Liberal Education

When the Kentucky governor, Matt Bevin, suggested last month that students majoring in French literature should not receive state funding for their college educa­tion, he joined a growing number of elected officials who want to nudge students away from the humanities and toward more job-friendly subjects like electri­cal engineering.

   [New York Times, “Rising Call to Cut Funding for Liberal Arts Degrees,” 2/22/2016]

Isn’t that interesting? The majority rules. And the values of the majority—and the quality of its thought—will invariably come to be mirrored at every level of a society, not least its governing circles. Here is democracy’s Achilles’ heel. It is a laudable structure of governance, but its quality will reflect the people.

“Liberal” means free. It was the province, long ago, of those who could both fund the costs and take the time to get educated. “Liberal Education” has never meant  “cost free.” It was the education of the leadership class: wide, general, and elevated—over against vocational education which was for the lower elite of the laboring masses, the craftsmen. And the laborers got none at all.

He who funds also calls the shots. State funding, sooner or later, also means direction of the curriculum. State education is, therefore, regardless of its content, never liberal: the student isn’t “free” of State interference.

Interesting, isn’t it. The more we laud freedom, the less of it is actually available. I used to ponder that when I was young and came to the conclusion that, so long as I wasn’t independently wealthy, I was only “free” to seek a job. And to vote—if that even mattered when far outnumbered by those who do not think. And to drive—provided I bought some insurance.

Someday some few will again have liberal education—but democracy must first decay and its pieces must slowly be absorbed back into the soil of history.

Sweet and Sour

The Grosse Pointe Public Schools had put a $50 million bond issue on the ballot; it was voted on February 25. The public rejected it by a 70 percent majority. The bonds would have paid for a fiber-optic network serving the several institutions within the district; purchased computers, laptops, and tablets; and would have in addition beefed up security using cybernetics. Owners of houses like ours—which is sort of average in this district—would have paid about $230 per annum more in property taxes.

The pro-bond lawn signs said “Tech Yes,” thus causing the mind to echo back “Heck Yes.” Good slogan that. The anti-bond forces said “Heck No,” “Vote No,” or spelled it out: “Vote No on School Tax Levy.” Around here the “Tech Yes” signs were significantly more numerous, but in the vote last Tuesday the antis won a decisive victory.

Brigitte and I failed to vote; there was, you might say, some interference. But we liked the outcome. Mind you, we admire our school system here. It is one of the highest ranked district across the state, indeed across the nation. In 2009, for instance, Grosse Pointe South high school ranked in the top 2 percent of high schools academically. The district serves one of the wealthiest communities in the Detroit Metro area. What that means is that the average student probably already owns at least one computer, laptop, or tablet. And as South lets out on school day afternoons, it is dangerous to cross Kercheval at Fisher (next to our Library), because the masses of students crossing the intersection, ignoring the lights, are all staring at smartphones. The outcome of this vote, therefore, was sweet; but it felt sour.

The sour taste comes from the fact that our educational powers that be still think that genuine advance in education can be achieved by buying it—by buying things and systems. The same process is underway massively in all kinds of other communities. Buy the cyber and you’re buying the future wealth of your children. That part doesn’t taste good. And, sure enough, the District, recovering from the shock of Tech No, is planning somehow to fund this achievement of primacy in education by funding it out of current revenues. Some things, of course will have to be delayed (maintenance on hundred-year old buildings) and by eliminating extras. What extras are still left? The “sour” comes from contemplating the substitutions that lie ahead. History? English lit?  

Shrinking Recess, Thinning PE

Sometimes all the news that’s fit to air can give one a rude shock. News on PBS (I think) the other day informed us that Recess is shrinking in elementary schools and so is physical education (PE); in many districts PE has been eliminated outright. Here is a link to a presentation by the Center of Public Education (CPE) on this subject. Why is this happening? Well, more time is needed for English/Language Arts and Math (presumably to meet testing requirements) and the time must come from the presumably useless categories—or the expensive ones. PE is expensive and, in these days of seemingly skyrocketing bullying, Recess must be supervised. What shrinks or thins will disappear.

Per CPE’s article, in the 2001-2008 period 20 percent of school districts (translates into 1 in 5) have reduces recess; 9 percent of districts have reduced PE.

Madness—in the form epidemics of experimentation—has long plagued education. Is this another enzyme on the loose? Or does this one come from “government’s too big, so let’s cut out the basics.”

So what is growing? Childhood obesity.

Education Costs Through a Wider Lens

With controversy churning once again around a rise in the interest on student loans, Brigitte wondered how the U.S. situation compares to that in other countries. We have memories, of course. Two of our daughters went to college, Michelle in France, Monique in Spain; Michelle also graduated there. We made some minor financial contributions to those efforts (it seems)—but not painful enough even to be remembered. My own reflex reaction was cautious. I sort of doubted that good data would be available. It turned out that I was wrong. A Canadian group, called Higher Education Strategy Associates (HESA, link), part of the Canadian Education Project (link), has been collecting data on fifteen countries. The most recent report, titled Global Higher Education Rankings 2010, is available online (link).

HESA’s objective is to measure the affordability of education. Their approach is to compare the actual total cost of education to median income in every country. The cost of education is measured as tuition and costs (fees, books) added to necessary living expenses; that is total cost. Total cost is then reduced by measuring grants and additional tax expenditures made by the country to subsidize educational attainment; such tax expenditures do not include loan programs in HESA’s scheme. The result is net cost. Net cost expressed as a percentage of median income then produces a ranking. HESA reports on those few countries for which it was able to collect all of the data required. I am reproducing one of the summary tables here based on 2008 data:

The table here includes actual net costs for the individual. Loan programs, which do not reduce costs but improve accessibility to education, would be applied to these net costs. In this tabulation, Germany ranks lowest in cost or highest in affordability. The net cost is 15.2 percent of median income in that country. Japan is worst, with education costing 107 percent of median income.

Worth noting here is that in Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden, virtually no tuition is charged at all. Finland, Latvia, Netherlands, and New Zealand fall into the low tuition category, Canada, England and Wales, and Mexico are placed into the medium tuition bracket, whereas Australia, Japan, and the United States are in the high tuition category.

The report contains many tables showing details, including data on loan programs. The text brings explanations. The focus in this country, right now, is on loans—which HESA treats as a somewhat marginal issue. The real one is what education costs. The high costs in the United States and in Mexico are in part due to the big cost difference between private and public education in those countries. If only public education were charted, the U.S. would be closer to Canada in rankings and Mexico closer to Australia.

Free Education

Well, as they say, nothing is free. But nominally free education is still available in the United States even in these Latter Days. Here are four such institutions. Not only does the qualifying student pay no tuition; in addition room and board are free as well:

U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO

U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point, NY

U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY

U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD

U.S. Coast Guard Academy, New London, CT

Students must undergo a qualification process in which they document superior educational achievements up to high school, demonstrate a less directly measurable leadership ability, qualify physically, and meet other requirements such as, for West Point for example, 17 but not yet 23, single status, no pregnancy, and no obligation to support a dependent child or children.

With all qualifications met—and the school still having room for you—you can get your four years of education absolutely free. But, in signing up for it, you commit yourself to serving five years in the military. And that, for some anyway, may mean what might be viewed as modest earnings. Let’s take a look.

A Second Lieutenant earns $34,517 a year, a First Lieutenant $39,769. Assume promotion to First Lieutenant after a year (18 months is more usual). In five years the person then will earn $193,593 or, on average, $38,719.

Now, to be sure, a war may be going on. Working conditions may be hazardous and the salary bumped a tad by combat pay. If all goes well and the graduate survives those obligatory five years of service, the actual cost of the education will be the difference between military pay and some hypothetical salary in the civilian sector. In today’s environment, for some individuals anyway, the difference may be nil or negative, suggesting that some things, given the right circumstances, might be free. And in addition, a job is guaranteed—right after school and also out five years and counting.

To the extent that education in practice, except for very small cohorts of the weird, means preparation for an occupation, the military does the best job of all of our institutions. Something to ponder…

Writing to the Demographic, Teaching to the Test

My contention is that measurement, the very core of the scientific approach, becomes problematical when applied too rigidly to those areas of life where measurement fails to capture the most essential elements. Two such regions among others include the arts and education. How can we capture, in a quantitative net, exactly what a genuinely educated person is? How do we know that this painting here—or that television show—is art? The judgement, in either case, has everything to do with the individuals doing the judging. At best there is a kind of public consensus, more felt than measurable (e.g. as in counting critics or teachers pro and con). Far from all individuals will share the elite consensus, no matter what the individual's status is. In effect, as one ages, one finds oneself disagreeing with some elites while agreeing with others heretofore disdained.

Measurement physicalizes because it averages. It fails to capture individual uniqueness. Testing has its uses—in areas, perhaps, like guiding curriculum reform. As a measurement of a teacher’s performance, it sucks. The ability of a teacher should be judged by another individual—not by a group, and least of all a group of students. That’s a hard requirement. We want to mechanize,  routinize everything, template everything, impose a math-based cookie cutter applied to what we view as a uniform dough. Life is much more demanding than that.

In the entertainment “industry,” measuring by ratings, correlating content to viewership, the content itself classified into categories (sex, violence, relationships, urban culture, paranormal, etc.), each category appropriately weighted, produces the chaos of pop culture, where nothing of a higher sort emerges and the half-life of a series is often one quarter of a season—before it is jerked.

Underneath all this, of course, is Moloch Measuring: the measurement of money—be it investments in a show and calculating its return … or investment of public dollars in education by calculating expenditure per pupil. One could easily produce a neat TV series from this. Call it The Invasion of the Soul Snatchers. Combine art and education by defining the show’s locale as a grade school, a high school, and a University. Projected ratings should be good if sex, violence, relationships, urban culture, and paranormal are properly weighted in the resulting mix.

The Early Grades

It’s sort of obvious, when I think about it: culture is formed in grade- and middle-school. The logic for that runs as follows. The values we form in childhood, the values we feel, later, as virtual instincts, later shape the collective. Their first experience, of course, is in the home. But their socialization takes place in schooling. The child encounters the social collective in grade school for the first time. There the three Rs are, you might say, almost incidental. It is the Big V that really counts.

If the home has effectively formed the child—the values gained there may be weakened, diluted, and eroded if the child’s first contact with society does not at once confirm them. And parents, time and again, stare in hopeless impotence at this process of erosion aided, as it is, by social consensus.

High school? Too late. Or perhaps irrelevant. My own memories tell me that it is the worst stage of education as ordinarily encountered. Puberty: humanity’s most biologically-imprinted age. Wise woman Montessori understood that; in that age, in her design, the abstract gives way to the tasks of social integration.

And by the time we reach college, the hope is that the individual’s values have reached a certain crystallization.

The difficult aspect here is that values have a holistic character. They can be said to represent a fusion of morality, empathy, cosmology, and intellect—but that comes later on. The child simply absorbs a kind of something: life itself. And as it ages, its powers of absorption, in that sense,  grow weaker. Montessori, again, spoke of the early “Absorbent Mind” present in children. Later that something may indeed  be parsed into components; as an adult, the child may modify this or that part of the whole. But something crucial in the whole remains, and it is that remainder that really forms culture. And that’s what we call values.

If we seek to diagnose the ills of our culture, we ought really to concentrated on the level that really matters: the home and the early grades. The ills of vast collective structures like politics, finance, media, entertainment, business, etc., are all of them traceable to failures in the home, where ambitious parents try to “realize” themselves and struggle to advance careers, and to schools that dare not teach values—indeed cannot—because they fear to overstep the line arbitrarily drawn between religion and the state. And you cannot teach values, as such, unless the cosmological component is a part of them.

Lifelong Learning?

Most of life’s learning serves adaptation in the sense that its subject is the world. In a real way even such arcane studies as astronomy help us in a practical way; they provide an important grounding for our stance and action: orientation. The knowledge of history belongs in this bin too; we can no more meaningfully shape history by individual action that we can steer the stars, but knowing great patterns of collective behavior and their cyclings makes us more sober and therefore detached observers of that which unfolds about us on quite another time scale than our own brief life.

The adaptive urge has been a great teacher for me. Amusingly the very subjects I dismissed in youth because they didn’t draw me became central to my work-life: mathematics and chemistry. These were among “required” courses, but C- was good enough for me. Then, under the prod of necessity I later learned them on my own; the difference both in the feel of these subjects and the experience of learning was enormous. What matters is the inner self wanting to learn something. Without that we get, ah, what goes by the name of education. There is also a lucky part to this, at least for me. I can’t abide understanding something “just enough” to get some job accomplished. Once I’m into a subject, I can’t rest until I’ve grasped its entire inner pattern. This does not mean academic level command of the subject—but it means penetrating to its essence, at least so far as this is possible. And since that essence is elusive, it leads to a lifelong interest.

There are two kinds of forced learning: the first is delivered by collective social pressure; the second is delivered by the will of the individual. The first is easily resisted, finessed, satisfied. The second is horribly demanding, irresistible; it arises from desire. In my case the image of the junk yard dog always arises. I’ll be damned if you resist me! Let’s call that the response if the subject appears as an obdurate enemy. But the mystery of the subject may appear in feminine guise as well, in which case what drives one on is total love.

So where in all this, one might wonder, is the quest for truth? Curious business that. The Truth seems at first to be wrapped in the garments of the world. Slowly, slowly, as these are examined, understood, and removed, more and more of the real Truth emerges to view. Then, in advanced years, the world itself becomes more and more transparent, manner of speaking. The discovery of the Higgs boson brings more merriment than awe. That is because something has begun to shine beyond such petty matters and the Real is finally emergent.

More on Autism

In an earlier post I noted changes in the official diagnosis of autism (link). One thing leads to another. On a walk with Monique, talking about that, she alerted me to the absolutely fascinating story of Temple Grandin—and a movie about that lady’s early struggles—helped by a heroic mother, aunt, and various other creative and determined individuals to draw her out. Grandin developed from the most unpromising beginnings into a major innovator in animal husbandry; later she distinguished herself as professor and lecturer on autism. A brief video (link) will introduce her. Watching that video—in which, among other things, she discusses the education of the young and the importance of hands-on-learning—and having just seen the film, it occurred to me first, what the real differences are between “hard” cases of autism where some genuine differences exist in the formation of the brain, Grandin’s case, and the spread of “soft” autism which is most likely due to failures of nurture, rearing, and education—hence the changes in diagnosis. Second, I discerned here the similarities between very gifted and creative and autistic people—which may have much to do with natural gifts of “seeing more,” as Temple Grandin did—she understood many things that others didn’t even notice—and good nurture, education. Grandin’s is a story very similar to Helen Keller’s—with very similarly triumphant outcomes. We know too little. But what I’m beginning to see clearly now is that the old ways of life were better suited to let children develop—playing in the real world with toys of their own making—and that the best educational method, based on real observation of children, is Maria Montessori’s.

Recalling Eliade

Full turns of Time’s big wheel always cause me to recall Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). He was one of the chaotic but inspired thinkers who influenced people like me, thus people who rashly jettisoned tradition, religion in youth. People like me needed guides who seemed to have embraced the modern but then had come to doubt it. Another such was Carl G. Jung. I was exposed to such brilliant modern interpreters of the traditional as Etienne Gilson, but stuff like that flowed over me and left no trace. Traditionalists did not engage the world I thought I knew. Brought up in, but rejecting, a tradition in which the liturgical year played a major guiding influence, I had to read a book like Eliade’s Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return before I intuitively understood the genuine meaning underneath such structures as the liturgical year. To think of myth as actual, real, here and now—that’s something of a leap. But exactly the same process fashioned my approach to mathematics. I was taught it in the traditional way—which assumes that I’ll be a good boy and simply cram the information, learn the rituals, and accept all that without intuitive assent. I didn’t. I put math right next to religion as something to be despised—useful in minor ways but beneath the dignity of genuine engagement. Until later—when I tackled the subject on my own.  Odd this. But there always will be people of my sort who don’t take well to regimentation—those for whom, in fact, regimentation is a signal that something must be viewed as dead. Education can’t be mechanized—not the real thing. But teaching anything at all effectively is extremely expensive in time and money. But when it’s done right, at least we get something for the effort and resource expended.

Not a School, A Flagship

Those of us “left behind” by the Rapture of Modernity when it came, gosh, I can’t quite pin down the date, need help in understanding what we read in the papers. I read in the papers this morning that Ohio State hired a coach who will receive $4 million a year in pay plus lots of extras. This led me to wonder, actually for the first time ever, what the difference between a state university (e.g. Ohio State) and the state’s university (University of Ohio) is. Well, good luck. State universities at least appear to be land grant institutions. And Land Grant institutions came about because the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 passed. The root of these bills was a movement, dating back to the 1830s, to establish agricultural colleges. Here is the purpose of these as initially formulated in the first Morrill Act (cribbed from Wikipedia):

[W]ithout excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. [7 U.S.C. § 304]

The emphasis is mine—and I find that phrase instructive. The Congress of 1862 clearly felt that there also were other classes in the United States, and here they’re singling out the industrial  classes and their several pursuits and professions. Well, as we can see, they’ve come a long ways, these industrial classes.

The Morrill Act left the identification of schools to receive funds under the Act to the state legislatures. And those institutions getting the nod came then to be called land grant institutions. The University of Ohio (founded 1804) is not, but the Ohio State (1870) is a land grant institution. By contrast, here in Michigan, both University of Michigan (1817) and Michigan State (1855) are. Both institutions, in Michigan, are also labeled Flagship institutions. That curious designation came into use, according to Wikipedia, citing Robert M. Berdahl, former Berkley chancellor, in the 1950s when a wave of post-war expansion enlarged the state university, read Morrill Act, school systems. The original land grant colleges were labeled Flagships, thus the old boys who, being older, merited greater respect. Do I get it, finally? I think so.

Now Ohio State excels in many, many ways. It is indeed a Flagship, not merely in having a pretty pricey new coach. Those still clinging to “the arts,” liberal and otherwise, will be pleased to know that Ohio State’s Wexner Center of the Arts is described as featuring “groundbreaking deconstuctivist architecture” and “being lauded as one of the most important buildings of its generation.” It’s most prized item is Picasso’s Nude on a Black Armchair. I’d like to show the image, but it’s surrounded by copyright protection. But if you must look at a nude today, here is a link.

The Wexner Center owes its name, and its Picasso, to the generosity of Leslie Wexner, Ohio State alumnus. Wexner himself is chairman of Limited Brands, a clothing company. Limited owns Victoria’s Secret, thus the thematic link to that nude is, in a way, present. Limited also own Bath & Body Works and La Senza, to strengthen that theme. Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont (1810-1898), who started life as a merchant’s clerk before rising to the House and Senate, knew what he was about when he engineered the future education of the industrial class.

Let the RA do it!

Learning has a visceral aspect—a touch and feel and hear and smell component. I’ve always known this at some level, but conscious knowledge of it dawned when I was already a man. I joined Midwest Research Institute as an analyst. The Econ Division employed analysts, the midlevel, and research assistants, the next level down. The idea here was division of labor: RAs did the repetitious, boring tasks, analysts the more demanding. But something in my innards resisted this division. I was always getting down, into details, doing my own literature searches, crunching my own numbers, plotting my own graphs. Something odd always happened in this process, and I became aware of that. I absorbed more information; my sense of mastery over the material grew; my confidence increased. I never trembled meeting with clients—as other analysts frequently did. I knew where all the bones were buried and the reason why.

For this reason, at staff meetings, under pressure of deadlines, I often heard myself admonished: “Don’t do that stuff yourself. Let the RA do it.” I found it easier to take a job and simply let the RA do it all herself, start to finish—not least customer contact. In those days RAs were typically women with liberal arts backgrounds. One of these ladies rapidly developed as a consequence of such assignments and soon became an analyst. Yes. A little help with the final report—but then I was still helping with those years later when I’d become at division director at MRI. In my group we assisted other such rapid promotions, and the RA position more or less faded away.

Hands on, direct contact. Drudgery educates. It produces a real democracy of work. In a way it’s costly, but the societal benefits are great. Vice presidents of sales and marketing appointed solely on the basis of a Harvard MBA?—who’d never made a single sales call ever on a real customer? I encountered such and analogous cases. Such things breed phony aristocracies and support phony class structures. A good rule is to do it yourself; don’t let the RA do it. At least until you really know something.

These memories arise as I engage in the mathematical drudgery of comprehending how and why logarithms first arose. I was never made to experience directly what the founders of these arts experienced—and think it is a symptom of poor math education. Many more would be math-literate if we went about the education of the young in a slower, more costly, but a more genuine way.

The Puzzle of Anti-Intellectualism

One of the odd surprises for my family coming to the United States (and here I mean my mother’s and my own very junior reactions—but later also shared by Brigitte when she put foot on these here shores) was the curiously exaggerated American dedication to education oddly paralleled by the relatively low status enjoyed by teachers over what we’d been accustomed to in Europe, and not merely in compensation but also in expressions of respect. (“If you can’t do it, teach it,” just to pick a flitsam off the floor.) It was obviously and tangibly evident to me in my earliest days in high school—where I couldn’t help but observe something I’d never seen in Europe—not in any Hungarian, German, or in one large French school: the important role of organized team athletics and the status assigned to those who managed to be varsity or to cheer it on in short little skirts. Mind you, in Europe we had gymnastics every other day—not least games, like basketball.

This came to mind this morning when I received a muddled sort of comment to a post on LaMarotte. The post was on the earnings of private and public employees. Here it was again, a kind of smoldering, simmering, and half-hidden hatred of teachers. And in Wisconsin, of course, public employees—of whom teachers as a category are by far the most numerous, even including soldiers, sailors, and marines—are now revolting against a governor whose vocabulary (was that also the teachers’ fault) can’t seem able to spell the word taxes.

I discovered this morning that Richard Hofstadter had written a book on this subject, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963). His name I recognize, but I haven’t read any of his works. His definition (which everybody quotes) is here (p. 7 of his book):

The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.

During my years in Europe, I also had plenty of contact with the European proletariat which, one presumes, should have the same resentments and suspicions, yet none of us in the family ever observed it—and this despite the fact that there, certainly in my generation, probably in the next one over too, the separation of the sheep (meant for intellectual training) and the goats (meant for trade training) took place routinely at age 11. In Germany the intellectual training continued in the Oberschule or the Gymnasium; the training in trades took place in what was called Real Schule—and it was heavy on the sciences, light on the humanities. Real Schule was training for Real-ity. Is it that democracy, American style, with heavy doses of individualism, etc., never fully developed in the Old World? That, instead, the class division, early on, into at least two layers, left a deep mark?

The ambiguity in America appears to arise because education has two effective meanings. In one of them the life of the mind is to the fore, in the other it isn’t present at all. In the other education is a kind of tooling aimed exclusively at achievement in the world—and it is this definition which gets the enthusiastic approval of the American public; I want my kid to advance in the world. Education is thus job- not mind-preparation. The second of these is barely noticed or, if pursued with vigor by some, those Some are dismissed as nerds.

The one exception to the prevalence of anti-intellectualism is the respect that doctors still enjoy—but their profession is caring for our bodies. And there we cut some slack. We’d just as soon be treated by minds developed as fully as possible before we let the rubber-clad finger go in or the sharp scalpel descend.

Needed That

Studies in France have virtually no other end than the making of money—said Michele de Montaigne in his essay, "On schoolmasters' learning," in the second half of the sixteenth century. Found that a refreshing corrective to the narrowing of mental arteries always present, especially in those of some age, a symptom of which is to imagine that our times are more saturated with decadence than others.

Community, its Markers, and Wealth

When my family arrived in the United States, you could go to college at your state university without paying tuition; you had to pay for lodging; you had to pay for books; the education was free. We got here in 1951. In 1954 National Educational Television beg we. As its support from the Ford Foundation faded, Congress established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (1967); from this initiative arose the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in 1970. Public TV had no advertising. Its fare was not at first very compelling but became ever better. When we arrived in Kansas City and my parents rapidly found work, they went to work using a streetcar system; it served the whole city efficiently; most people could catch a streetcar by walking a few blocks east or west. We lived right in the city, in a humble but tidy neighborhood. We could walk to grocery stores; one was a Safeway. Other typical services were also within walking distance (pharmacies, restaurants, barber shops, movies, doctors’ offices). One of our regular weekend trips was to the downtown library—by streetcar. In our neighborhood many people belonged to unions; the labor movement was alive, well, growing, much in the news. The working class had a kind of consciousness, unity.

Yesterday another fundraiser began on PBS. “Again?” I said—but not with any kind of heat. Mine was a sort of sigh well beyond resignation. I’d discovered the phone banks and the all-too-familiar fundraising faces after watching three ads, two screens recognizing supporting foundation, and CPB’s plug for itself. This being the kick-off yet another cycle, our station showed a well-made documentary on the Polish Heritage of Detroit; that community was and continues to be highly communitarian, ritualistic, Catholic, cohesive, lasting. This made me think of “community” more generally—and the disappearance of its markers as our life in these states unfolded.

Streetcars had died first. By the time we left Kansas City, only the tracks remained; a decade later even the tracks had disappeared. By the time our children were of college age, every state university charged a tuition. By that time central cities had undergone white flight to the suburbs. Years later, revisiting our first U.S. neighborhood, I found, count them, three burned out houses their sooty hulks still there. Our own house was now a weed-covered vacant lot. I don’t know about Kansas City, but I do know the situation in Detroit. In Detroit retail trade has also left the central city so that the inner-city population has virtually nowhere to shop; the few stores that remain sell chips, liquor, and minimal groceries at high prices. In my professional life I’ve had frequent occasions to study the evolution of the working class—and not least the ever-downward pointing curves of union membership.

People present such catalogues of change to blame some group, class, or ideology for failure to “do the right thing.” But changes on so great a scale have deeper—one might say environmental—causes. Community? It is adaptable, natural, valuable. How then to explain the progressive erosion of its markers? They should not be eroding unless something better can be discovered as the cause of the decay.

That something better turns out to have been wealth. It’s better—from the personal view point, but it carries a hidden cost. In the 50-year period from 1951 to 2001 (to pick a round number) wealth has increased three-fold. Per capita disposable income in constant dollars was $8,408 in 1951 and $25,704 in 2001. If we take the measure of constant dollars seriously, thus equivalent purchasing power in the two years, the population was much richer in 2001 than in 1951 when we set foot on U.S. soil. The distribution of wealth has been uneven, but most people did experience the pleasure of affluence enough so that, well, communal loyalties (which extract a cost) have weakened without appearing to erode the “good life.” To the contrary. Some of the disciplines demanded by communal life could be abandoned too with gains in pleasure and no tangible loss of value except, perhaps, nostalgia.

Not visible in this process, of course, is that the structures of human cohesiveness have weakened; now, more and more visibly, the institutional and even the physical structures are also showing signs of heading south. No single group, class, or ideology can be singled out for blame (not that blame isn’t being issued left and right). The environment changed—but not the constant of human nature. I’m not an economic determinist but I am a student of humanity. Paradoxically, wealth is more erosive of values than want. Community will come back again when things have decayed enough. And it might be built around the still existing nodes of it—like, for instance, the Polish community in Detroit and many other such seemingly backward but still healthy human structures that remain.

Ai, Ai, Ai!

The coincident appearance of two accounts recently reminded me again that Artificial Intelligence is supposedly advancing even as Ordinary Intelligence is visibly in decline. Indeed the two may be aspects of each other. The first was a New York Times piece titled “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man,” June 26. This was on the front page yet! The other was “Droning On,” by William S. Lind, in The American Conservative.

The first story reports without commentary on a conference held by computer scientists, members of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, at Asilomar in California. Nice place, Asilomar: beachside conference center nestled in lovely pine woods, walks on the beach, a great surf, fresh, modern facilities, all wood (except for pristine plumbing) a genuinely Danish atmosphere. And here people sat about thinking about the end of the human era, an intelligence explosion, and machines that can empathize with you one moment and kill you the next. These brainy people, to quote the story, “generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet.” At the same time, however, they wondered: “What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being?”

In the second story, politically incorrect William Lind dares to question the current and insane military doctrine that victory belongs to the technologist. He excoriates the military for using drone aircraft as killing machines. His article is well worth reading. Lind, wisely, puts the focus on the people behind the gadgets rather than marveling at machines. But the two stories converge. In the first scientists wring their hands; they let themselves imagine that machines have actual volition; in the second military people are depicted believing that weapons systems win military conflicts rather than people.

The mere fact that such nutty notions can gain traction is literally proof that ordinary intelligence—or, rather, its serious education—has been too long neglected. We are evidently sinking into barbarism in the midst of a vast technological expansion. Reluctantly, over the years, I’ve come to accept that math and engineering can be taught to and applied at very high levels by people who’ve managed, ultimately, to stay very stupid. So also can administration, accounting, and even law. There are hierarchies of knowledge, and the technical is nowhere near the top.

Circumstances so arranged things that I came to master the computer thing—and at a fundamental enough level so that I genuinely understand it. I was over forty when I started. Dante’s launch into the Inferno is not a bad analogy:

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
Ay me! [Inferno, Canto I]

Ai, Ai, indeed. But, like Dante, I too had a skillful inner guide, and so it all worked out. In those days I remember the wonder and amusement with which I plowed my way through Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach thinking, along the way, that we may have lost God but we’ve certainly discovered magic. We would form the body of an artificial man out of silicon—well, it is a kind of refined sort of dust—and then it would come alive. Or so Hofstadter hoped and believed. But breathing the breath of life into this artificial beast is proving a bit difficult it seems. Huff, puff, huff, puff. It’s not working yet, but faith, surely, conquers all.

Maria Montessori

We have a long association with the Montessori Method of education—and when I say we, I mean Brigitte particularly and myself as a humble servant of her endeavors but a close and enthusiastic student of Maria Montessori’s thought, writing, and practices. Our association began in the mid-1960s. In due course Brigitte became a certified Montessori teacher and taught in a school affiliated with Avila University until we left the Kansas City area in the early 1970s.

My thoughts returned to this period doubly triggered, in part by organizing books for a move to another place; my stock taking showed me, again, our rather extensive collection of literature on the method, not least all of Montessori’s books. Another and seemingly unrelated preoccupation also played a role: thinking about the need for a national economic policy. Relating how that idea evoked Montessori I’ll save to the end.

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was a woman of genius in the progressive, nineteenth century mold, but firmly anchored in tradition nonetheless. She was the first female physician in modern Italy, a graduate of the University of Rome’s La Sapienza Medical School—good name, that. (Alas, humanity forgets so easily. Female doctors were the norm, not the stellar exceptions, in medieval times.) As a member of the university’s Psychiatric Clinic, she was drawn by the problem of educating retarded children. Her interest and leadership rapidly earned her appointment as the director of a school for the retarded. The methods she had devised soon led to success. Some of the children in her charge soon passed state examinations for reading and writing and did so with higher-than-average scores. In the next step she organized a school in a housing project, by invitation. This became the Casa dei Bambini, the Children’s House, the first ever Montessori school.

With some trepidation I’ll attempt to give a very brief summary of the Method. Montessori’s observations led her to the conviction that children learn spontaneously by interaction with their environment. They teach themselves. She optimized this process by offering bambini a specially prepared environment in general and specially designed teaching materials as tools. She combined this by training teachers carefully disciplined to maintain order as unobtrusively as possible, thus to protect the environment and nip conflict in the bud—and to facilitate the children’s learning not by teaching but by gentle guidance (and only when necessary) of the child’s own process of discovery.

When it is properly done—and when the surrounding society does not destroy by night what the school provides by day—this method has wonderful results. But it does require that it be implemented as designed and teachers suited by intellect, character, and temperament to stay out of the way but yet to be there to the extent necessary. The Montessori method continues to gain ground in early childhood education, but it isn’t sweeping the field and perhaps, given the human condition, shall never do so. Lucky the children who benefit. They, and others because of them, will experience the grace that came by way of Montessori into the world.

The Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) has seventeen member countries, predominantly western, but the method is present in the Islamic world in Pakistan and in the Hindu world in India. The method is more widespread in some other countries than our own, but here are some statistics about the Montessori movement in the United States. In the 1993-94 period, using data from the AMI, 732 Montessori schools were active in the country. This is a much lower number than schools that use the Montessori name; it’s a free country, the method has a stellar reputation, and people can and do use it without appropriate certification. In any case these 732 schools were educating 42,800 students. In the 2000-01 period, school numbers had increased to 1,377; these schools were now educating 84,525 students. Now let’s see these numbers in context. The Montessori Method reaches from toddler up to, maximally, 12-year olds. Montessori also wrote extensively about the education of children older than twelve, but she did not form institutions for older ages; and her ideas have never been tried. Why? Several aspects of society would have to be reorganized to do justice to the good doctor’s ideas. So what is the K-through-7 population in toto? According to the Digest of Education Statistics, in a table available here, 2001 enrollment in pre-kindergarten to Grade 8 was 39 million. The category is slightly larger than applies: Grade 8 includes 13-year-olds. But taking this number, it is obvious that Montessori training is almost invisible, accounting for 0.2 percent of students.

This tells Brigitte and me just how influential people of our views generally are over against a vast culture—but that doesn’t mean that we must keep our mouths shut.

Now let me relate why thoughts about a national economic policy made me think of Montessori. It occurred to me that the guiding, optimizing effect of a “prepared environment” and of appropriately trained teachers can bring out the best in children acting spontaneously and following their innate tendencies. The thought was that much as Montessori guided children, respecting them, letting them do things that came naturally—but in a certain environment, an environment the teacher also protected from wanton damage—so also a national policy could optimize the performance of a free economic sector by guiding its actions by proper regulation and minimal but crucial guidance by government. Other nations have done better implementing concepts analogous to Montessori’s method in the larger economic sphere. Is that, perhaps, because a national consensus is more sharply focused at the top? Imagine a Montessori teacher unpredictable from day to day: one day she is authoritarian, one day aggressively laissez faire; one day she favors children whose parents are best dressed and drive the most expensive cars, another she exudes a warm-caring personality toward the most neglected of her unfortunate bambini. Indeed, from day to day, you can't really predict, and sometimes she is entirely distracted because her boyfriend is acting up. Not good, folks. But that’s how policy manifests in the U.S. of A.