I Love the James Webb Telescope

…because I like being right. What I’m right about is how the Science! is settled right up until people get a better good look at, well, just about anything. As I point out here, among many other places, it’s a safe bet that things anyone has only seen from hundreds of millions of miles away will look different when seen from ‘only’ a million miles away, or that something seen only through the then-current gizmos will look a lot different when seen through the latest and greatest gizmos.

It seems the JWST has seen things that do not comport well with current theory. While scientists may be shocked to imagine their precious theories are not exactly right, I sure am not.

The humor here, at least for me, and the single greatest cautionary tale for anyone ‘following the science’ is how stone cold certain scientists are about their theories right up until they’re overthrown, and then how those same scientists get just as certain of the new theories they’ve cooked up to explain the new observations. After a brief period of fluster, rarely is the shift from Theory A to Theory B even acknowledged to have taken place. Rather, a serene, confident calm descends on the field – of course our Theory B is right! Rince and repeat – this is the real history of science.*

The James Webb doing its thing.

So ‘we’ – a handful of astrophysicists and related experts – have these way-cool theories about how old the universe is, how it formed, what the rules must have been 13+ billion years ago. And oops! they don’t seem to cover the new observations. Step 1: tinker under the hood. Maybe we just need a slight tune-up here or there to make it all better. Step 2: if the tune-up doesn’t get it done, then move on to finding the one problem child in the current theory we need to modify. Step 3: come up with an effectively new theory. Step 4: however the earlier steps were resolved, act as if nothing really happened, and trumpet the modified or new theory as The Science with as much confidence and certainty as the old theory was until recently proclaimed.

The educated layman should note that these cosmological theories are exactly the kinds of theories ripe for overthrow: they have no practical applications and so will never get practically tested, they are based on observations of extremely distant phenomena using more or less sophisticated yet necessarily limited tools, they are Russian dolls of nested assumptions.

This last point bears expansion. To take one case: the redshift. The concept of a wavelength shift due to the relative motion of the source and receiver is solid, testable science. So the idea that stars and galaxies are moving relative to us because the light coming from them is redshifted (or blue-shifted) is sound – but it should be noted, one step removed from direct observation. Now lay on top of that stellar and galactic motion Hubble’s Law. This is the idea that speed corresponds to distance, such that the more redshifted the light from a galaxy appears to us, the farther away it is. Here’s the catch – Hubble’s Law is only testable through independent observation for a small subset of comparatively near objects. Exactly where this Law is most applied – very distant objects – it is least testable, as in usually completely untestable. But the entire edifice of current theory stands upon it.

Scientists then back into age: that object is far away from us (using Hubble’s Law) moving at some ‘known’ (through the redshift) speed, so math says that what we’re seeing is really old – it has taken some number of billions of years for the light to come to us from that distance.

Now, all of this is results from perfectly sound logic, and maybe it’s exactly right, but it should be kept in mind that it stands on a heck of a whole lot of assumptions not backed by tests or observations. The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Milky Way and will get here in about a billion years. ‘We’ (certain specialists) ‘know’ this, because ‘we’ ‘know’ the distance between the galaxies (using ‘Standard Candles‘, I think) and because of the blue shift in the spectrum of the Andromeda Galaxy as observed from earth. (If there is some other, independent, way to reach this conclusion, I am not aware of it. I’m not really very up-to-date on this stuff, so please correct me.)

All of this makes sense. But so does phlogiston, as does the idea that the Earth is stationary. More to the point, so does the idea that planets develop in pretty much the orbits we see them in today. Problem is, phlogiston isn’t real, the earth does move, and planets seem to form in one orbit and then get moved into other orbits or even get ejected from their systems of origin. The Music of the Spheres evidently modulates across any number of keys.

These are three – phlogiston, stationary earth, and formation of planets – of many examples where following the science meant accepting theories that have since been proven wrong. They all three make a lot of sense. All three have decent sized mountains of evidence in their favor. Yet all three have been overthrown by contrary evidence – evidence you needed better equipment, better logic, or both to obtain.

So, hurray for the Webb! I am and have long been a huge fan. It is exceeding my wildest hopes, so far, by making a lot of scientists sweat a little. I love cosmology because, being completely useless, it is almost completely apolitical. Also, being completely useless, it will never get tested by application, so will remain a Wild West of sorts as far as theorizing goes. What’s a decade or more late and 300+% cost overruns compared to this level of fun?

* as opposed to technology. Once science becomes applied, people really do gain a degree of confidence not available in ‘pure’ science. The melting point of iron is well-established, not so much by scientists but by the millions of technicians who routinely melt iron. We have reached this point of science applied to real-life challenges in many fields, such that the basic, useful facts of those fields are established with a high degree of confidence: chemistry, metallurgy, electronics, various engineering fields, and so on. But in many fields, the less cautious of the practitioners overreach: we really don’t know much about genetic engineering, not in the sense that a good engineer knows that his bridge will stand up, based on centuries of his peers building such bridges. Geneticists may be able to do a wide range of interesting things in a consistent and repeatable manner – but centuries of repeatable successes in the real world are still centuries out. And all this applied science is on way WAY firmer footing than anything a cosmologist or astrophysicist theorizes about.

Micro-aside: Two Pieces of the Impedimenta

Promise I’ll get back to more entertaining (insofar as my whining about Science! and education can be considered entertaining) topics soon. For now, found these two long-forgotten items in the massive pile of stuff from storage:

Copywrite 1963.

A friend did the calligraphy of the title. The rest was a much younger (20?) me doing my best to follow the rules and guidelines of the book above. Note that the staves are drawn freehand in ink with a staff nib. Unfortunately, the paper clip rusted and something wet got on the first page. The other 8 pages are still good.

It’s like being a master buggy whip maker. I can do perfectly useable and sometimes even attractive music script. But so can MuseScore, in about 5% of the time, and you can easily edit MuseScore. Note so much with the editing of ink on paper.

I’m a dinosaur in so many ways.

Addendum: The very next thing in the pile was this:

And I of course demanded, “Rock My Pancreas 8 to the Bar!” My wife was standing right there. Eyes rolled hard.

Down Day Wednesday, and Thanks

First off – thanks to all my readers and subscribers. You guys are the best! I started writing this blog about 13 years ago with no expectation anyone would ever read it, and I’ve done effectively no promotion. Yet here you are! I am very grateful to you all for reading and commenting on my modest scribblings. So go have a great Thanksgiving tomorrow, and hug the ones you love.

Back to the mundane. I’ll get back to Science! and education history after the holiday as time permits. Until then, more boring updates.

On the one hand, I’ve been thinking about writing a lot lately. This has something to do with unpacking hundreds of books, and coming across old stories and one novel that I started 20-ish years ago. That’s been fun and distracting from…

On the other hand, we’ve been trying to unpack now for 2 months, but due to a confluence of forces, chief of which is that my beloved has to care for her mom most days, and babysits grandkids most of the other days (or both elder and child care on the same day – yikes!) and I’m working a lot of hours trying to keep the wheels on at school. Also, there was a good bit of unfinished painting in a couple rooms, meaning we could not yet unpack into them, and we’ve only recently gotten all our stuff out of storage (and into the garage and piles of boxes throughout the house). 2 months in, and we’re not close to halfway settled yet.

This – mountains of boxes and other impedimenta that I need to find a home for or get rid of – does not make me happy.

But it would be totally ungrateful to whine, when we live on beautiful land in a beautiful place! Eventually, it will be so nice! Even now, I can take a walk around the property and just soak up the pretty whenever I need to.

Speaking of which, here is the view out the window of the spare bedroom that doubles as my office:

If the trees and plants were not there, this would be a view across a lovely little valley. But even as it is, it’s pretty nice. The pizza oven goes behind the bricks where the pile of oak trimmings now sit, BTW.

As I sit at my desk, to my left…

And to my right:

A couple of shelves on the tall bookcase above are as much of my education history library that I’ve unpacked so far. I expect my kids will burn it upon my death – wouldn’t blame them a bit. Not what anyone would call gripping reading. I moved all the SF&F to a bookcase in the other room. Note that this represents an all but imperceptible dent in the mountain of boxes of books yet to unpack.

But let’s not bicker about who will be unpacking what – this is a happy occasion! I’ve run out of places to stick bookcases before I’ve run out of bookcases, and our supply of bookcases is not adequate for our supply of books. We had maybe 25 boxes stored in the garage at our last place, which, in 27 years, we never got around to unpacking. (The kids who went to Classical schools did raid them for school books. That’s the nice thing about a Classical education – your schools books never go out of date. A Loeb or Plato or Dante etc., have a long half-life). I don’t want that to happen here.

I need to build in some highly unusual cases around the windows in the living room, maybe foist off one or two of the existing bookcases into MIL’s room (which so far I have considered off limits). And, yes, I’m purging books as I go – filled maybe one box of rejects out of the dozen or so boxes unpacked so far.

Two questions for the groundlings:

1. Lots and lots of issues of SF&F Magazine, Asimov’s, and Analog, maybe two or three good sized shelves’s worth – toss ’em? I only keep them to remind me of what kind of stories magazines buy, or rather bought between 5 and 35 years ago…
2. Devotional literature. I am not a devotional lit fan. Lives of the saints, writings of the early Church Fathers, other church history, sure – but I’ve almost never gone to the stacks saying, “I could use a good devotional book right about now.” Nope. Scripture, of course, and some biographies and autobiographies of the saints, and writings of the saints – those fill my needs. BUT – of course I feel a little hesitant to toss out the DOZENS of more purely devotional books that have somehow accreted on my shelves… Toss ’em?

Now to go prep the meats for tomorrow’s feast.

Monday Update: That Was the Era The Was

On Saturday, it rained. We also emptied out the last of our storage units in the Bay Area and drove the last of the junk our precious belongings the 90 or so miles up to our new place in the Sierra foothills. 18 months ago, when we moved out of our home of 27 years, we gradually filled three storage units and one of those Pods with our stuff. Then we took 15 months to find our new home. Now, today, after we emptied the U-Haul van, we’ve severed the last merely material links we have with the area we lived in for 37 years.

Feels a little weird.

We have a few books:

In addition to the ones we’ve already unloaded, one pile of boxes of books…

…and another…

…and some more…

…and a few more, with a bonus plastic tub of cables and the top of one of my classic KRK V-8 monitor speakers.

Did I mention this isn’t all of the books? Then, there are some bookcases – these, along with the half a dozen or so I’ve already moved inside, fell well short of being enough to hold our books:

I made almost all of these. I like the style of the one in front, but the size is lass than optimal. The tall one in the middle – there are two more just like it – is more efficient, but not as aesthetically pleasing to me, at least.

Another view of six of them. I made all of these. There are three more in the room where I’m typing this – one of the tall style and two variations on the shorter ones. Plus a nice one my late son made in our bedroom, and others scattered around the house. And they are not enough!

This house is very poorly designed from a bookcase (and therefore book) perspective: large low windows and few expanses of empty walls make it a challenge to fit very many of any kind of bookcase in here.

Longer term, I’ll probably build a bunch of built-in bookcases. I suppose I could get rid of some books – nah, that’s crazy talk!

Now my wife and I live amid a jungle of boxes. Books are not the only thing we have a massive amount of. It all will not fit here. We have the extra-large garage, an adjoining open thing I call the barn – it’s sort of a glorified carport, but huge – and a workshop, and a house over 1,000 square feet smaller than the one we moved out of. But that’s not enough room!

We need to simplify and radically downsize. That takes both physical and emotional energy, and time. I anticipate we will be living amidst the boxes for years to come.

Instead of worrying about that, I’m going to build more stuff! Woohoo! Here, for example, are some sketches of a rough idea for a Marian shrine for someplace TBD on the property:

Barrel vaults are fun! Thought about doing a gothic cross vault – a small one! – but I’d likely need to cut bricks into quarters to make them small enough to get the curves right, plus build some elaborate forms to support the arches and vault, and cut a bunch of bricks into custom shapes, and – nah. Maybe next time…

This would all be a lot more fun if I weren’t also getting older. 65, and lifting boxes of books gets old fast. I am determined to wear out before I rust.

How Many Trees? Understanding Science 101, part 3

Continued from here and here. First off, let’s specify a reason for this count, which is also the reason for the particular specifications below: we are an emergency preparedness team only interested in trees that could conceivably cause trouble in an emergency by, for example, falling on a house or a car. Or, if we want to get all apocalyptic, trees that are big enough to be burned for fuel (which is why we want to exclude banana trees – I suspect they don’t burn too well). For these or some other reason, we have settled on the definitions below.

Let’s agree, for now, on the definition of ‘tree’ that we’ve been using so far:

a tree is defined as a plant with bark that is at least 4″ in diameter when measured 18″ off the ground.

And the definition of a block as defined by reader rimgrund362ec8fa03:

 [A] block [is defined] as being bordered along the centers of the streets that define it. And a tree is in the block if the trunk is entirely inside the block as defined. If your counters encounter a tree growing in the street, notify the public works department and have them remove it before continuing the count.

We are just hoping these streets don’t have medians with trees planted in them, as do several of the streets around here. Rather than having the city taxpayers pay both to have them planted and cared for and then removed, we will simply stipulate that any such median trees are to be ignored for the purpose of this exercise.

We recognize that, yes, this definition excludes banana trees, small trees (less than 18″ tall), and skinny trees (less than 4″ in diameter). We have agreed, for now, to make note of border cases, such as cypress trees bent to the ground by the wind, or giant suckers growing from roots, on the assumption that a) they are unlikely in the block of interest, and b) even if there are a few, it’s probably not going to be material. But the counters have been instructed to note oddities, if any, such as these.

So we get our 10, say, teams together. Let’s stipulate that each team consists of 3 ‘researchers’: one who primarily keeps records, and 2 who make measurements. I envision somebody with a clipboard (or computer) and two people with measuring tools: an 18″ stick, and a set of calipers set to 4″.

Go! Each team gets to decide where to start. Team A starts at one corner, and immediately counts 10 trees that are clearly upon inspection much bigger than the lower limits: towering maples, oaks, and pines. They also spot the crowns of what they can only assume are large trees – in the backyards of several homes.

Sooo – Team A can either decide that those backyard trees are so obviously large that they should count them, full stop. OR they could go knock on the door, hope somebody is home, and ask permission to go in the backyard for a closer inspection. OR they could ask the owners how many large trees they have in their backyard, and use that number. OR they could resort to aerial pictures, or maybe just fly a drone over the block, and count the trees based on their crowns…

OR maybe knock on every door, hope at least a few people let them into their backyards, count the trees in those backyards by hand – and then average the counts, and use that average to estimate the number of trees in the backyards they could not get into. They will probably discover that some of the crowns they spotted from the street are in fact two or more similar trees growing close together, or that there are a number of trees as specified that failed to tower over the roof of the house and thus were invisible from the street. The ‘counting visible crowns of trees from the street’ is probably not going to yield acceptable numbers.

OR leave an official looking notice in every mailbox, asking for permission to enter each backyard, then schedule the counting over the next few weeks. And only THEN, after getting as many hand counts in as many backyards as possible in that timeframe, average the counts and multiply by the number of backyards they didn’t get into…

I hope it’s clear that, assuming the teams are largely independent, whatever plan Team A chooses to follow, Teams B through J are unlikely to follow the same approach. They could also report back to the lead researcher with their problems, and a centralized coordinated solution could be reached. Then we must hope that this one consistent approach is used consistently without material error.

Then there’s the coverage issues: how does each team make sure they really looked everywhere, and didn’t just skip (or double count) a bunch of trees? There are more or less standard approaches – a map with a grid on it such that each team is charged to count the trees within each much smaller grid, and then add them up. But this brings us back to some of the problems we discussed when defining a block: how do we make sure a tree that straddles a gridline gets counted once and only once?

And so on. Even assuming all teams agree to each definition and rules (and each understand them the same way!), we are still looking at a situation where it would be a minor miracle if any two counts agreed with each other.

Tree?

This is also true if there’s only one team that honestly repeats the exercise over time. Even the same people trying to do the same job the same way are unlikely to get the same results. For just one example: if the team chooses any of the approaches that require estimating the trees in backyards to which they have not gotten access, it will make a difference if they get exactly the same people to let them in each time they do the count. And, of course, over time, people plant and cut down trees. Trees die, small trees become larger.

Another thing that needs to be defined in this context: material. If there are hundreds of trees on this block (according to our arbitrary definition of ‘tree’), how much does it matter if we miss one? 10? 100? What if there are only 20 trees on the block? Now missing one tree is a 5% error. Is that immaterial? So imagine all 10 teams come back, and their counts are all within 15% of each other. Good enough? 20%? One factor, probably the main one, will be what we’re using the numbers *for*. The most common thing to do is to simply assume the ‘real’ count is somewhere in the middle, say the average. But how would we check that? Perhaps all 10 counts are low, due to an unknown systemic problem. Then the highest estimate is the closest to the ‘real’ count. Or maybe the other way around. How would you know, or figure it out?

The point here: even the most systematic, focused, and unbiased counters are unlikely to get the same counts, either in groups all at once, or as a single team over time. And remember the counts, however accurate or not, are still based on arbitrary assumptions that need to be understood if the numbers are to be used outside the teams doing the counting.

Next: can we count on the teams being skillful, honest, and unbiased? How?

How Many Trees? Understanding Science 101, part 2

Continuing this discussion. Thanks to those who have read and commented on the last post.

Let’s circle back to the questions one needs to answer before even starting to count trees. How about this one?

1. Why are we counting trees?

If we don’t spell out what we are trying to achieve by counting a particular set of trees, our answers to the other questions will appear completely arbitrary. Recall our definition of a tree:

a tree is defined as a plant with bark that is at least 4″ in diameter when measured 18″ off the ground.

This definition excludes, among other things:

One kind of grass tree

• banana trees
• bonsai trees
• trees 3.5″ in diameter 18″ above the ground
• trees less than 18″ tall
• Smaller Japanese maple trees

…and on and on. Also, this definition is ambiguous in some cases:

• are palm trees considered trees?
• how about grass trees? (about 30 Australian species that are called trees, and kind of look like trees…)
• is a sucker – a secondary growth out of the base or roots of a larger tree – counted separately or not?

…and so on. I am drawing your attention to two facts about the very roots of this tree-counting business:

• The definitions and rules (and procedures, and validations processes, and team selection process and so on) are, essentially, arbitrary. The people behind the counting effort get to make them up, pretty much, to achieve whatever end they have in mind.
• There are any number of reasonable objections or counter definitions to these procedures and definitions. More generally, people may be, and probably would be, baffled by the details. So a willowy 10′ tree is not a tree because its trunk is under 4″ in diameter 18″ off the ground? What? That’s a tree! You’re playing games!

So now imagine hearing, from a guy in a lab coat: there are exactly 438 trees on this suburban block. Well? How many trees, in your opinion, are on that block? Anything else you’d like to know before committing to a number?

Next, we’ll deal with the physical process of counting trees.

How Many Trees? Understanding Science 101, part 1

(I wish Mike Flynn was still with us! His feedback on the following would be appreciated. RIP, Mike!)

The following hypothetical is both a test and lesson in how science works – when it works.

Suppose a grant exists to pay people to count the tree in certain suburban blocks. Teams are assembled to do the counting. First point: if you think this an easy or trivial project, you really don’t get science at all – lucky for you, you are in the condition that this essay is trying to help!

Everybody agree that that’s a tree right there?

Let’s list some of the questions anyone given this task would need to know before beginning to count trees:

1. What counts as a tree?
2. What are the limits of suburban block?

Slightly more advanced:

1. What about trees on the border? Do we count them if they hang into the block, or are mostly in the block, ignore them if they are not entirely in the block, or what?
2. Are the streets that border the block included? There may be trees in the medians, do we count those?
3. Over what timeframe is the counting to be done? Trees grow and die, such that if we take much time on this, there’s a good chance a tree we counted at the beginning will be dead before we reach the end.

Can you think of any more? Good scientist spend a lot of time getting questions like this very clear before they ever get started.

Next, let’s attempt to answer the first two questions in order:

1. For purposes of this study, perhaps a tree is defined as a plant with bark that is at least 4″ in diameter when measured 18″ off the ground.

Sound good? The bark specification rules out banana trees and – palm trees? Do they have bark? It appears we need a definition of ‘bark’ as well, or another definition of ‘tree’ that doesn’t rely on ‘bark’ as a distinguishing characteristic.

We also now know that we’re not counting anything under 18″ tall, because we won’t be able to measure its diameter as specified above. So a cypress tree bent to the ground will not count as a tree if the trunk does not at some point get 18″ off the ground. And then, if it did, we’d be measuring it sideways – is that OK?

Note also that this definition excludes all the young trees – a 10′ tall oak or maple tree might be less than 4″ in diameter 18″ off the ground – and I’m thinking most people would still call it a tree. But not us. Is that really what we mean to do?

On a slope, are we measuring the 18″ height from the low side, the high side, or the middle, or averaging, or what? Plus, some trees have a bit of an oval cross section. Do we measure diameter once one way, then again at 90 degrees from the first measurement? Take the longer, the shorter, or the average?

1. The block is defined as the area included within four specific intersecting streets. The streets and their medians are excluded from this count. Trees must be completely within the block as defined above to be counted.

Let’s pause here. I hope it’s clear that if you sent out 10 teams to count the trees in a specified block before getting very clear on at least those first two questions, you are most likely going to get 10 different counts. I mean, out here in California, one is likely to come across little tiny ‘volunteer’ trees everywhere. A 6″ tall oak is still an oak tree, right? And privet – a tree? If so, how many trees are in a privet hedge? And so on.

But what might not be clear is that, even if we answer the first two questions in detail to everyone’s satisfaction, we’re still likely to get as many different counts as there are teams doing the counting. We’ll get there in part 2.

Goofy Update: Books and Vermin

1. Our new property is lousy with deer. As with all vermin – and deer are lovely, elegant vermin – deer earn that name by making pests of themselves in places they should not be. I have no problems with critters that stay away from my stuff. I’m fine with rats and mice, even, as long as they keep away from me and, preferably, near snakes and cats and owls and such, where they could serve a useful role in the food chain.

Maybe 30′ away, next to the driveway this morning. Not worried that I stopped to take his picture.

Our land used to be part of an orchard in the distant past, and still has some producing apple trees. Ugly, overgrown apple trees producing mostly smallish apples. My wife has been picking some, and making dried apple rings and apple cake, so they can be eaten. So sometime in the next couple months, I’ll trim them up and see if we can improve the quality and quantity of their yield. Or it will be time to get Biblical on them, and chop them down and burn them. There may even be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

And there is a persimmon tree, and a couple pears. These all are evidently candy to deer. I have a legitimate interest in keeping the deer out.

Instead, I wake up this morning and a young buck is sauntering past my car maybe 20′ from the house. This was an improvement over yesterday, where a little deer convention was taking place in the front yard. Two bucks, a doe and a faun were hanging out. I came out to leave, and stood maybe 50 feet from the little herd.

I attempted to reason with them, to no avail. “Hey!” I reminded them, “I am the apex predator around here, and YOU are made of meat!” They looked at me with their big, beautiful eyes, impassive. So I took a couple steps towards them and waved my arms. The faun, about 1/2 grown, eventually hustled down the hillside; the older deer just looked at me, then casually strolled off after it.

This is not the right dynamic. More respect should be shown. Not sure what the rules are for just popping one of them. (I own not the appropriate boom stick nor do have much confidence in my aim nor do I know how to dress a deer – but, motivated, I could solve all that.) I’m sure whipping up some Bambi’s Mom stew might make the point a little better.

Until then, we need a la dder to get to most of the fruit, which is usually picked clean, I’m sure coincidentally, to about as high as a deer can reach on its hind legs.

2. Books. Sheesh. As mentioned, I started unpacking the book boxes labeled Important Now, and have a 4′ wide lineup along the back of the desk of the ones I really should be reading. The overflow fills several bookshelves – and this is by no means all of the dead tree editions, not to mention the dozens more books in electronic format. All these are related to my education history tome, the itch to write which is growing daily.

AND – I ordered a bunch more, because of course I did. More on them later. I also gave $5 to archives.org, since I have downloaded dozens of otherwise expensive/ impossible to find books from that site.

Now to find time. But I have this more than full time job.

3. Bought a little red trailer from Harbor Freight to use with the riding mower. (or “lawn tractor” – suuuure.)

Sharp eyes will notice the large number of bolts evident in this picture. Yep. Reviews say it takes a least an hour to put this thing together, what with the multiple pieces of sheet metal and the dozens of bolts, washers, and nuts. As long as one doesn’t value one’s own time, it was cheap! It’s sitting in pieces right now in the barn-like thing, awaiting the next time I have some daylight and an hour to kill.

Once assembled, we can load up the chainsaws, the safety gear, and bags or boxes to put apples in, drive down the hill to the trees and get to work – and then be able to drive apples and equipment back up. It’s just steep enough to be discouraging.

4. Finally (for now), I’ve got something like 2 million words here on WordPress, probably a couple hundred thousand of which are effectively my notes for the books on education history. How best to get those backed up? I think WordPress has a download feature. I seem to remember looking into it once, and there being options, which then required understanding and thought – what does this option mean? Assuming I choose it, how do I make it available in LibreOffice, say? Does that even work?

That I’m even thinking like this suggests the time to do it was yesterday.

Further updates as events warrant.

Update: Talking to a neighbor (who happens to work for me) and she assures me that if deer are eating my stuff, I can legally harvest them. She was surprised when I confessed that I lacked the proper rifle, and her next question was: do you know how to dress a deer? She no doubt both has the rifle and knows how to dress a deer. Country folk are the best.

A Reader Asks…

Yard Sale of the Mind always appreciates a good question. Teaching and Learning Labs posted to following comment to this post:

OK, I’ve been coming around from the idea that our education system is misguided, through awakening to how I failed to get the education that was once common, to seeing the foundations (and structure built on it) as evil.

I teach college physics, I’m a dad to two young sons, and our faith in God is strong. I’m unsure what concrete steps to take, here and now, toward turning the tide. Your blog has value, but I’m curious: what steps are you taking, in your own roles – as headmaster and otherwise?

First of all, thanks for reading. You seem like exactly the sort of reader I’m writing for. Here’s the long answer:

My first role in education was a father of five. When our first born was 3, we put him in a parent co-op developmental preschool for a few hours a day. As a co-op, my wife and I were able to see how it worked. The ‘developmental’ part meant that the kids were given time to explore a rich environment – there were sandboxes and dress up and toys – and other kids. The underlying assumption is that any given kid would gravitate toward whatever was ‘developmentally appropriate’ for them. Some kids were ready to hone their social skills, so they might play with toys with some other kid. Other kids might need time on the climbing structures to work on physical skills. And on and on, and changing every day.

Until age 4 or 5. Once the child reached kindergarten age, the only appropriate development was learning how to do whatever the teacher told you to do. The nicest people in the world would switch from keeping minimal order among the 3 and 4 year olds while the kids did what they wanted, to micromanaging the 5 year olds to prepare them for school.

School. Right?

So, magically, the small kids who were assumed to be able to productively manage their own time turn into slightly larger kids that need micromanagement in order to ‘learn’ or ‘progress’ or something. Watching our oldest thriving and happy as a 3 and 4 year old begin to struggle a bit (these were the nicest people in the world, after all) as a 5 year old made me wonder: what changed here? If it is assumed that the younger kids can manage without being constantly directed by adults – and that assumption passes the eye test – why does turning 5 not just change the assumption, but switch the assumption 180 degrees?

Around this time, I met some people trying to get a Sudbury Model school started. The basic assumptions of that model are the same as the assumptions of the pre-school: provide a rich environment, and let the kids do what they want. The big difference: rather than having the nice moms and dads break up and correct poor behaviors along the lines of ‘don’t hit’ and ‘don’t throw sand’ and so on, the kids at a Sudbury school have the collective responsibility to maintain order. No grades, no classrooms, no micromanagement of their time by teachers. But weekly (at least) judicial meetings where behavior issues were addressed by the children. Sudbury kids can all argue like lawyers starting around age 8.

The Sudbury school we helped start did three things I thought essential: 1) keep the kids out of the age-segregated graded classroom; 2) keep them away from state certified teachers; and 3) give them a chance to learn how to manage their own time and be responsible for the results. Our kids loved it.

Our relatives and friends hated it. We were clearly destroying our kids, who would never need succeed, would never learn how to deal with ‘real life’ and so on. I even had a close relative tell my kids out of my earshot that we had ‘ruined’ them. And, to be honest, there were some white-knuckle parenting moments in there, at least at first: what was my oldest daughter supposed to do, when there are few if any little girls around her age? Exactly how long can #2 son put off learning to read? Answer: until age 14. He has a Great Books and a Master’s degree. Didn’t seem to hurt him much.

So, we raised 5 free-range children. All 5 got into the colleges of their choice. All are literate, considerate, and good, solid citizens who love their mom and dad. All the ones who could have so far have graduated college, each with various honors. Three are happily married; we have 3 beautiful grandkids with #4 in the oven. The oldest was hit by a car and killed when he was 20; the youngest is still in college.

That’s how we ‘ruined’ them by not subjecting them to school. Now, our home life was solid, as I imagine yours is as well. We would often have someone – me, more often than not – read while the kids cleaned up after dinner. We always ate dinner together. A good story – Lord of the Rings, Till We Have Faces, all sorts of Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, and so on, were on the reading list – would keep going after cleanup was done. Further, I handled their catechesis by taking the 5 to 10 minutes drive to Mass to talk about the readings and feasts for that day.

The chief benefit of keeping our kids out of school and away from having to perform to ‘grade-level’ and other vicious fictions is peace and quiet. Our kids didn’t need to rebel – against what? We didn’t waste their or our time enforcing school on them in the form of homework. So we get along now, and we all got along then. We love each other.

So that’s the ancient past. For now, I am trying not to let the ideal stop me from doing the very good. Chesterton Academies are vastly better in every way than just about any other form of schooling done now. I spend time almost every week trying to talk some parent or student down from this insane need to do as they are told. Why waste a minute thinking about what you need to get into Cal or Stanford? Don’t go there! If they were merely expensive wastes of time, that would be one thing. But they are much worse than that – they are actively evil. Just go get a job, or go to any of the many small Christiaan and Catholic schools that would be happy to accept our recommendation.

Should our school reinstate the type of education used for centuries – no classes or grades per se, but rather the student studies under the guidance of a teacher/master, who would judge whether a student had qualitatively become a bachelor or master or doctor?

In the abstract, yes. In the concrete, few parents are ready to be that brave; few students, especially those with 8 or 9 years of ‘traditional’ age-segregated compulsory schooling under their belts, are ready to tackle this. In fact, few even understand what I’m talking about. As John Taylor Gatto put it, the chief success of the current method is that few can even imagine doing it any other way.

So, i am personally torn: I would love to run a little medieval university-style school backed up by plenty of tutoring, such that by age 14 or so, most kids would be ready for ‘college’ or getting on with their lives. You want to go on? How about mastering Latin, Greek, and Hebrew like millions of students your age before you? How about Euclid? Millions of students have learned that before age 16. What are you waiting for?

But – I don’t know. I’m not young or rich. How would I do this? Further, after 3 generations plus trained up in compulsory age-segregated classroom schools, where success is measured in compliance, who would attend? Or am I just a coward?

Finally, John Taylor Gatto refused (I was there when he was asked) to promote a one best way of educating kids. He was in favor of a free market in education. If you applied the genius of millions of Americans to the issue, you’d come up with thousands of good ways to educate kids. So, while I have my ideas, informed by my Catholic faith, at the end of the day I’m just a guy.

Be not afraid.