Hildegarde

I actually read the article Mike Fisher posted the link to a few days ago.  For awhile it was showing up on Facebook on a regular basis.

And I thought then what I thought now. 

In terms of any discussion about whether government should be allowed to “nudge” or coerce  its citizens to  make its version of the “right” decisions, the information is entirely irrelevant.

The issue is not whether people often  make bad or  mistaken decisions, or whether human nature is hardwired to make such decisions more likely than not in lots of cases.

Of course all that is true.  I’ve got three thousand years of literature to prove  it.

The issue is this–what is the proper relationship of the government to the people.

Democracy assumes that the people control the government.

Government cannot coerce private choice in a democracy not because we assume that individuals will always make the right choices, but because adult citizens are assumed to have the close to absolute right to decide their private business for themselves.

What the writer of the book reviewed in that article was actually proposing was an end to democracy.

Democracy would be replaced by oligarchy. 

This oligarchy will be staffed by “experts” who will be “trained” in “science.”

They will therefore know what we want, even if we say we don’t want it. 

(One of the things I found interesting about both the  book reviewed and the reviewer is that they tended to take people’s responses to questions  like “Do you want to  live a long, healthy life?” at face value.  My guess is that no matter how the question was asked, the answers were less clear than you might think.

Consider my friend from college, with deep problems with depression. Every medication they’ve ever put her on has made her completely frozen–no depression, but also no libido and no ambition.

It turns out that she can self medicate with cigarettes.  She has none of the side effects of the prescription medications.  She’s  happy.  She’s had a spectacular career.  She’s gone all over the world.

Of course, as she  herself knows, she’s also k illing herself.

But if you asked her if she wanted to live a long,  healthy life, she’d certainly say yes.

If you asked her if she wanted to live a long,  healthy life AT THE EXPENSE OF being the way she is on medications, the answer would be an unqualified no.)

But whether it’s the “science” of how people make decisions, or the “science” of how junk food gets us “addicted,” the  purpose is the same–to reduce the individual from the status of a citizen to the status of a child, who can’t be left alone to make his own decisions because he’s just not competent to make them.

Go here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/07/its-your-own-good/

I’d say I was flabbergasted, but I’m used to it.

So it’s very early in the morning, and I’m sitting at the computer at school having my office hours, which nobody will come to.

Until the last week, when they’ll all come at once.

But I’m here, and I’ve got work to do, and I should really go do it.  Instead, I’m writing this, because the work I have to do here isn’t really for today, and I can do it at home later.

Next to my chair I have my big black leather tote bag, and in that tote bag, aside from the usual things, like quizzes to hand back and the textbook, I have the book I’ve been trying to read for nearly two weeks now.

It’s driving me crazy.

The book is called Francis Bacon: The Major Works (including New Atlantis and the Essays), an Oxford World’s Classics mass market paperback edition edited by a man named Brian Vickers. 

I don’t know anything about Brian Vickers, and I couldn’t find the usual short bio in any of the usual places.  His acknowledgments are datelined Zurich, and include a thanks to a university in Tokyo.    I assume he’s a Brit of some kind and a native English speaker, getting that mostly from clues in his introductions and his notes.

But it’s not his biographical or his academic credentials or his institutional affiliations that I want to talk about here.

It’s the design of this book.

Mr. Vickers may not be responsible for the design of this book, and if he isn’t, I’ll have to apologize.

Because whoever is responsible for it should be banished from publishing forever.

Okay.

This book includes within it several major works by Sir Francis Bacon, in whole and in part.

There is a general introduction at the front, which is fine.

There are also particular introductions to each of the works.

Then there are vocabulary notes–words the author thinks the reader may have trouble with, defined in modern terms.

Then there are translations of the Latin and Greek phrases Bacon often uses.

Then there are actual notes, little asides on things like the Great Chain of Being or the politics of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

See those last four things?

They’re all together at the back of the book.

The individual and particular introductions are at the start of the notes for each piece, yes.

But the other three things are all smushed together, so that every time you do want to consult a note, check your Latin translation, make sure of your vocabulary, it’s almost impossible to find what you’re looking for.

You’ll get the page number, in bold, and then a positive cascade of stuff, mostly undifferentiated.  If you’re looking to check a Latin translation, you have to dig through inches of vocabulary words that are often just plain silly.

I mean, is it really necessary to tell me what “lucky” means? 

But because the vocabulary notes seem to be aimed at a not very well read 4th grader, there are literally thousands of them. 

So you turn to the back, find the page number, and start wading.  The Latin translations are identified only by their first and last words (quoque…est) so they’re often buried almost entirely out of sight. 

By the time you find what you’re looking for, you’ve often forgotten what you were reading, and have to go back and start over to get the sense.

Most of the time, this doesn’t feel like reading. 

It’s more like some crazy obstacle course, made all the more miserable by the fact that I can tell that if I could find a way to navigate this thing without all the bumps and problems, I’d actually be interested in the material.

I don’t find Bacon the secular saint a lot of people like to pretend he is these days, the great innovator in the sciences, and all the rest of it.

I know too much about his personal life to admire him on any level.

But this is an authentic voice from an important time and place, and there have even been some surprises–for instance, the fact that he is a Humanist only in the Christian sense, and not only believed in God but believed in hunting heretics.

There’s something they don’t tell you when they give you Francis Bacon as a model of an early scientific skeptic.

The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t matter what he was.  This book never lets me relax long enough to think about him. 

And I end up, after a few hours, being physically uncomfortable. 

This is not a book to make a Sunday morning with Bach. 

I tried it, and I ended up with Beethoven at six a.m., sounding like doom.

I also realized that there was a time of day after which I just couldn’t go on with it.

So I did something I almost never do–I started another book, in the middle, to read at night.

That book is Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light, a fair play mystery in a series featuring a chief homicide investigator with the Quebec Surete.

I picked the author because she and I were featured in a Publisher’s Weekly article on fair play mysteries (it was a while back), and I was of course interested.

It’s a very nice book indeed, with very engaging characters.

I’ll post a complete report when I’ve finished with it.

I’ll post a complete report on the Francis Bacon–if I finish with it.

The only things keeping me going at the moment are my internal conviction that I must always finish what I start, and the fact that there really is material in there I’m interested in.

It’s Monday.

The snowstorm was on Friday and went a bit into Saturday.

Schools were closed Friday and there was no mail service in all of NE on Saturday.

Classes were cancelled Saturday and Sunday–yes, there are Sunday classes some places–and now…

Schools are closed in most of the towns around here, as are colleges and universities.

The roads, it seems, are not all plowed yet.

Our road is plowed, and various grown children have gotten the snow off our walk.

The snow walls on either side of our walk are up to my shoulders, and the snow walls on the road are probably over my head.

I haven’t gone out to look.

But this probably the first school snow day I’ve ever experienced when the temperatures are supposed to be over 40 by noon.

It’s cold in this office, and my work is done, so I’m going to go grade papers or something else useful.

But I’m beginning to think that our response to this snowstorm is a form of institutional PTSD.

We’re usually a lot calmer about this sort of thing.

It’s Saturday morning, and the word is that we’re likely to see a little more snow over the course of the morning.

It is, however, not snowing now–but it did, yesterday, a lot.

I’ve heard estimated totals for this part of the state of between eighteen and twenty-two inches.  I’m not going to go out into the yard with a yardstick to make sure.

I will say that I tried to get out onto the porch this morning to size things up just by looking at them, and the screen door was so impeded by snow I could move it, and had to get Greg up to push it out for me.

He wasn’t pleased, and he’s going to be even less pleased by all the shoveling that’s going to be going on a bit later.

I should buy a snow blower, I know.  I think about it every year, but I never seem to do it.

I just want to note that we don’t ever seem to be able to get beyond schools when we talk about education on this blog.

What I was trying to say was this:

1) Forget about schools.  Let’s by pass them altogether.

2) Let’s have employers hire and fire on the basis of competitive examinations ALONE.

3) If you want to send your kid to school to prepare for those examinations, fine.  If you want to homeschool him, fine.  If you want to send him to the library and let him do it on his own, fine.

4) The big point is this–a high school diploma or a college degree will count for NOTHING.  It will NOT be a credential that gets you a job, or that indicates your skill level in anything.

5) The tests will NOT be devised by government entities of any kind.

6) Instead, individual employers will work up their own tests–taking what advice they want–that will be tailored to their being able to identify candidates with the skills they need.

7) I expect that what will happen is what has happened with E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy project–the individual tests and curricula will circulate, and employers and other entities will adopt the ones that work the best for them.

8) What happens to hiring and firing teachers, or to the curricula of specific schools, or government education policy, will be entirely irrelevant.

No committees or bureaucracies will be necessary, and that’s a good thing–because no committees or bureaucracies will be able to devise a successful method of skills evaluation.

They’re coming at it from the wrong end.

They’re always coming at it from the wrong end.

We’ve all gotten so used to the idea that Schools Are Where We Learn Things that we’ve forgotten that for most of history, they weren’t.

Let’s get rid of schools as the places that certify skills and knowledge–they’re completely useless at it.

We can, of course, still retain them as places we want to send our children for other reasons.

But I bet none of them will cost $50,000 a year or require a mountain of debt to attend, and we can ditch the college loan system entirely.

I’m going to go organize the shoveling.

The title has nothing to do with what I want to talk about today.  It’s just an indicator of my frustration.

I got in to school a little later than usual yesterday, so I wasn’t able to get any real work done on the computers.

To make up for that, I’ve been trying to sign in to the college website this morning, only to be continually told that my “session has timed out,” even though I’ve JUST signed in.

The site gets like that sometimes, but it’s making me crazy.

I have been reading the comments and I’ve got a couple of notes:

1) I agree with Cheryl that some bureaucracy will always be necessary, but it’s a necessary evil, and it should be kept as minimal as possible, which is a lot more minimal than it is. 

At the very least, bureaucracies should not have the ability to issue regulations that have the force of law, and they should be required to enforce only objective standards.

No bureaucrat, major or minor, should have the right to say “this is what this regulation means to  me” and then enforce it that way.

That will always lead to favortism, corruption and empire building.  There is nothing else it can lead to.

2) I’m not with Robert about  multiple choice tests.  I think they’re a bad measure of anything.

We give our  students multiple choice tests to determine their literacy levels when they enter, and too many of the kids who get good scores on those are completely unable to write a coherent and grammatical sentence.

What I want are long tests hand written out, preferably with individual examiners from some entity entirely unconnected to the schools, and with some tests (say, for history) done orally.

And yes, I know.  This would be very expensive, and I’m not likely to get it just because of that.

But that would at least give me some indication of what they actually know and are able to do.

3) I knew about our statistics on the international tests, but all I have to say about that is–they are obviously not testing correctly for what needs to be tested for.

My students are virtually all white, but even in my advanced class they are almost all incapable of writing ANYTHING grammatically, and most of their reading comprehension levels are minimal.

It’s one thing to read a passage, be given a set of possible answers, and be good at figuring out which of those answers may be correct.

It’s something else to be given a short story or essay to read and be able to figure out from that alone what the text is saying.

I’m going to go try to sign on to that website again.

I’d like to remind everybody that the lists are not some kind of challenge, and that the list for January is unusually  long. 

January is dead time for teaching, and on top of that is was dead time for writing, too.  I got sick, I got questions that needed resolving in the manuscript–in the end I worked on Real Work in the mornings and then sort of curled up  into a ball and read things.

Now teaching is definitely back into gear, and that  means a whole other set of preoccupations.

For me, the biggest continuing  issue is the wholesale bureaucratization of college teaching.

And I will admit that on some levels I sort of get it.

The state and federal governments are pouring enormous amounts of money into “college,”  and students are running up trillions of dollars in debt, a lot of it guaranted by the Federal government through guaranteed student loans.

For t hose reasons, it has become vitally important that the governing bodies be able to “prove” that they are getting their money’s worth.

That might even be a good thing, if the entire enterprise wasn’t predicated on supposed “facts” that are not facts.

The biggest non-fact is the idea that students with a high school diploma have the skills a high school diploma is assumed to import.

In reality, of course, such students often have nothing like those skills.  The closest you come is with students who have taken a GED, because in at least some areas–especially math–they are actually required to know something.

In subject areas like English, the testing is a joke–essays graded by the “holistic” method that does not bother to notice errors in grammar, punctuation and spelling, “reading comprehension” questions that–well, I don’t know who grades those things, but the “comprehension” tested for does not seem to translate into an actual ability to understand what they read.

At the very bottom skill levels, students don’t need remediation as much as they need an entirely new pass through primary school,  middle school and high school.

We are talking about kids who don’t know the things we expect of fourth graders–the parts of speech, yes, but also who wrote the Gettysburg address and why, and who fought in WWII.

In composition this is worse than a mere annoyance, and the simple fact is that you cannot take a kid who has done  no real academic work at all in the past 12 years and “fix” it all in a semester of two. 

The process of learning any language–even your own–is far more complex than that, and takes more time.  It cannot be short cutted by gimmicks like vastly expanded class hours  bunched into a single semester.

The Department of Education, in the meantime, has its own narrative:  college teachers are pampered, priveleged and lazy.  They only work a few hours a week and spend the rest of the time goofing off.  Colleges and universities are money grubbing and essentially fraudulent.  They’re cunning and indefatigable at finding new ways to charge students and governments more money.

That is the only possible reason why they might require students to take more than one remedial course.  If they were really doing their jobs, students wouldn’t need more than one. 

And then look at the way they’re disorganized–the same course taught by two different teachers can be completely different, even assign different books and textbooks. 

And there’s nothing to say what the course is for or what it’s supposed to do or what the students are supposed to get out of it.

So if they want our  money, we’ll fix all that.

Fixing all that is what we’re supposed to be in the process of doing at the moment, and in aid of that there are constant semester-by-semester changes in the bolierplate for the syllabus, detailing  new “course objectives” and “measurable outcomes.”

The course objectives are written in Educationese and are only sometimes decipherable by ordinary mortals.  The measurable outcomes are often not measurable in any objective way.

The whole process is about to tip over into the surreal.

Since it doesn’t matter if anything actually gets done, what we will do, more and more–we’re doing some of it now–is to produce more and more complete paper records that things have been done, whether they have been or not.

This is what happened in the primary schools and the middle schools and the high schools, so that these days a high school diploma means exactly nothing at all.  A student with a high school diploma could know a lot and be a great writer and a decent mathemetician.  A student with a high school diploma could think that “when” is a verb and that Pearl Harbor started the Vietnam War.

Except, of course, that this isn’t exactly what happens. There are schools–Wilton, New Trier, Walt Whitman–who produced reliably competent graduates at everything but their lowest skill levels, because the parents of the students there know what is actually needed and insist on it. 

Which  means that  if you live in a very rich town, and have parents who know what to advocate for and how to advocate for it, then you’ll get a high school education.

If not–well, maybe  you’ll get lucky.

I  hear people talk endlessly on forums everywhere about “income inequality,” but although lots of them are willing to tax everybody up the smithereens to even up the score (at least temporarily), nobody is willing to fix t his.

And this is determinative.

It is already the case that where you go matters more than what you study almost universally across the board.

At the end of this latest round of bureaucratic fixes, we’ll have gutted the lower tier four years and the community colleges to the point where students who can afford nothing else or who have the grades for nothing else will be unable to  learn what they need to know. 

It won’t be taught.

If you’re interested, I put up a post just before this one giving the  list of the books read and completed in January, plus short stories and long essays from anthogies but not newspapers, magazines and websites.

There’s got to be a limit somewhere.

Anyway, the idea wasn’t  to list everything I read, but only books plus those things I read outside of the day to day routine.

And yes, I do read a lot in the way of newspapers, magazines and websites.

A couple of notes, now, on what’s up there for the end of January.

8) Mikhail Bulgakov.  The Master and Margarita.

I picked up this book because people kept telling me I wasn’t going to like it, and eventually I just got annoyed with the prejudgment.

I kept going with this book because its opening scene was just so eerily familiar.

This book is a novel of the kind that was called in the Sixties and early Seventies “fabulist.” 

The form actually existed long before then.  Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is a fabulist  novel.   

And of the fabulist novels of the Sixties, Seventies and sometimes early Eighties, only Thomas Pynchon’s first two–V and Gravity’s Rainbow–have survived. 

They’re both good books, and very wild rides–the wild ride being what a fabulist novel always is.

The Master and Margarita was written first in the 1930s and then destroyed when it got him into political trouble and then written again and then–the thing has a manuscript history that sounds  like a fabulist novel itself.

The premise of the book  is that the Devil comes to Moscow, and then…never mind.

No spoilers.

I wouldn’t know where to start.

But that first scene meant I wasn’t going to be able to stop before I’d finished, and that first scene is this:

The editor of a magazine called Godless is talking to one of his poet-contributors, insisting that the latest poem will  have to be rewritten, because, although it does vigorously oppose and despise Christianity, it seems to imply that Christ once actually existed.

Since all educated and intelligent people know this is not true, the poem will have to be rewritten before it can be published.

That’s when the Devil shows up.

What got my attention was that I have been in that conversation, many t imes.  It’s a staple of freethought, atheist and secular web sites, books and articles and discussion groups to this day.

Of course, the Devil doesn’t show up–but that seems like a quibble.

It’s the kind of thing that you just  have to accept, from the outside, is going to be completely bizarre on more levels than you can count, and some people who get interested in it get completely obsessed.

But it’s worth the time whether you want to go into all that or just take it at face value.

And it isn’t the usual kind of thing.

The last is

9) Lionel Cassel.  Libraries in the Ancient World.

It’s a very little book, covering the development of libraries up until the start of the Middle Ages, written by the kind of old-fashioned expert who is so completely absorbed in his passion that he doesn’t seem to  notice that the rest of the world exists.

It is, of course, largely archeological and anthropological, as it would have to be, and there’s a lot of information in there about how books came to look like they do know (instead of being on rolls), how alphabetical order rose and developed, and lots of other things that are  good to know just because they are.

I  personally think there aren’t enough books of this kind in the world, but that may just be me.

The first book I read in February was

10) Robert A. Heinlein.  Stormship Troopers.

But I won’t be discussing that here for reasons I’ve already made clear.

So, for the month of January, books and short stories read (not including newspapers, magazines, etc) are:

1) George Steiner. The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan.

2) Dorothy L. Sayers. Five Red Herrings. (rr)

3) C. Northcote Parkinson.  The Evolution of Political Thought.

4) Thomas Penn.  Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England.

      a) Ernest Hemingway.  “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”  (ss) (rr)

5) William Shakespeare.  Richard III.  (rr)

      b) Dorthoy Parker.  “Lolita.”  (ss)

      c) Dorothy Parker.  “Arrangement in Black and White.”  (ss) (rr)

6) C.S. Lewis.  An Experiment in Criticism.

7) John Fonte.  Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others?

8) Michael Bulgakov.  The Master and Margarita.

9) Lionel Cassel.  Libraries in the Ancient World.

This is my first day back in class, and I’m completely frantic–the beginning of the term is ALWAYS a mess, and they ALWAYS change the boilerplate for the syllabus.

Anyway, I can’t do a blog post today, but I did get the following in e-mail from Robert.

It connects to yesterday’s post, so I throw it out there for your consideration. 

I won’t tell you, at the moment, how much I do and don’t agree with.

It comes in two parts.

I.

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