The above line is from one of my favorite comedy albums we owned when I was a kid. See, back in the Paleolithic, comedians made vinyl records, called albums, of their routines, and people would purchase them at ‘record store’ and then play them on their ‘record players’. Crazy, right?
So all the kids in my neighborhood, circa 1965, had memorized a set of Bill Cosby routines from this one record. He had a routine about the radio show The Lone Ranger (google it) that he, Bill Cosby, listened to when he was a kid. The Lone Ranger’s side kick was Tonto, the noble savage. The joke ran that the Lone Ranger and Tonto were surrounded by hostile Indians. The Lone Ranger asks: “What do we do now, Tonto?” to which Tonto replies: “What you mean ‘we’, Pale Face?”
Cracked me up. Watching a Science! video about our upcoming settlement of Mars – it’s a sure thing! Just a few details to work out! – I found myself asking Tonto’s question repeatedly: What you mean, ‘we’ have invested billions? What you mean ‘we’ know this or that about living on Mars? I haven’t spent a dime on getting to Mars; I don’t know much of anything about solving the near-endless list of fatal problems with living on Mars. There are certainly a person – Musk – and some governments that have spent a lot of money on projects connected to maybe some day sending people to Mars. Nobody yet has anything beyond early untested prototypes of what a Mars habitat might be. Nobody has yet grown any food on Mars, or survived a Van Allen Belt free Carrington Event on Mars, or mined any water, or produced any methane, or built anything there. And so on.
These are not the same.
Here’s my curmudgeonly take: nobody knows jack stuff about living on Mars. Some few people barely have a theory about how we get people there, how we get them down to the surface alive, and how they might live on Mars for a couple of years. THEORY. Which theory contains as much handwavium as your typical Star Trek episode.
Just as I say about the Drake Equation: while I would be as fascinated as any geek if any evidence of non-Terran life is discovered, the fact remains: no evidence of non-Terran life has yet to be discovered. Getting some bases on Mars where people could live something like normal healthy lives would cool – but there aren’t any yet. ‘We’ have dream and theories.
There are no probabilities for another incident of a unique case. There is no likelihood for success of something that has never been tried, and is not like anything that has been tried. ‘We’ just don’t know. Might it all work? Sure, it might. I hope it does. *
Maybe there will be a city on Mars in my lifetime. That would be cool! But I’m not holding my breath.
All this is just background, where I’m venting my frustration with what amounts to a cheap rhetorical trick, or, more directly put, a lie. A few days ago, I posted this comment to Sarah Hoyts blog:
I’m finishing up my first year as Headmaster of a small Catholic high school . I have a lot to learn, but one thing I have learned: start on Day 1 (next year!) hammering at the lies. I’m already planning out the first 4 days, call them orientation, of next year, and here are some of the points on my list:
Fearful people are easy to control. Do not be afraid! “Friends” who try to scare you by threats to call you names or shun you because you don’t agree with them are no real friends at all. You can do better than them.
Emotions are easy to manipulate. Beware appeals to feelings! Often, appeals to feelings contain the implied threat that you will be called names and shunned if you don’t agree.
People who try to hurry you up on making up your mind are trying to manipulate you. There’s no reason you, a high school student, needs to take a position RIGHT NOW on much of anything. It’s not only OK, but generally correct to say “I don’t know’ and resist demands you accept a position.
The worst lies are the ones that are almost true. These lies start out stating something true and sympathetic, then, bit by bit, move on to manipulative lies. Just because you agree that, say, poor people need help, doesn’t mean you have to agree with every proposed step to help them. You know you’re being manipulated when you are accused of hating poor people if you ask questions about how, exactly, the proposed action works.
And a bunch more. If I fail to help these kids understand what they’re up against, it won’t be for lack of trying.
I hereby add to this list: When you hear people saying ‘we’ know or have invested in or agree on something that you, personally, do not know, have not invested in, and do not necessarily agree with, you are being played. Honest people say WHO it is who (claims to) know, has invested, and agrees WITHOUT GETTING YOU INVOLVED IN IT BY IMPLICATION. This use of ‘we’ is emotional manipulation that is designed to discourage discussion.
That some people might have fallen into the very bad habit of using this ‘we’ construction more or less innocently doesn’t make it any less manipulative and evil.
For the record, as I’ve said elsewhere, what I’d want to see is a self-sustaining habitat anywhere on earth. It’s never been done. Then, if that works, up the difficulty factor – put it on, say, the floor of the Marianas Trench – much more hospitable than the surface of Mars, and very much closer. You know, just a proof of concept. The – the obvious one – throw one up on the moon. Again very much closer, and, most of all, very much like Mars. Save a couple trillion, work the bugs out on the moon. Then, with all that experience behind you (instead of in front of you) go for Mars! It would be cool! But just assuming it will all work, that all the issues can be overcome because we really want them to be overcome-able, is childish.
One of my brother-in-laws once said that without women, men tend to become animals, and without men, women tend to go insane. I think he said it more forcefully and colorfully, memory fails.
Chesterton visited America a few times, and in reading this book his overall affection for America and Americans comes through. But, being Chesterton, he also spots the inherent insanity lurking behind all the contradictions and optimism and progressive zeal. Here, the man who once said that modern women who had declared they would not be dictated to promptly ran off to become stenographers, takes on the early 20th century American feminism. Not politically correct, needless to say.
Here, he’s commenting on the weird combination of the rhetoric of freedom couple in the American mind with the worship of an inevitable and preordained future “progress”.
There is another cause of this strange servile disease in American democracy. It is to be found in American feminism, and feminist America is an entirely different thing from feminine America. I should say that the overwhelming majority of American girls laugh at their female politicians at least as much as the majority of American men despise their male politicians. But though the aggressive feminists are a minority, they are in this atmosphere which I have tried to analyse; the atmosphere in which there is a sort of sanctity about the minority. And it is this superstition of seriousness that constitutes the most solid obstacle and exception to the general and almost conventional pressure of public opinion. When a fad is frankly felt to be anti-national, as was Abolitionism before the Civil War, or Pro-Germanism in the Great War, or the suggestion of racial admixture in the South at all times, then the fad meets far less mercy than anywhere else in the world; it is snowed under and swept away. But when it does not thus directly challenge patriotism or popular ideas, a curious halo of hopeful solemnity surrounds it, merely because it is a fad, but above all if it is a feminine fad. The earnest lady-reformer who really utters a warning against the social evil of beer or buttons is seen to be walking clothed in light, like a prophetess. Perhaps it is something of the holy aureole which the East sees shining around an idiot.
But I think there is another explanation, feminine rather than feminist, and proceeding from normal women and not from abnormal idiots. It is something that involves an old controversy, but one upon which I have not, like so many politicians, changed my opinion. It concerns the particular fashion in which women tend to regard, or rather to disregard, the formal and legal rights of the citizen. In so far as this is a bias, it is a bias in the directly opposite direction from that now lightly alleged. There is a sort of underbred history going about, according to which women in the past have always been in the position of slaves. It is much more to the point to note that women have always been in the position of despots. They have been despotic because they ruled in an area where they had too much common sense to attempt to be constitutional. You cannot grant a constitution to a nursery; nor can babies assemble like barons and extort a Great Charter. Tommy cannot plead a Habeas Corpus against going to bed; and an infant cannot be tried by twelve other infants before he is put in the corner. And as there can be no laws or liberties in a nursery, the extension of feminism means that there shall be no more laws or liberties in a state than there are in a nursery. The woman does not really regard men as citizens but as children. She may, if she is a humanitarian, love all mankind; but she does not respect it. Still less does she respect its votes. Now a man must be very blind nowadays not to see that there is a danger of a sort of amateur science or pseudo-science being made the excuse for every trick of tyranny and interference. Anybody who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed. In other words, it is a danger of turning the policeman into a sort of benevolent burglar. Against this protests are already being made, and will increasingly be made, if men retain any instinct of independence or dignity at all. But to complain of the woman interfering in the home will always sound like complaining of the oyster intruding into the oyster-shell. To object that she has too much power over education will seem like objecting to a hen having too much to do with eggs. She has already been given an almost irresponsible power over a limited region in these things; and if that power is made infinite it will be even more irresponsible. If she adds to her own power in the family all these alien fads external to the family, her power will not only be irresponsible but insane. She will be something which may well be called a nightmare of the nursery; a mad mother. But the point is that she will be mad about other nurseries as well as her own, or possibly instead of her own. The results will be interesting; but at least it is certain that under this softening influence government of the people, by the people, for the people, will most assuredly perish from the earth.
But there is always another possibility. Hints of it may be noted here and there like muffled gongs of doom. The other day some people preaching some low trick or other, for running away from the glory of motherhood, were suddenly silenced in New York; by a voice of deep and democratic volume. The prigs who potter about the great plains are pygmies dancing round a sleeping giant. That which sleeps, so far as they are concerned, is the huge power of human unanimity and intolerance in the soul of America. At present the masses in the Middle West are indifferent to such fancies or faintly attracted by them, as fashions of culture from the great cities. But any day it may not be so; some lunatic may cut across their economic rights or their strange and buried religion; and then he will see something. He will find himself running like a nigger who has wronged a white woman or a man who has set the prairie on fire. He will see something which the politicians fan in its sleep and flatter with the name of the people, which many reactionaries have cursed with the name of the mob, but which in any case has had under its feet the crowns of many kings. It was said that the voice of the people is the voice of God; and this at least is certain, that it can be the voice of God to the wicked. And the last antics of their arrogance shall stiffen before something enormous, such as towers in the last words that Job heard out of the whirlwind; and a voice they never knew shall tell them that his name is Leviathan, and he is lord over all the children of pride.
I went over my memories of grade school here and high school here. Completing the set, I’ve already written about my college experiences here.
So that’s it. I’ve made an honest effort to lay out my formative experiences and biases. Now back to education history proper. In one week, school is over. Plan is to devote 3-4 hours a day to drafting the book, and 3-4 hours a day to preparing for next year. Having to herd cats for nine months has, I believe, kicked my focus and discipline up a notch. This time, for sure!
What, exactly, was high school for? I never did figure it out. Unlike grade school, you didn’t have all your classes with the same people, nor in the same classroom. This was an improvement – I guess? This was also the beginning of the great division, between the ‘smart’ kids who were going to go on to college, and the ‘not-so-smart’ kids who were just going to get a job somewhere. The smart kids took German and calculus and, of all things, speed writing (for all those notes you were going to be taking in college). The other kids took Spanish and wrapped intellectual challenges up with maybe Algebra.
I wasn’t self-aware enough to question any of this. I was a fearful, compliant kid. All my rebellion was merely passive-aggressive – I simply didn’t do the work. But I was too compliant to ever not show up or willfully fail. In fact, threats generally worked on me, to the extent that I would do what was needed to avoid further conflict. And I really did enjoy the extra curriculars, so it’s not true I got nothing out of high school – just that I got very little out of the classes.
In high school, I had a toehold in almost every camp but belonged to none of them. I was a jock, because I played basketball; I was a choir nerd; I was a drama nerd. And I was just a plain nerd nerd – speech team, took German and calc and chemistry – so, nerd. I even was a student government rep in my senior year. I ran on a whim, and won.
(My greatest triumph as a student government rep: I managed to get the dance committee to hire the Coasters for a dance. Yakity-yak, Charlie Brown – those guys. In 1976, they would do high school dances for a reasonable amount. In 1987, they made the R&R HoF. It was cool.)
With a couple of exceptions, I could BS my way through all the high school classes just as I had all my grade school classes. Exceptions: freshman math, where the teacher dinged me for never handing in any homework even though I aced all the tests; German, where you’ll be shocked to learn one needs to actually study, and chemistry, ditto. I carried a 3.1 GPA into senior year – snoozing my way to a B average. But while this was going on, I was in plays, on the basketball team, singing with the choir. My first quarter grades tended to be OK, as nothing extracurricular had started yet, so I was less distracted and tired. I didn’t do drama in the first semester, as it interfered with basketball. But I did the spring production all 4 years.
1st semester freshman year German I got I think a D. This was enough to get me in a little trouble, so I studied enough to pull a B from there on out. I didn’t miss any plays or hoops.
Chemistry is where I learned a trick that served me well for the rest of my schooling: write killer papers. I didn’t do much homework, so-so on the tests, but I wrote an A+ paper: how one could create stereoisomers of sugar that should taste and cook the same, but be undigestible by human enzymes, which are keyed to a particular stereoisomer out of many possibilities. I spelled out how the process might work, what were the challenges, and predicted great financial success to anyone who could solve the problems and bring this to market. And the idea would work for other foods as well.
(About a decade later, Olestra hit the market – the exact same idea, except applied to fats (oils). Of course, there is the problem of what your body will do with stuff it can’t digest. Olestra evidently gives people the runs. I don’t know if anybody has done this with sugar. I was 16, and read a lot of science on the side.)
Other than that – the occasional triumph when I either needed to dig myself out of a hole or some particular assignment got my attention – high school was an enormous, relentless waste of time.
My reading expanded. Around 6th grade, I started walking the few blocks to the public library after school. At first, I would use the card catalog to find where particular subjects were shelved, and just spend time browsing, reading a bit of this book or that, maybe check something out, maybe just sit on the floor reading. After a while, I knew pretty much where everything was shelved, so I’d just go to whatever section struck my fancy that afternoon. I read Charles Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, which I found fascinating as a grade schooler. It’s sensationalist nonsense, for the most part, but the bits he uses to build his case are good stuff. And I read a bunch of books on frogs – I knew the Latin names of all the common species. And so on.
This continued somewhat in high school. I read Plato, Lord of the Rings, everything Ray Bradbury had published up to that point, a ton of Azimov, some other Sci-Fi plus just random stuff.
There was no one to talk to about books. My oldest sister, who was almost 20 years older than me, read some – but she was out of the house by the time I was born. Other than that, in my family- not so much beyond the sports pages or school work.
I was better read at 16 than all but a couple of the teachers. I read LotR only because it was a book some of the (female) students were talking about. Didn’t like it much (my opinion of it improved over time) but at least I knew other people who had read it.
What, exactly, was high school supposed to do for a kid? As far as I could tell, if, instead of school, they’d have let me shoot hoops and spend time in the library, I’d have learned a hell of a lot more that I ever did attending classes. Add a mentor or two, who I could actually talk about some of this stuff with, and life would have been good! Instead, I grew more bored and lazy. Certainly, I was not the only one. I am grateful that, for the most part, the teachers left me alone. I didn’t cause any trouble for them.
Junior year, we did the pre-SATs. Life was different back then – nobody studied for the SAT, outside of maybe taking a practice test and doing a little bit of strategizing. At the beginning of senior year, I got pulled into the Dean’s office. He scolded me – what’s the guy with the highest scores in the school doing pulling a 3.1 GPA? He shamed me into trying. For one semester, I made myself try. Didn’t quite get straight As, because I could not quite hide my contempt for Speed Writing, and silly woman who taught California History was so boring and mechanical I struggled to keep up a façade of interest.
Two stories: our speed writing teacher was a cute young thing managing a classroom full of seniors, many of whom were jocks. Her management technique was to walk into the classroom and, if we were goofing (which we almost always were) she’d simply start dictating. There would be a mad scramble while everybody got their notebooks out. Once silence fell, she would continue.
I’m a decent mimic. One day, she tries this trick. “Dear Sirs: We have several openings…” Scramble to get notebooks out, pause for silence. I, mimicking her voice, continue: “…in our walls.” One long beat – I think half the class wrote that down – and then pandemonium. It took what felt like several minutes to get people back on track.
I sat there, looking at my desk, fighting to keep a smile off my face. She knew it was me, of course. I never missed a class, handed in all the work, aced all the tests – and she gave me a B.
The California History teacher was a walking coma. Just the most droning, unimaginative teacher I’ve ever had. She would assign readings, then her lectures were just stuff from the readings. Well, I could read just fine, so I tended to tune out in class, just listening with half an ear to hear if she ever deviated from the book. She rarely did – and when she did, I wrote it down.
So again, I never miss a class or an assignment, ace all the tests – and got a B. Why? Once, she gave a test on which was a question about something that was not in the book nor had she discussed it in class. I KNEW that was true, BECAUSE I was paying attention and reading the stupid book. So, my answer to the question was something like: “was not in the book nor discussed in class.” Which was the simple truth. But she took it as insubordination, and knocked me down a grade.
By the next semester, I had learned my lesson. No more trying to please a bunch of mindless mediocrities. I still got around an A average, despite skating. But I was fed up. The key to getting an A was compliance. Both those teachers knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I knew the material, possibly better than they did. But that’s not an A if you don’t do as you’re told or show up the teacher.
There was a box on the Pre-SATs asking if you wanted your scores sent out to interested colleges. I checked it, and got a nice cardboard box full of materials. In the pile was materials from St. John’s College. One side of the envelope was a pencil drawing of a rhinoceros. All my contemporaries at St. John’s remember that envelope fondly – what the ? A rhino? Funky-cool.
Inside the package the Great Books Program was described – read books and talk about it with other people who read the same books!?! Get out! So I applied, got in – and that was effectively the end of high school for me.
I had gotten through 12 years of schooling – about 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 35 weeks a year for 12 years, or 14,700 HOURS of instruction – at which I was at least moderately successful by the standards of the teachers. Applying the 10,000 hours rule, where 10,000 hours of work is needed to become a master at anything, I should have been a master at schooling, a master and a half, even! Certainly, if I’d have spent any significant fraction of those hours working with a tutor studying a foreign language, or a musical instrument, or a craft, or, really anything, I would be deeply disappointed if were not at least deeply competent.
For example, to become proficient at the piano, it is generally said to require about 30 minutes of practice per day over about 5 years – not concert pianist level, but good enough that you would be confident proclaiming that you played the piano. This is (almost) regardless of talent – less than a thousand hours of practice, and you’re reasonable competent. Similar numbers apply to a wide variety of subjects and skills.
So, at what, exactly, did 12 years of schooling render me a master? Note that I got good grades for the most part, such that, by the express standards of the school, I was doing well. But at what? It took me a couple weeks, max, to learn to read; I typically got whatever math was being taught on the first pass. I didn’t really learn to write very well until my 20s, but I wrote well enough to crank out killer papers as needed; all the grammar, structure, and vocabulary I got from reading. I’ve gotten ‘B’s in German and can’t remember 6 German words.
And so on. Study skills? You must be joking. I finally sort of figured out how to study halfway through my junior year in college. I entered college without even a basic idea of what was required to succeed.
We demand a VAST investment of time from students, enough time to master any number of skills and subject, in school. Typically, students don’t master anything. Consider: how much time did you spend doing algebra? Are you any good at it? Generally, once you’re out of school, you’ll remember how to do something like this: Factor
only if your job requires you to know this. Otherwise – and this is super easy algebra – you are unlikely to remember how to do it. And so on, for dozens of other subjects you had to take, because taking them was SO IMPORTANT for your intellectual development, certainly MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than whatever silly things you want to spend your time doing.
What did you and I mastered through 12+ years of schooling? We learned that
Whatever they tell you to do is much more valuable than anything you might want to do
Failure to comply is failure
What you want to master is insignificant
What you have already mastered is irrelevant
Your time belongs to the school
Your will belongs to the school
Your life belongs to the school
Stay with your assigned herd
As Socrates put it: once you start paying teachers, the easy will become difficult, and the quickly learned, long.
Yard Sale of the Mind 