggest that maybe science as we know it has not grasped all aspects of reality.

First, in physics, we do not know how to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of gravity (general relativity). For a long time, it was thought that this was merely a technical, mathematical difficulty that we would soon overcome (superstring theory has promised to do this, for example). But, in recent decades, an increasing number of physicists have come to wonder if maybe this is a sign that we are missing something more fundamental than we realize.

The second cloud on the horizon is quantum mechanics itself. Anyone who has learned anything about quantum mechanics, even from really bad popular books (and there are lots of those!), knows that quantum mechanics is really weird. In a nutshell, quantum mechanics seems to say that everything that could have happened affects the future, not just those things that actually did happen.

There are various ways of trying to escape this ghostly effect of unrealized possibilities. None has yet convinced the majority of physicists.

The third cloud is the problem of consciousness. Physics has nothing to say about what it feels like to be an electron. But we all know that it does feel like something to be a human being. How can electrons, protons, and neutrons, whirling around inside our head become aware of themselves?

Lots of suggestions have been made: they all ignore the fact that electrons, protons, and neutrons are a part of physics, and that the idea of an “internal perspective” is utterly alien to physics.

Quite a few philosophers and physicists have mulled over this problem: an increasing number have the humility to admit that we cannot see what an answer could even look like (for one of my favorite discussions, see the philosopher Colin McGinn’s readable and informed book The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World).

So, how will these disturbing clouds be resolved? What will the angry dance among science, religion, and philosophy look like a hundred years from now?

I don’t know. But I am confident that it is one of the great questions of the twenty-first century.

An education that tries to sweep such questions under the rug, that ignores how radically the modern scientific view of reality differs both from common sense and from traditional religion, is really no education at all.

A Japanese Musician on Selling Our Kids Short

2009-09-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

While googling for information on piano equipment (pedal extenders for the kids), I accidentally stumbled on an essay that criticizes the modern tendency to underestimate the mental potential of our children, written by Haruko Kataoka, founder of the Suzuki piano method.

Dr. Kataoka wrote:

I am always dismayed to see the content of so-called "children's entertainment" and educational materials. They are so simplistic, as if children cannot understand anything….

Making only childish materials available to children is based on a huge misconception…. adults become convinced that children need simplistic materials for their entertainment and education, and they arbitrarily provide children with only these things. The great majority of children's toys and activity books are based on this basic misunderstanding….

The result is that society itself makes children look below themselves in their studies. It is not the children's fault that they are looking down. The adults are forcing them to look down….

The beauty of nature and the splendid fragrance of the arts are necessary for people from childhood. Whether they are exposed to such things daily for ten or twenty years or whether they have been exposed only to lowly, common things will determine that individual's sensibility for the rest of his or her life.

Indeed.

That is one of the core messages that I hope I am communicating in this blog: kids are capable of far, far more intellectually than most adults give them credit for. We are routinely denying children access to the best knowledge of nature and history that humans possess, and to our greatest cultural creations such as classical music, and instead feeding them "simplistic" pabulum considered “developmentally appropriate.”

That is not only an insult to our kids' intelligence. It also cripples our kids in developing the primary means of survival possessed by human beings – their minds.

While Kataoka’s specific interest was in music and music teaching, she makes clear that she intends her point to apply not just to music but rather to all aspects of a child’s development.

The entire essay is a bit over a page in length, and well worth reading: I hope you’ll take a minute to click and read it.

What Barack Should Tell the Schoolkids

2009-09-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

Here’s what President Obama should tell the schoolkids on Tuesday if he really wants to help solve the problems in American education:

Since I’m supposed to be the leader of this country, I’m gonna give you guys some straight talk. The grown-ups in this country are ruining you kids’ lives. Your teachers have been trained to make sure you don’t learn anything interesting or challenging; half of your teachers should never have been allowed to graduate from grade school themselves. Your parents want you to end up just as stupid and ignorant as they are: they’re really afraid you might actually end up smart, which is why they make fun of smart folks by calling them “nerds.”

So, here’s what you gotta do: fight back! Hard. Force your parents to take you a couple times a week to the biggest library in your town. Go through the books on science and history and math. You’ll find that most of them are just as full of empty words as your schoolbooks. But, if you look carefully, you’ll find a few that tell you the truth. When you find one of those books that tells you the truth, read it, and work hard to understand it.

It’s not gonna be easy, because no one ever taught you to understand books that tell you real stuff. But there are books that tell you the truth about how people create computers and bridges and medicines and airplanes and skyscrapers. The grown-ups don’t want you to learn that stuff, because then you’ll be smarter than most of the grown-ups and then the grown-ups will feel like fools. You just show ‘em.

And you can find books that tell you the truth about all the grown-up leaders, too – how Presidents fought wars for no reason, lied just to keep power, and stole as much money as they could get their hands on. The grown-ups don’t want you to know that either. They want you to grow up to be suckers, just like they have been.

Knowledge is power, guys. You wanna be poor, ignorant fools like your parents, or you wanna fight back?

Your choice.

Good luck

Kids would be pretty startled to hear someone telling them the truth about education for the first time. But they'd listen. And they might even believe him.

Of course, that kind of courage would require that Barack have a backbone. And there is no evidence that he does.

Teaching Science the Harry Potter Way

2009-09-07T00:31:00.000-07:00

Seeing the most recent Harry Potter movie raised an interesting question: why do so many kids find the idea of attending Hogwarts so enticing?

After all, J. K. Rowling makes clear that the students at Hogwarts actually study hard.

And, notoriously, American kids do not like hard schoolwork.

The answer of course is obvious: at Hogwarts, you get to learn magic.

At Hogwarts, you get to acquire knowledge not possessed by mere “muggles,” knowledge that lets you in on arcane secrets about how the universe really works, knowledge that gives you vast and amazing powers not possessed by ordinary humans.

Such magic actually exists in the real world: it is called science.

For example, who would have thought, prior to the twentieth century, that a rather mundane material, so-called “yellowcake,” had within it a mysterious substance that, when properly separated out through arcane and laborious methods, could be used to make some of the most dangerous weapons in history, far more dangerous than Rowling’s “death-eaters”?

(Yellowcake is a substance produced from uranium ore, and uranium is of course the original raw material for nuclear weapons.)

Who would have thought, before the late nineteenth century, that all ordinary matter had within it tiny little particles, making up less than a thousandth of the weight of matter, that could be used not only to control each other’s motion but also to control everything from a cell phone to a jet plane?

(J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in the 1890s; electronics is the art of using a small flow of electrons to control a much larger, more powerful flow of electrons.)

Who would have imagined, prior to the twentieth century, that the entire structure, growth, and daily functioning of our bodies is controlled by a tiny stringy molecule, hidden in the nucleus of nearly every cell of our body, that embodies a sort of computer program that builds a human being from a single cell?

(The stringy molecule is DNA, of course.)

As the example of nuclear weapons illustrates, science is not an entirely benign form of magic. But that fact should not make it less interesting to children: “black” magic is at least as interesting as “white”!

I could continue at great length in this vein: almost all of the great discoveries in science, from plate tectonics to relativity theory, from quantum theory to the theory of evolution, amount to showing that the universe is a radically different, much more mysterious, magical place than “common sense” would ever have suggested.

And, the mysteries unveiled by science not only tell us amazing things about reality; the knowledge provided by science is also enormously powerful.

So, how can American public-school educators manage to transmute science education from the unveiling of deep and powerful mysteries to a numbingly boring subject that most kids shun?

A big part of the answer lies in the dogma of “developmental appropriateness” that plagues American elementary schools. It is “developmentally inappropriate” for young grade-schoolers to learn about black holes or the Big Bang or mutants or nuclear chain reactions – although the X-Men comic series has proven for decades that kids are interested in “mutants” and although it is hard not to be interested in things that make very big bangs (which include nuclear reactions and black holes, and, of course, the granddaddy of them all, the Big Bang itself).

Instead, in early grade school, kids are taught that plants have roots and leaves, that seeds sprout and turn into plants, etc. – as if any normal kid did not already know this.

If anyone thinks I am being unfair, glance through the “Science Content Standards for California Public Schools: Kindergarten through Grade 12”, adopted October 1998 . The terms “DNA,” “Big Bang,” and “mutation” do not occur in the grade one through six standards at all. The terms “black hole” and “relativity” occur nowhere, not even in the high school physics standards.

Another problem is the over-emphasis in American science education on experiments.

It’s true, of course, that natural science is based on detailed observations and experiments. But real scientific experiments are not just random fooling around to see what happens. Real experiments are the result of careful thought and study and mastery of all that is already known about the subject, before one decides on an experiment that will give us insights into nature that we do not yet possess.

Real science is an obsessive search for secrets that nature is carefully hiding from common sense.

Grade-school students and, by and large, even high-school students cannot do that sort of experiment. The result is that the experiments that can be done by schoolchildren tend to be exceptionally boring and uninformative.

(The one major exception is experiments that blow things up: understandably, both teachers and parents tend to be wary of that sort of experiment!)

The emphasis on pointless experiments is connected to the educratic dogma of “constructivism,” the idea that kids can and should “construct” knowledge from their own experience, rather than learn it from a book.

The problem, of course, is that no amount of experience can cause an ordinary person to “construct” the theory of relativity for himself: we needed a genius, Einstein, to figure out how to “construct” relativity.

Prior to the university level, experiments should be put in the same category as field trips or science specials on television: perhaps an entertaining break from the daily grind, but no substitute for actually learning science.

Really learning science means reading books (not just a single textbook, but a variety of books on the subject), working problems, and, above all, trying hard to think about the concepts of science and trying to understand how science has shown that so many of our “common-sense” beliefs about the world are in fact radically wrong.

Still another problem is political correctness from both the Right and the Left.

Science is revolutionary: it proves that many of our common-sense ideas are false.

Most people have finally adjusted to the idea that the earth moves around the sun, and so the schools can safely teach that as a fact.

But many people have not yet adjusted to the idea that we are descended from fish, and so the schools must tread lightly in presenting that idea, especially in early grade school. (Needless to say, the words “evolve” and “evolution” do not occur anywhere in the grade one through six California science standards.)

Similarly, the political Left is uncomfortable with the fact that our genes have a large influence on our intelligence, our personality, etc. So, don’t expect to learn much about evolutionary psychology or behavioral genetics in American schools, either.

A final problem is the American emphasis on pragmatism: how will it help my kid practically to know more than a bare minimal amount of science?

Well, actually, kids who are engaged and excited by discussions about mutants and the Big Bang and relativity and black holes are more likely to stick with science, so that they are willing to slog through the tough advanced science courses needed to become an engineer, a scientist, or a physician.

So, yes, teaching the deep and amazing aspects of science may well help your kids practically.

But, more than that, science is the first organized body of knowledge in human history that gives us systematic, verifiable, non-obvious knowledge about reality, knowledge that is the same whether you live in New Delhi or New York, Nairobi or Shanghai.

That is a remarkable change in human history. When my great grandmother was born in 1883, no one knew what atoms were made of or how old the universe was or what made the stars shine or that there were other galaxies besides the Milky Way.

We now know all of that and more – that there are planets around other stars, how the continents have moved during the earth’s long history, how stars can end their lives as neutron stars or black holes, etc.

Before the rise of science, humans lived in, as Carl Sagan put it, a “demon-haunted world.” “Truth” was a matter of the arbitrary beliefs enforced in your native land: as Pascal sardonically suggested, what was true on one side of the Pyrenees was false on the other.

Science changed that – it banished the imaginary demons, it discovered real, objective truth.

So, kids need to know real science – exciting, revolutionary, disturbing science – not simply because it will motivate them to study enough science to get into dentistry school but also because science frees humans from the lies, myths, and dogmas of the past.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

Science is magic made real. Real education in real science should be more exciting than learning magic at J. K. Rowling’s imaginary Hogwarts.

Books are available nowadays for even young kids to learn real science in a way that explains the excitement and mystery of science without sacrificing accuracy – e.g., Mahlon Hoagland’s The Way Life Works or Jenny Morgan’s The Universe Tells Our Cosmic Story trilogy. Get books like these and let your kids learn real magic.

Should Homeschooled Kids Study Philosophy?

2009-09-06T02:44:00.000-07:00

Should homeschooled kids study philosophy and, more specifically, should homeschooled kids of grade-school age study philosophy?

The answer to both questions is “Yes, but…”

Educated people know something about the history of philosophy, just as they know something about the history of literature, music, architecture, etc. Ideas created or elaborated by philosophers hundreds of years ago are still floating around today, and kids need to learn about those ideas because they affect us all today. Kids need especially to learn about those ideas that happen to be utter nonsense, so that they are not sucked into believing in the nonsense themselves.

Furthermore, philosophy is, in fact, less complicated than most people imagine, and even grade-school kids can seriously learn some things about the history of philosophy.

When my kids were in third-grade, we read together, out loud, Jeremy Weate’s A Young Person’s Guide to Philosophy: like all DK books, it is engaging and nicely illustrated. It is of course necessarily superficial, but it does give kids a thumbnail sketch of some of the major figures in the history of philosophy, and it offers a good basis for further discussion.

When our kids were fourth-graders we read together Lloyd Spencer’s Introducing the Enlightenment, which, in the format of a graphic novel, does a nice job of introducing the leading characters and ideas of the Enlightenment. I found especially interesting his emphasis on the importance of Locke as a key figure behind the Enlightenment, and also his contrasting of Rousseau vs. Voltaire.

So, yes, even grade-school kids should learn something about the history of philosophy, if nothing else to be immunized against philosophical nonsense.

But… many introductory books on philosophy take the tack that “philosophy is not so much a set of answers as a way of asking questions: the important thing about philosophy is not specific answers, but rather the philosophical way of thinking”

Yeah – that is because the answers that philosophers have come up with over the centuries have been almost uniformly bad!

I have in mind, for example, Kant’s claim that the structure of the human mind forces us to think in terms of Euclidean geometry, just a few years before non-Euclidean geometry was discovered, or Comte’s “positivistic” claim that we would never know the composition of the stars, just a few years before scientists discovered how to analyze stellar composition using spectral lines.

The problem is not simply that these guys goofed up. The problem is that, for centuries, philosophers have supposed that they could gain insight into the inner nature of reality by thinking about how we use words, by studying carefully how we think about the world, and by utilizing the basic common-sense knowledge that we all already possess – without doing complex experiments, without learning advanced math, without making painfully detailed observations of nature, etc.

The “method” of philosophy, in short, is that of a literate, articulate gentleman, someone who is very skilled at using words but who does not want to soil his hands with actually doing detailed observations or experiments, or bother his mind with doing high-level math or learning about the detailed observations and experiments carried out by others.

(A few philosophers today are actually going to the trouble to learn real, advanced math, science, etc., but they are very few in number. People who can really handle tough math and science, naturally, tend to become mathematicians, scientists, engineers, etc., rather than philosophers.)

This philosophical method is the exact opposite of the scientific method: science has progressed by assuming that nature hides its secrets in the hard, difficult to come by, details.

Kepler discovered that planets move in ellipses by trying to understand why Tycho Brahe’s actual observations differed in tiny details from what any existing model predicted. Darwin proved the fact of natural selection through his bizarre obsession with Galapagos finches, and many other varieties of animals. The second law of thermodynamics was developed by thinking in great detail about how heat engines worked, and trying to figure out what the performance of the most ideal possible heat engine would be.

Science is the result of an obsessive-compulsive disorder directed to making unnaturally detailed observations of nature in the paranoid belief that nature is hiding deep secrets in those absurd, tiny little details.

And it has worked.

The method of philosophy has been to assume that the inner nature of reality is inherently accessible and transparent and can be understood by thinking calmly and carefully in the comfort of one's armchair, as if reality were simply another well-spoken gentleman who can be understood if one courteously and attentively listens to his words.

That has failed.

So, while kids should learn about the history of philosophy, they most emphatically should not be encouraged to think “philosophically,” i.e., in the way that professional philosophers have thought for the last couple centuries. That method of thinking is a proven loser.

Of course, some areas that are usually considered part of “philosophy” are subjects that humans simply must deal with. The obvious example is ethics: you do have ethical views, whether you admit it or not, and it would be best if you consciously investigated and understood those views.

But… the fact that “ethics” is classified by libraries and by universities under the subject of philosophy should not compel us to think that professional “philosophers” are actually experts on ethics or that the “philosophical way of thinking” is necessarily the right way to think about ethics.

Ethics is too important to be left to the philosophers.

Ethics has to do with the practical issue of how we should live our daily lives: on the face of it, numerous different subjects have something interesting to say about that question – history, anthropology, economics, biology, religion, etc.

And, surely, the accumulated common-sense wisdom of human beings through the generations has some relevance, too.

Yes, kids certainly need to learn about the difference between right and wrong, and from a very early age. But it is an error simply to assume that philosophers are better able to think about ethics in a careful, systematic way than experts in other intellectual disciplines.

In thinking about ethics, the quality of someone’s thoughts must be judged on its own merits, not by whether or not he is officially a “philosopher.” And, based on the failures of philosophy in so many other areas, one should not be optimistic about philosophers’ contributions to thinking about morality, either.

So, yes, homeschooled kids should be taught about Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, about Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel – indeed, they need to be intellectually immunized against Kant and Hegel.

But children should also be taught not to think “philosophically,” in the manner of current and recent academic and professional philosophers. On the contrary, they should be explicitly told that, for at least the last two centuries, the philosophical enterprise as carried out by professional philosophers has been an obvious failure and that the vast increase in our knowledge of reality during the last several centuries has been due not to philosophy but to natural science.

The Solution to Global Warming?

2009-09-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

“A Sunshade for Planet Earth,” an article* by Robert Kunzig that discusses serious scientific proposals to avoid global warming without the need to cut back on human CO₂ emissions, was published in the November 2008 issue of Scientific American.

But I have not been able to find any discussion of this in the “mainstream” news media.**

Why?

I think it is fair to say that the “mainstream” news media is obsessed with the “global warming” issue. And, indeed, if the worst fears of global warming become reality, it is going to be a very serious problem.

The possibility that there may be a simple, cheap technological fix should therefore be great news.

Why didn’t the “mainstream” media discuss this?

Let’s be blunt – over the next few decades, human beings are going to continue to dump huge amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere. It is politically impossible for Europe, Japan, and the US to cut back dramatically on CO₂ emissions in a way that will seriously impact our standard of living.

And, China, India, and other developing countries will dramatically increase their CO₂ emissions in the next several decades.

Human CO₂ emissions will in fact be higher, probably a great deal higher, in 2030 than they are today.

Now, it is possible that those increased CO₂ emissions might not end up being a problem.

There are in fact compelling scientific reasons to conclude that human CO₂ emissions cause the globe to be warmer than it otherwise would be.

But the devil is in the details. Without human CO₂ emissions,would the earth naturally be in a warming or a cooling period? Is it possible that, without our CO₂ emissions, the globe would actually be cooling, and that therefore we need those emissions to stabilize the global temperature?

Yes, it’s possible. Our current geological epoch is one of intermittent Ice Ages: for example, the so-called “Little Ice Age” started in the late Middle Ages and only ended in the 1800s. Perhaps, we would soon enter another "Little Ice Age," except for the protection provided by human CO₂ emissions.

The other key question is: if anthropogenic CO₂ is indeed causing warming, exactly how much warming will end up occurring?

That is much harder to determine than the “mainstream” media have admitted.

I have been interested in global climate modeling since the late ‘60s, long before “global warming” became a big political issue, and, as a physicist, I have some concept of the scientific and computational difficulties involved in modeling the global climate.

The scientific reasoning that indicates that human CO₂ emissions will make the earth warmer than it otherwise would be is quite straightforward. But to calculate the actual value of that warming is fiendishly difficult.

It’s the clouds.

A major part of the problem is clouds: as the globe starts to warm, more moisture should go into the air. Water vapor is itself a “greenhouse gas,” and thus will tend to increase global warming. However, more water vapor also tends to mean more clouds, and clouds tend to reflect sunlight back into space and therefore reduce the effect of global warming.

And understanding clouds is very hard.

Among other things, cloud formation depends on the amount of dust and kind of dust in the atmosphere, and understanding how much and what kind of dust will be kicked up into the atmosphere under global warming is also very hard.

The amount of global warming also depends on how vegetation (and bacteria) respond to the CO₂ increase and to the increase in temperature.

Bacteria are complicated.

The moral here is that when the “mainstream” media report that the “scientific consensus” expects a global warming of between x and y degrees, do not believe them.

This is not a problem that can yet be definitively settled scientifically: I am not confident that it can ever be settled.

It is hard.

So, I do not know if global warming will be a real problem or not. My “gut feeling,” for what it is worth, is that we may be on the verge of another natural cooling period, and that there may therefore not be much of a problem. But that may simply be “wishful thinking” due to my naturally optimistic disposition.

“Global warming” may indeed turn out to be a very serious problem.

So, what solution does the Scientific American article suggest?

The most promising solution seems to be to dump sulfur dioxide (about one-and-a-half million tons, in terms of the weight of the sulfur, per year) into the stratosphere. The estimated cost is between twenty-five and fifty billion dollars a year, a trivial amount when spread out over all the citizens of the industrialized nations. (Incidentally, we are already dumping much more sulfur dioxide into the lower atmosphere each year: this would be a very modest increase in our sulfur dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.)

This works by causing increased cloud formation in the stratosphere, which reflects sunlight and cools the planet. As the article notes, we have reason to be confident that this will work: the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines dumped a lot of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and did indeed have a cooling effect.

Is it a perfect solution?

No – as I said above, climate modeling is hard.

There are questions about whether this will have an effect on ozone holes over the arctic and antarctic, how it will affect different regional climates, etc.

And, the article also discusses other possible methods of counteracting global warming, although I myself found the sulfur dioxide approach to be the most promising. (The sea salt scheme bears further looking into, but the idea of a literal sunshade in space, while theoretically possible, is, in my judgment, not practicable.)

Go to your library and read the article yourself.

And then ask yourself: why did you not hear about this in the “mainstream” media?

The “mainstream” media are, after all, obsessed with global warming: they should find this welcome news.

Exactly what game are the “mainstream” media playing?
__________

* The article is behind a wall; only the introduction, Geoengineering: How to Cool Earth-- At a Price is available for free online. Fortunately, any decent library has Scientific American.

**A Google search on the title, restricted to the last year (i.e., all the time since it was published) brings up less than three hundred hits (many to other pages on the Scientific American site that link to the article) – none in “mainstream” US news media, except of course for Scientific American itself.

Physicists Dissing Philosophy

2009-09-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

The feisty Czech physicist Luboš Motl recently weighed in on the “what’s gone wrong with philosophy” issue. I think it is fair to say that Luboš specializes in controversy, but I also think his views on the issue of philosophy are very widespread among practicing scientists.

Luboš also links to an interesting essay by an old professor of mine, the Nobel laureate Steve Weinberg, in which Steve addresses the “unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy”: why has all the effort of philosophers during the last couple centuries borne so little fruit?

Steve’s basic conclusion is that the best that good philosophy can do is simply to serves as an antidote to bad philosophy: as he states at one point, “But here again the service of philosophy was a negative one; it helped only to free science from the constraints of philosophy itself.”

I do think that Steve is a bit too harsh towards the philosophy of “mechanism,” i.e., the idea that all of reality consists fundamentally of simple entities that do nothing but push and pull on each other. He is of course correct that the rise of the concepts of fields (e.g., the magnetic field) in the nineteenth century disproved the most naïve versions of mechanism – the world is indeed more than just billiard balls bouncing off each other, which is the underlying picture behind the most primitive version of mechanism.

However, as much as we physicists may admire ourselves for our new, more sophisticated picture of reality, which Steve discusses – quantum fields, superstrings, etc. – still, to an ordinary layperson the scientific world-view remains pretty mechanistic. Quantum fields, superstrings, etc. are still simple, mindless little things that push and pull on each other in simple, mindless ways.

If the modern physicist’s view of reality is not quite the simple “clockwork universe” of the nineteenth-century physicist, it is still, as Steve himself has noted elsewhere, basically a view of the universe bereft of meaning, purpose, or feelings.

In short, a pretty mechanistic universe, from the perspective of most human beings (and traditional philosophy).

I think the underlying issue here is the essential three-way conflict among science, philosophy, and religion.

Science, philosophy, and religion all make claims to have a broad, integrated view of reality. But, the views of reality they arrive at differ dramatically.

The scientific view of reality is based on actively trying to disprove one’s hypotheses (believe me – I, and any good scientist, would dearly love to show that we have a wonderful new theory that overturns all the existing theories in our field!) and on only retaining those theories that survive the most vigorous attempts at disproof. Science also embodies the rather paranoid concept that nature is hiding its secrets from us and that we can uncover those secrets only through obsessively detailed observation and experiment. And, science rests on a broadly mechanistic picture of reality, a universe lacking in objective purpose, meaning, or feelings.

Philosophy is radically different: it supposes that the secrets of reality can be uncovered by concentrated thought alone, that reality is naturally open to human understanding. The “testing” of philosophical theories consists basically of verbal assaults by other philosophers. And, historically, most philosophers seem somehow to have uncovered a reality in which human feelings and concerns have a natural home.

Religion differs dramatically from both philosophy and science, most notably in the fact that very few religions welcome attempts to prove that they are wrong: indeed, in practice, the primary warrant for religious belief is that those who deny or seriously question the core beliefs are encouraged or compelled to leave the religious community. And, of course, religions commonly claim that the driving Spirit behind reality has made an active effort to explain Himself to us. Needless to say, religion generally offers a universe full of purpose, meaning, and feelings.

It would be quite surprising if three such radically different approaches to confronting reality were to give compatible pictures of reality.

Of course, they do not.

This is a deeper cultural conflict than often acknowledged: these three views of reality cannot all be right.

It is easy for us scientists to deride creationists who claim that their religious beliefs disprove modern biology and paleontology. It is also easy for us to dismiss “postmodernists” who claim that their verbal musings trump the findings of modern science.

But, in some ways, both the creationists and the postmodernists deserve credit for seeing something that more sensible, moderate folks try to evade: in the long-term, science, philosophy, and religion cannot co-exist.

Choices have to be made.

Why We Are Homeschooling

2009-09-03T19:55:00.000-07:00

Anyone familiar with the homeschooling universe knows of the wide diversity of “homeschooling philosophies” – e.g., the classical trivium, unschooling, Charlotte Mason, and, most of all, “eclectic.”

Rather than choosing from that smorgasbord of homeschooling philosophies, we have based our homeschooling approach on the idea that one’s homeschooling methods tend to be a reflection of one’s broader view of human life – including philosophy, politics, religion, etc.

We are homeschooling largely for academic reasons and also because we dissent from much of the prevailing values and attitudes that are typical of contemporary American life.

American society does not value intellectual achievement. We have “select” sports teams even for grade-school children who show unusual athletic talent. It does not surprise us that some kids can advance at twice the pace athletically of most other kids their age.

But, with very few exceptions, we do not have “select” schools for academically talented and motivated children. Very few Americans grasp that bright kids can advance intellectually at twice the speed of average kids.

Indeed, bright kids, as we all know, are disparaged as “nerds.”

Our own kids have been consistently testing at twice their grade level or higher (in tests administered by a local school district, not by me). I’d like to think that this shows that our kids are simply born geniuses, but I am pretty certain that this is not the case: I know lots of other kids who, at an early age, seemed to me as bright or brighter than our kids.

No, I think that our kids are excelling academically simply because our homeschooling approach is centered on the idea that learning is a very good thing, and that children are capable of learning much more, much faster, than most adults realize.

Aristotle said that man is the rational animal. Our mind is our primary tool for survival. To deny children the opportunity to develop that tool to its fullest is to cripple them.

Aristotle also said that long-term happiness is the result of developing our potential as rational beings to the fullest, in the pursuit of excellence.

As a modern scientist, I of course can find numerous points on which I differ with Aristotle’s philosophy. But on those two points, I agree with Aristotle.

Modern American society, especially the pop culture that so pervades most Americans’ lives, does not.

And, that is the central reason we are homeschooling: to enable our kids to develop their potential as rational beings to the fullest in an environment that values their intellectual efforts and achievements.

Is Philosophy Futile?

2009-09-02T17:24:00.000-07:00

The historian Richard Carrier offers some on-target criticisms of present-day philosophy in this interview with Ben Dench.

Richard’s central point is that the original idea of philosophy as providing a grand integrated view of life and reality has been replaced by a concept of philosophy that involves dealing with isolated puzzles and riddles :

In academia, philosophy is almost dead. What passes for philosophy now is little more than a fancy system of games and puzzles. Even the few exceptions (Singer, Nussbaum, Haack) are mostly divorced from the original goal of philosophy, which was to bring a coherent worldview to the common man, based on facts and reason, that would tell us how to better live our lives and cope with the world as-it-is. But that requires building and defending systems of thought, not arguing isolated specialized problems in isolated specialized fields; it requires figuring out what actually counts as progress and then rolling up their collective sleeves and working on that progress, not just pontificating willy nilly and turning philosophy books and journals into what the rest of us call history of philosophy; and so on. There are no Humes or Ayers or Aristotles or even Ciceros or Senecas anymore….

The idea of a coherent worldview, every part as well thought out as the rest, has become an alien concept. Philosophy as it was, is no more. And as far as most people are concerned, what philosophy is now, is all but useless to anyone, and even what's useful, is so dense and jargonized as to be unintelligible. That's why decreasing numbers even bother studying it….

Richard also points out that philosophers are focused on the obsolete, discredited views of long-dead philosophers in a way that never occurs in the natural sciences:

History of philosophy can save people time, but only if you actually use it that way. Yes, by learning the blind alleys, you can avoid them yourself. But this has a pernicious tendency in two unfortunate directions. On the one hand, many philosophers dismiss new ideas by immediately labeling them as something that was already refuted even when in fact the new ideas are relevantly different. I have a hell of a time trying to get philosophers to understand that I am both a mathematical realist and a mathematical nominalist, and not a mathematical Platonist in any sense of the term--they can't fathom the synthesis, because all they hear are the past-and-dead categories "mathematical realist," "mathematical nominalist," "mathematical Platonist" and they can't get their minds out of the ruts of the way these things were characterized and debated in the past. History of philosophy has made them worse philosophers, not better ones. On the other hand, many philosophers keep trying to think in the same ruts as past debates--we're still dividing ethical theories into Utilitarian, Kantian, and Virtue Ethics, even though that very division is antiquated and confining….

History of philosophy also seems to be starting to replace actual philosophy outright… Pick up any philosophy journal today and see the amount of citing and referencing and discussing of "other" philosophers that occupies their pages, in ratio to anything that actually gets done as far as making progress in human understanding, and you might become as alarmed as I am.

Philosophers shouldn't be acting like historians. They should let historians do that, just as scientists do. You don't see articles in science journals laden with elaborate discussions of the history of science before attempting to establish a finding. They just present their findings. If there are other current findings and theories on the books (not past refuted findings and theories, but still unrefuted ones), they will survey them and respond to them, even if that involves them in historical reporting. But they don't waste time on inessentials. They build on established and agreed findings and results. No botanist would say you have to read up on the history of all the mistakes and dead ends in 19th century botanical science to make progress in botany today. Philosophy should operate the same way. It just doesn't…

Finally, he suggests that contemporary philosophy is woefully lacking even in basic intellectual standards:

Once at a dinner I stopped an editor of a philosophy journal and showed him that he had published an article with a glaringly obvious logical flaw, so obvious in fact it should have been embarrassing to his entire publication and certainly should never have passed any credible peer review. He actually responded by saying, "You actually expect philosophy journals to prevent the publication of fallacious arguments?" I was flabbergasted. Several of us at the same table answered in unison, "Uh, yes, we do." What the hell else is peer review for?

The interview goes into much more detail, and covers numerous other topics ranging from technology to religious fundamentalism (I don’t agree with all of Richard’s other points in the interview: I think he is way too optimistic about technologically induced “telepathy,” for example).

If anything, I think Richard may have understated the problems with current academic philosophy and the radical difference between modern academic “philosophy” and philosophy as practiced by Locke or Aristotle.

In later posts, I'll discuss in more detail how and why modern philosophy is in the doldrums and what I think this means for us homeschoolers.

The root problem, I think, lies in philosophers' failure fully to confront the fact that modern philosophy arose as an attempt to deal with the collision between modern science and traditional religion in seventeenth-century Europe. The philosopher/anthropologist Ernest Gellner wrote on this at great detail (e.g., in his The Legitimation of Belief , The Devil in Modern Philosophy, and Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion), and I agree with Gellner that you cannot grasp modern philosophy without addressing broader issues involving science and religion.

Has conservatism failed?

2009-08-28T19:20:00.000-07:00

Keith Preston has a brief but insightful discussion of the history of American conservatism in a book review on the Takimag site.

His final paragraph sums up the ultimate futility of conservatism in the US during the last half century:

Indeed, given the phenomenal success of the “conservatives” in expanding military spending and military interventionism, and their phenomenal failure everything else, one might be tempted to argue that the former was the only issue that ever really mattered all along, and that the grassroots economic, fiscal, social, cultural, religious and patriotic conservatives who comprised the activist base and key voting blocks were, to use an ironic Leninist term, nothing more than “useful idiots.”

But read the whole essay – his case is convincing.

Is Teacher Training the Problem?

2009-08-25T03:03:00.000-07:00

Steve Sailer has a new blog entry, “The inanity of teacher training,” consisting largely of a lengthy quote from Heather MacDonald, that nicely illustrates part of the problem with the current “educational system” in the USA. It is also worth reading MacDonald’s essay in its entirety.

To pursue this in greater historical detail, see Kliebard's classic The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958, which manages to be both scholarly and remarkably readable.

However, I think that Sailer and MacDonald have only identified part of the problem: a century ago, many American parents did oppose the content-free curriculum.

But, today, this is actually what a large number of American parents want for their children. A "content-full" curriculum leads to kids who are "nerds," and many parents would rather have their children grow up to be illiterates than nerds.

Advocating knowledge for its own sake is a subversive stance in contemporary America.

From the Homeschooling Physicist---

2009-08-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

The main purpose of this blog is to offer information about our homeschooling approach and the resources we have found useful in our homeschooling experience.

As a Ph.D. physicist turned stay-at-home homeschooling dad, my experience as a homeschooling parent is somewhat unusual: I hope I can offer a helpful perspective on some aspects of homeschooling, especially in areas such as math and science where my own professional background may be especially relevant.

Of course, from time to time, I may also offer comments on politics, philosophy, religion, and anything else that strikes my fancy. I do not expect to blog a great deal about our personal lives.

I hope eventually to post systematic information on all the different books, workbooks, etc. that we have used in our homeschooling.

I will not necessarily be posting on a daily basis, but I do hope to post at least a few times each month.

The comment section is intended to be somewhat restricted -- i.e., a place to ask questions about my blog entries, to provide further information, or to politely offer different perspectives. I do not wish the comments section to become a free-for-all for debates on politics, religion, homeschooling styles, etc.: there are many other forums for such debates, and I just do not have the time to oversee such debates here. Any attempts to be nasty or abusive in the comments section will be ruthlessly deleted.

The blogs and links over to the right are various sites that I often find interesting: I do not agree with everything posted on all (or any) of these sites: if they post something outrageous, please blame them, not me. Those links include a Christian libertarian anarchist (Lew Rockwell), a self-described “godless liberal” (P. Z. Myers), and a wide range in between.

Free and open speech is a good thing.

Dave Miller in Sacramento