January 6, 2006
Presidential Suicide Shocker! Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:30 PM EST At National Review Online (a conservative website), Bradford William Short discusses a new book on assisted suicide in which the author, Margaret Pabst Battin, suggests that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson may have killed themselves. The reasoning behind this speculation seems to be that they died on the same day—July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of independence*—and both men had made vague semi-endorsements of the idea of suicide years earlier. I haven’t read the book and don’t intend to, but Short does not make it sound very convincing (though as a pro-life advocate, he is hardly impartial; by the end he strays far enough from the Founding Fathers to deride the entire field of “bioethics” as a “cult of death”). In the course of his discussion, he mentions Battin’s use of a quotation from Rep. John Randolph of Roanoke, who, upon hearing of Jefferson’s death, wrote, “they have killed Mr. Jefferson.” This inspired a rejoinder from Richard Brookhiser, a friend of American Heritage as well as of National Review, who points out that Randolph “was, to put no finer point on it, nuts.” And indeed he was. His entry in the Dictionary of American Biography is a long chronicle of alternating madness and brilliance, sometimes both at once, punctuated by speeches filled with eloquently contemptuous ridicule that on at least one occasion led to a duel (with Henry Clay, in 1826). Randolph was beardless and diminutive and spoke in a high-pitched voice. He seems to have been unable to function sexually as an adult, which could certainly make a person crabby. The DAB says, “The universal contemporary opinion that he was impotent was verified after his death,” though it doesn’t say how. Characteristically, Randolph made this deficiency the basis for one of his most devastating ripostes. When teased about his lack of virility, he replied: “You pride yourself on a faculty in which your slave is your equal, and your ass is your superior.” * In 1776 Adams predicted that the 2nd of July, when the Continental Congress first decided to declare independence (though without a specific text), would be celebrated by Americans, but custom quickly established the 4th, when the actual Declaration was adopted, as the date for commemoration.
January 6, 2006
Teaching—Past, Present, and Future Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:55 AM EST I think Frederick Allen and Frederic Schwarz are onto something in their observations about the explosion of knowledge and the democratization of the knowledgeable. Both phenomena, however, have corollaries. The first concerns the differences among various disciplines; the second the inequities of instruction and learning between geographical and socioeconomic groups. My limited knowledge of the state of teaching today extends only to history and literature. I am a dunce in math and science, a fact that perhaps demonstrates that teaching was not superior a generation or two ago. Another recent survey on education, this one about the state of mathematics expertise among American students, revealed that the United States placed eighth worldwide. (At least, I think that was the rating. I really must start clipping these articles.) Almost as distressing as the ranking was the fact that American students believed that they rated first. But there is another side of the coin, and that has to do with the democratization of knowledge, or perhaps the lack thereof. Yesterday I eavesdropped on a conversation between two men who appeared to be in their eighties or nineties. They began by discussing the scandal in Washington, went on to bemoan the state of the world ethically and intellectually—though wondering whether they merely believed this because they were getting old, which, I thought, showed a wonderful openness of mind—and then one began to talk about the his granddaughter’s courses in science. He, apparently, was a research scientist himself. I could not hear the details—after all, I was eavesdropping—and probably would not have understood them if I had, but he was gleeful as he recounted the work his granddaughter was doing in a high school laboratory. Perhaps American education isn’t in the fix we think, at least not in all disciplines in all places. I suspect the best schools are teaching better than ever. I suspect the best students are making strides their predecessors only dreamed of. I suspect that is especially true in the sciences. But if the good news is that the current state of scientific teaching is not as bad as we feared, the bad news, according to a 2005 letter of protest to the White House by a group of leading scientists, is that this administration’s politicization of scientific research bodes ill for America’s future. And we haven’t even begun to talk about Intelligent Design.
January 5, 2006
The History of Mine Safety Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:15 AM EST The horrifying events in Sago, West Virginia, brought to mind an article we ran in our sister publication, American Heritage of Invention & Technology, titled "Safety First, at Last." It's a look at the efforts over time to make coal mines safe in America, and though it's from 1992, I think it still has a lot that's very instructive, and it's a gripping narrative by the daughter of a coal miner. Amazingly, there was no effective federal mine-safety legislation at all until a tragedy at a mine in Illinois killed 119 people shortly before Christmas in 1951, and rescue teams weren't required at all mines until 1969. Terrific creativity has gone into enhancing mine safety since, though the business remains by its nature a dangerous and unpleasant one. To read the article, click here.
January 4, 2006
Is America Getting Dumber? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:10 PM EST Here’s another thought about why Americans seem less well-educated than they used to. I don’t disagree with the points my fellow bloggers have made, but I think there may be one more element involved. Maybe it’s partly because we expect so many more of them to be educated. In 1900, 500,000 Americans made it to high school. High school enrollment increased tenfold over the next half century, and by 1980, three quarters of all students finished high school. Nowadays half of all high school graduates go on to college. There has been a vast democratization of education in America over the past century. The farther back you look, the more you see education as an exclusive privilege of a small elite group. Maybe we can’t educate all of many tens of millions quite as well as we once educated a few hundred thousand, and maybe when we look back on a more educated time, we’re also looking back at fewer people during that time. Look at it that way, and if you add up all the knowledge out there, there’s got to be a lot more today. It’s just that our expectations have exceeded our national accomplishment in education.
January 4, 2006
These Kids Today, They Don’t Know Nothing Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:45 AM EST In a pair of recent entries in this blog, Ellen Feldman and John Steele Gordon have decried the sorry state of knowledge on the part of the American public, particularly its younger portion, about history and economics. I heartily agree with their observations, and I would add mathematics to the list. A few years ago I was staying at the oldest and best hotel in Pittsburgh and needed some postcard stamps. They cost 20 cents at the time, and I asked the desk clerk for ten. She had to use a calculator before she could tell me that the price was $2.00. In the movie Drugstore Cowboy, one character who wants to sell ten units of some narcotic item at $9 apiece is so perpetually wasted that he can’t figure out what the total cost should be. He asks, “What’s nine times ten?” and Matt Dillon tries to pull a fast one by saying, “Um, let’s see . . . 75.” The guy just nods. When I saw this movie in 1989, the audience laughed loudly at this scene, but now it’s all too common in real life, and not just among junkies. Everybody has their pet theory for why people are so uninformed. One factor is probably the politicization of school curricula. There are many ways of teaching history or economics, depending on your politics, and sometimes the desire to inculcate certain beliefs or attitudes takes precedence over basic learning. The same is true of science teaching, as we have seen recently as well as in past eras. Even in mathematics, the “fuzzy math” of today, like the “new math” of my childhood, can make finding the actual answer to a problem (or the “solution set” to an “open statement,” in 1970s-speak) seem like a minor detail. In general, I think there has been a trend since the 1950s to teach students about a subject rather than teaching the subject itself. This is usually justified on the grounds that “we’re teaching our kids how to think, not just filling them up with facts.” The trouble is that you need a basic set of facts, often quite a large one, to be able to think analytically about a subject. And by learning facts you develop an analytical framework, not vice versa. I could go on about this at great length, but I won’t. Equally important, however, is the fact that there’s so much more to know today than there was half a century ago. Not only do we have 50 years more history, but we expect our students to learn about topics that were ignored or glossed over in the past. When I was growing up, even in college, Rosa Parks was the answer to a trivia question, about on a level with the pitcher who gave up Roger Maris’s 61st home run (Tracy Stallard of the Red Sox, in case you’re interested). Nowadays every schoolchild knows her name, and when she died recently she was treated as a national hero. With the scope of history teaching having expanded so much, it’s no surprise that some of the old favorites get lost in the shuffle. I’m not saying that knowing about Rosa Parks is more important than knowing about Joe McCarthy or Anne Frank, just that there’s a limited amount of information that can be crammed into students’ heads, and as we broaden the scope of the history they’re taught, some readjustment is inevitable. In the end, all this may work out for the best, because ignorance can be better than simplistic or imperfect knowledge. Knowing nothing about economics is not a good thing, especially for a political journalist, but it’s better than being educated on the subject by Karl Marx or William Jennings Bryan. Similarly, it’s better to have never heard of Joe McCarthy than to make the common mistake of equating McCarthyism with anti-Communism. Today the phrase “Renaissance man” is applied to anyone who enjoys both Desperate Housewives and classical music, but its original meaning was a man who knew everything about a wide range of subjects—because of the limited range of knowledge at the time. Today we know, and are expected to know, so much about so many things that it’s no surprise to see important subjects get pushed aside. Until somebody comes up with a Moore’s Law for humans, in which brain cells double in capacity every so often, the ever-accelerating expansion of knowledge will continue to outpace our ability to absorb it all.
January 2, 2006
Shampoo and Conditioner Posted by Ellen Feldman at 07:40 AM EST According to a recent study, America is not currently living through a golden age of historical teaching, or at least historical knowledge among young people. When asked to choose who on a list of famous generals was at the Battle of Yorktown, an alarming number of students at leading universities picked either Eisenhower or MacArthur. (Unfortunately, I did not clip the news article and cannot recall the actual numbers, but fewer than half chose Washington.) A few days after reading about the study, I gave a talk to undergraduates at a major urban university. Only two in the class knew what McCarthyism was. Thanks to that study, the sea of fresh but blank faces when I mentioned McCarthyism, and three days spent in San Diego working with middle and high school students, I have been thinking a great deal about the difficulties of teaching the past in a world of accelerating history, technological blitz, and the mania for new-and-improved. I went to San Diego to speak about Anne Frank and the life her diary took on in this country after her death. The experience was less daunting than I, a non-teacher, had feared. The kids were, for the most part, well-behaved, interested, and sympathetic. Several of the girls shed tears during a video prepared for the occasion. I'm fairly certain most of the students learned something. But despite the occasional tear, I did not have the feeling the newfound knowledge meant much to them. After the video and a brief talk, I took groups of students through a beautifully wrought model of two of the rooms in the secret annex. The intention was to force the kids into an essential historical experience, to make them feel what it was like to live in another time and place under other conditions. I cannot say I was particularly successful. I spoke of the constant hunger. It was no match for the latest fad diet sweeping the school or the obesity headlines in the day's paper. I told them about being locked up with their parents for 25 months. I could see them mentally closing the doors to their well-equipped rooms or merely turning up their iPods. I reminded them they would have had no contact with their friends. It was a meaningless threat to a generation brought up on instant messaging. Then, on the afternoon of the third day, as I was taking the last group of students through the rooms and talking about the grueling shortages under the Occupation, I inadvertently hit on something
that got their attention. They yawned when I spoke of living on rotten potatoes and beans. They looked bored when I told them about outgrowing clothes and shoes and not being able to replace them. Doing without soap left them cold. “And don't even think about shampoo or conditioner,” I added. I will never forget the look of horror that went from face to face, and not only among the girls. I am not sure what the moral of this story is. I doubt we can stimulate historical curiosity or improve historical awareness by product placement. But I keep thinking there must be a way to make our past more relevant to those who will fashion our future.
January 2, 2006
Follow the Power Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:35 AM EST Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes, has an
interesting column in the January 9 issue of that estimable
magazine called “World's Worst Disease.” That
disease, he thinks, is “zero-sum thinking.” Zero-sum thinking, according to Karlgaard, is based on the
following false premises: that “the earth is running out of
resources,” that “people consume more than they
contribute,” and that “wealth is a zero-sum
distribution game.” These premises are, indeed, false, as even the most cursory
review of economic history shows. The bottom quintile of the
American population today lives at a higher standard of living
than did all but the very rich at the turn of the twentieth century,
and in some ways even better than they did (air conditioning, for
instance, television, microwave ovens, cell phones, and so on). So unless we have been sending pirating expeditions to Mars
and bringing back lots of loot, we must have been creating
prodigious wealth in the last hundred years. So why, Karlgaard wonders, is this ludicrous idea so popular
with politicians, journalists, and the professoriate. He thinks it
might be because these people live in what they see as a zero-
sum world. There can be only one president, fifty governors, a
hundred senators. There are only a fixed number of bureau
chiefdoms and editorships at a newspaper, so many tenured
slots in an academic department. So, as in a poker hand, there
can be only one winner and all the rest must be losers. This is an interesting point, and I don't doubt that it plays a part.
But among journalists I think the fact that bad news sells more
newspapers than good news is a potent factor as well. (And, of
course, the often astonishing ignorance of even the most
fundamental economic concepts and statistics among political
journalists is also a factor.) But I suspect there is another, more potent, underlying cause,
wrapped up in James Madison's idea that “men love
power.” (Let me hasten to point out that Madison was
using the word “men” in the eighteenth-century
sense of “human beings.” Women love power
quite as much; just ask Queen Elizabeth I or Margaret Thatcher.) If we did, indeed, live in a zero-sum world, then someone would
have to be in charge of achieving an equitable distribution, and
that, of course, would be a position of great power. Those in
charge of this distribution would need experts on how to do it. In
other words, in a zero-sum world politicians and academics
would need to be more powerful than they are already. That, of
course, would suit them just fine. Consider what happened in the 1930s. Keynesian economics
swept the economic field in an astonishingly short period of time,
and within a generation had swept most politicians as well. Only
30 years after Keynes published his most important book,
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,
in 1936, even so conservative a politician as Richard Nixon
admitted that “we are all Keynesians now.” Why? Easy, Keynesian economics made economists and
politicians more powerful. Before Keynes, the first, and usually
last, economic duty of politicians was to balance the
government's budget; after Keynes, it was to fine-tune the
economy to keep it humming along at full employment. Before
Keynes, economists had about as much political power as
astronomers; after Keynes, they were whispering in presidential
ears. Only a decade after The General Theory, Harry
Truman joked that what he needed was a one-armed economist
because the ones he had were always saying “on the
one hand . . . but on the other hand. . . .” A more modern example of the popularity among politicians and
academics of theories that add to the power of politicians and
academics is global warming. That the earth has been by some
measures warming up in recent decades is clear. The cause of
this warming is not; how long or even if it will continue is less
clear still. But to listen to environmentalists and their political
allies, there is one cause and one cause only: human beings
and their economic activity. Other causes, such as variation in
solar output and volcanic activity, are simply ignored. Computer models, all based on endless assumptions-each of
which diminishes the probability that the model reflects the real
world-are taken as proof, despite the fact that these models
conflict with one another, often fundamentally. Again, why? Again, easy. Human-caused global warming would
greatly increase the power of politicians and environmental
scientists. There is not a whole lot we can do, after all, about
solar output or volcanic activity. If that is the cause, then there
will be palm trees in New Jersey whether we like it or not. But
human activity can be regulated. Getting to make the choices as
to when and how and where to regulate economic activity for the
sake of Planet Earth would be power with a capital P. No wonder
the idea of human-caused global warming is so popular with the
Sierra Club, etc. Every rookie policeman knows that for certain kinds of crimes,
the solution lies in “following the money.” In the
world of political economy, following the power has equally great
explanatory potential.
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