A Romney win: 53 to 47 in the popular vote; 295 to 243 in the Electoral College.
I give Romney the obvious states plus Colorado, Ohio, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
I’m a reluctant Romney supporter: I favored Ron Paul in the primaries, and I am doubtful that Romney and Ryan understand the magnitude of the task they face – an unsound monetary system, a “dependency society” that cannot possibly survive long-term, an over-extended system of global military and geopolitical commitments, a culture vehemently opposed to serious learning, a chattering class committed to fads ranging from “Waiting for Superman” to catastrophic climate change (yes, as a physicist, I know that the globe has warmed, but it is an open scientific question as to how large future warming will be), etc.
I’m not sure the Governor and the Congressman have the courage and insight to turn this around, much less the political skill to bring the country with them.
I do wish Romney the best, if he wins, just as I sincerely wished Obama the best when he won.
So, if I am not a fierce Romney partisan, why do I think he will dramatically outperform the polls?
Four reasons:
Turnout and the polls: the most important reason. I’ve followed the debates from Fox to MSNBC, and, as a guy who loves the number-crunching game (I had a great time in 2000 running the numerical extrapolations in my head and seeing that the networks were clearly wrong both when they called the election for Gore and when they called it for Bush – this really is my idea of fun!), I think that the skeptics have the better case: I.e., the polls seem to be substantially over-weighting Democrats.
Enthusiasm. Both the polls and the anecdotal reportage from journalists, along with my own personal observations, show a lot more enthusiasm for the GOP. It’s hugely different from ’08: I only talked to one acquaintance in ’08 who was enthusiastic for McCain.
Late deciders. When an incumbent has trouble getting to fifty percent in the polls, common sense and historical experience suggest that late deciders (who are these people?) are not likely to discover that they really do like the incumbent after being unable to decide for four years.
The Bradley effect. For some reason, a small number of voters seem to like to tell pollsters that they are going to vote for a black guy and then do the opposite (the “effect” is named for what happened to the black Democratic candidate for governor out here in California, Tom Bradley, back in the ’80s). This seems bizarre to me, but it does seem to happen.
The last two effects are no doubt pretty small this year – there are, after all, few late deciders. And, enthusiasm can be grossly misleading: after all, McGovern had lots of enthusiasm and “Tricky Dick” Nixon had very little – I remember it well.
So, in the end, it is the issue of turn-out models, as assumed in the polls, versus who really turns out tomorrow.
And, while those who are skeptical of the polls seem, to me, to have the stronger statistical arguments, no one really knows.
A lot of people will turn out to be really wrong, including, perhaps, me.
(However, if I am right, I wonder if the New York Times will fire Nate Silver and hire me!)
I predict the GOP will pick up three seats in the Senate, which will tie the upper house, with the new Vice-President holding the tie-breaking vote. I.e., I think Romney will have short coattails.
And, I think the GOP will lose five seats in the House – the blowout election in 2010 blew in some weak winners, a few of whom are likely to lose tomorrow.
After we find out whose predictions are right and whose are wrong, we will face the real problems: Bernanke has printed a huge amount of money that should ignite a firestorm of inflation when the recovery really starts moving. A robust recovery will help the deficit situation a bit, but there are structural problems that are pushing the federal government towards bankruptcy – and, unfortunately, the entire world monetary, financial, and economic systems are closely tied to the securities (i.e., debt) issued by the United States government.
And, underlying it all, the culture: a century of frivolity, irresponsibility, and unbelievable mendacity not just in the popular culture but especially among the intellectuals – the “serious” media, the universities, the “social scientists,” etc.
If Romney wins, he has not only my best wishes but also my condolences. He may have taken on an impossible task.
I hope he will prove me wrong.
Showing posts with label American culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American culture. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Thursday, March 18, 2010
The World We Have Lost
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.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?
Alternatively, we can decide that the idea of the teenager is one that has outlived its usefulness, then move on to other possibilities
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:
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.
- 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?
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.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The End of American Hegemony?
Bye-Bye, Copenhagen and Obama; Hello, Beijing!
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:
Thompson summed up the President’s experience by declaring:
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.
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.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Why Taking Classes is a Lousy Way to Learn
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.
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.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Are Homeschooled Kids Too Dependent?
Chinese vs. American Perspectives
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:
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:
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.
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")…Does the fact that Chinese have “less expectations of autonomy” than Americans imply that Chinese kids are more “dependent” than American kids?
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).
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 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.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
A Japanese Musician on Selling Our Kids Short
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:
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.
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….Indeed.
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.
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.
Monday, September 7, 2009
What Barack Should Tell the Schoolkids
Here’s what President Obama should tell the schoolkids on Tuesday if he really wants to help solve the problems in American education:
Of course, that kind of courage would require that Barack have a backbone. And there is no evidence that he does.
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.”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.
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
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
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.
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.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
The Solution to Global Warming?
“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.
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.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Why We Are Homeschooling
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.
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.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Has conservatism failed?
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:
But read the whole essay – his case is convincing.
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.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Is Teacher Training the Problem?
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.
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.
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