Christmas

Last Christmas, I wrote a long column in which I objected most strenuously to the whole season. I consider it my best and most important blog post to date, and I made several reasoned arguments against the Christmas season, the foremost of which is that it sucks and I hate it. At the mall this week, however, I was dismayed to discover that my objections have gone entirely unheeded. Unaccountably, Christmas has returned. Come on, people! Is no one reading this thing?

If this blog has railed against one thing from the outset it has been against the hypocrisy of compulsory sentiment, and nothing so exemplifies this condition as a visit to the shopping mall or supermarket this time of year. The same dozen songs, endlessly repeated (however often they are re-recorded - I see that Bob Dylan has an album of Christmas standards out); the same message (be merry, or else); the same visage of the Merry Leader (Santa, not Jesus) and the incessant reminder that he is watching you and knows when you are sleeping and when you are awake. There's an Orwellian thought for you. I say again that in the seven weeks separating Halloween from Christmas we get a small taste of what it’s like to live in North Korea. Merry! Merry! Merry! Happy! Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Merry Leader is Watching You And Expects You to Conform.

And, please, don't get me started again about the clichéd holiday specials ("Next week, on a very special episode of Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons learn the true meaning of Christmas" etc.) and the vapid holiday films with trailer tag lines like, "This Christmas, the only things some families can stand more than being together, is being apart."

Come on now, Broad, you middle-aged grump. It's not all bad, is it? Well, I admit that I don't mind some Christmas music. Emile-Claire Barlow does a thumpingly great version of "Little Jack Frost" (if you have iTunes, download it now – you won't regret the 99 cents) and, of course, there's Dean Martin's effortless take on "Baby, It's Cold Outside." But these are songs about winter rather than Christmas per se. In my view, there's only one authentically good modern Christmas song: Fairytale of New York, by the seminal Irish band the Pogues and the late Kirsty MacColl. It’s about a drunk and a druggie and the sentiments of genuine affection (and contempt - she calls him a "scumbag" and a "maggot", he calls her an "old slut on junk") that they share at Christmastime. Brings a tear to these jaded eyes of mine.

I find myself in complete accord with my Christian friends who regard the season as too commercial. There's nothing new about this complaint – C.S. Lewis made it half a century ago and he wasn't the first. Indeed there is something cold and crass about the idea that we will express our affection for family and friends once per year through the mandatory purchase of commodities that are in most cases both unwanted and unneeded. In many families it's reached the point where people simply tell each other what to buy for them, which raises an obvious objection about cutting out the middle-man. I know, of course, that for many parents Christmas is a time of genuine joy — many children love it — but let us not forget, too, that for many parents of modest or little economic wherewithal Christmas is a time of genuine anxiety. Young children are consumer aware but not, generally, comprehending of their parents' economic circumstances. And let's not forget that some parents, too, are positively insane this time of year. Remember the Cabbage Patch Doll riots?

Judging the volume of e-mails I received (about a dozen), my blog last year was my most widely read ever. After it was published I was approached by a couple of activist-minded students who had seen it and who were preparing to petition my workplace over its overt displays of Christian Christmas symbols. This, they felt, created a "hostile" atmosphere for non-Christian students, faculty, and staff. Would I join them? My reply was "certainly not." Apart from the obvious objection that it's rather silly of anyone to voluntarily work at or to attend a Catholic institution and then act surprised to discover Christian symbols there, I explained to them that my affinity for the Grinch goes only so far. Like him, I find the season loud and crass. But we have an emphatic parting of ways over the fact that he believes that it's his right to stop other people from celebrating it, too.

The fact that the students ­— and they are by no means alone in this — could not differentiate between these two worlds-apart positions, is indicative of how badly our educational system often handles such things. Out of mistaken notions of "respect" for differing worldviews, many schools have decided that it's best if people don't express their differing worldviews at all. But respect, of all things, is a sentiment that cannot be made mandatory. It emerges, if it emerges at all, through a process of engagement — which must necessarily include argument and disputation among people who do not always agree. The efforts at this time of year to ban carols and lighted trees and harmless expressions such as "Merry Christmas" are not merely silly but insidious. They undermine rather than promote discussion between faiths and between people of faith and nonbelievers.

Memorization

Last month, my wife and I moved. Moving is best done regularly or not at all, and after the events of the past four weeks, the idea of spending about fifty years in one house, dying there, and then forcing the inheritors of my estate to go through my decades of accumulated crap has a certain appeal. Take that, you vultures.

At any rate, I consider myself a modest adherent of Robertson Davies's admonishment to "keep everything." Amongst the discoveries in our attic — my prized comic books, located at last! — was a pile of undergraduate papers and tests. I re-read a few of them, and was struck by the fact that Graham, aged twenty, was in some ways a better writer than he is now. He was highly imitative of whatever he was reading at the time, but a careful and economical writer and one with certain spring in his sentences. He might have made a good novelist had he worked at it. He didn't. In fact, re-reading the essays now, I see quite clearly that he was also a remarkably lazy researcher, and much of what he wrote comes across as likeable but insubstantial, like fast food or a hollow Easter-egg. One senses from the remarks of various professors that they were more amused than impressed, and occasionally one saw through the whole stylistic juggling act and called it for what it was. In 1991, Graham received a mark of 40% for a very clever but paper-thin review of Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms. He was very angry at the time, especially since another professor had just given him a 90% on a similarly conceived book review. And here's an important point, students: re-reading the essays now, and reflecting upon the professors' comments, I realize that it was the first professor, and not the second, who was not only right, but who really cared about twenty-year old Graham's academic progress. The second exemplified what the recently departed Theodore Sizer called the "disengagement compact" – the all-too-common understanding between teacher and student that they won't demand much of each other.

Another thing: among my discoveries was a mid-term test I wrote in 4^th year. (Some years had passed: young Graham went through the academic grist mill and emerged as the person I will now refer to as "I".) The course was "The Intellectual History of Modern Japan", taught by a great professor, Barry Steben, who was very probably the person most responsible for my decision to pursue history professionally. His was a straightforward pedagogy. He arrived with a sheath of notes and an idea and started talking (with you, not at you); you finished each class feeling winded but with a sense of real accomplishment –the kind of really intellectually demanding classes that would be offered by more professors if the punitive instrument of the teaching evaluation weren't forever being dangled over their heads.

His tests were hard. Here's a typical essay question: "Describe the structure of loyalty under the Tokugawa order, giving the name in Romanized Japanese of each major node in the authority hierarchy. Explain some of the principles by which this order functioned at its different levels, and make some mention of potential contradictions within the society (or contradictions between the system and the actual realities of Japanese society) that contributed to its collapse at the end of the Tokugawa period. In outlining the structure of the system, you should explain why the concept of direct, unmediated loyalty to Heaven was considered subversive."

A curious thing: I scored 11/12 on the multiple choice and 23/24 on the essay question, for a cumulative mark of 94%. The professor felt that my answer to and explanation for one question was good enough for a 2% bonus, and thus my final mark came to 96%. Well done indeed. That was the highest test mark I ever received in university.

Now, the point, and for anyone who teaches history, it's a sobering though perhaps unsurprising one. Were I to write that test tomorrow, I would unquestionably fail it – with a mark of (probably) zero on the essay and, presumably, results according to chance expectations on the multiple choice, for an average of 6%. So, here I am, a professional historian, and I would fail a history test that I aced fifteen years ago. So much for the standard claim that we study history in order to accumulate facts that will aid us in the present, or the hope of those dour and fusty antediluvians at the Dominion Institute that if a kid can pass a history quiz he can be deemed well educated. As I've argued elsewhere, several conditions would have to be met for this to be true, not the least of which is that we'd actually have to remember what we're taught for more than a few months. Few of us can.

To illustrate: a few weeks back I was mildly irritated but also unsurprised when not one of twenty students in my 4^th year history seminar could correctly explain Confederation to me, and last week I found that none could tell me anything worthwhile about the French Canadian nationalist Henri Bourassa, and this after they all had completed a Canadian history survey. (Shame, senior students, for not looking it up – something you can do much more easily than Graham could at your age.) But the fault isn't really theirs: the overwhelming majority of us simply don't recall facts that we don't regularly require. Now, I happen to believe that a degree of cultural literacy is important. As one friend and colleague of mine has often observed, if you're studying modern European history and don't know what the French Revolution is, you're in trouble. The problem is this: the methods of education that the Dominion Institute types want —methods that center on rote memorization — are the ones least likely to produce cultural literacy in the long term. And they remain, despite the pretensions of the professoriate (including myself) to be teaching "critical thinking", at the core of our educational system. Oh, I tell my students that I want them to think about what I'm saying in lecture, but when mid-term and exam time rolls around what I'm looking for is accurate recall of raw information.

What Steben understood is that the curriculum was taught not just for its own sake but also and perhaps predominantly to cultivate a love of learning and scholarly habits of mind. I was fortunate to have half a dozen or so professors who saw it that way, and who made an authentic effort to do more than just pay lip service to this ideal. So, yes, I'd fail that test if I took it tomorrow. But give me two weeks to prepare for it, and I'll beat the pants off Graham, aged 25, without blinking. I have something that he was just beginning to cultivate: an understanding of disciplinary methodology. This is the second most important thing we can teach our students. (The first is ethics.) Knowing the name of the first Prime Minister and the date of Confederation is, well, trivial, by comparison.

Pedagogy

When people meet me for the first time, it is usually not the Aristotelian sophistication of my intellect, but, rather, the nearly Herculean perfection of my physique that positively arrests their attention. "How can I be more like you?" they ask, before adding, inevitably with a tone of remorsefulness, something along the lines of, "but I dream…"

I kid, I kid. I am, in fact, balding, gap-toothed, approximately porpoise shaped, and with each passing year new hairs begin to sprout from alarming places where hairs have no business being. This does not, unfortunately, include the top of my head. I am the apotheosis of every fitness magazine's "before" picture.

Having said all this, you are reading, comrades, not just the musings of a PhD, but a scholar whose arsenal of accreditations includes the necessary classroom work to be a certified personal fitness trainer. It's true. It is something I did back when I was young and fit, before the crushing gravitational pull of academe shortened and broadened my physique. And, as The Simpson's once said of becoming a police officer, you don't get to be a personal trainer overnight: it takes a solid weekend of training.

At any rate, my interest in matters concerning personal fitness remains, tucked away like a half-finished novel, awaiting better and fitter days. (On the issue of half-finished novels, incidentally: old friends can confirm that, age 17, I actually wrote a novel about a high school girl who falls in love with a classmate who turns about to be a vampire. I kid you not. But I thought the idea was stupid and clichéd and never pursued it after the 11^th grade. Well, it was stupid and clichéd. But it turns out that stupid and clichéd can make you a billionaire.)

Okay: the point. Personal trainers will argue interminably about optimal exercise protocols for their clients: should they do cardio first, and then weights? Or weights first, and then cardio? Or is cardio even necessary, if weight training elevates the heart rate sufficiently and for long enough? And when they do weights, should it be with free weights or machines? What is correct number of sets and reps and at what speed should be they performed? The journals of exercise physiology and fitness magazines are full of articles on these issues. But these discussions often ignore the fact that for most people, the real problem isn't deciding on an optimal exercise program, it's that they aren't exercising at all, and that almost any safe exercise program would do them a world of good. Shiny new programs that purport to make exercise fun can attract people for a certain amount of time, but gyms make a killing off of members who pay their monthly dues and never go. What sedentary people need, is to be persuaded that to be physically active is a vital part of living well.

The relationship to pedagogical debates over optimal teaching methods couldn't be clearer. Open any teaching journal and you'll find articles contrasting this method of teaching to that, and in the past ten or fifteen years most of the discussion has been about how technology should be deployed in the classrooms. But these debates fast reach a point of diminishing or inconsequential returns, when the real issue is that many of our students are the equivalent of sedentary North Americans who have gym memberships but don't really use them. (Graham's Rules of Pedagogy #1: It Avails Us Nothing to Idealize or Demonize Our Students.)

I don't deny that the question of how one teaches happens to be important as far as any given class goes, but the student engagement one achieves through technological wizardry and over-the-top pedagogical theatrics probably lasts no longer than the class itself, and may actually discourage learning in the absence of such wizardry and theatrics. (This is of special significance at a time when the evidence is conclusive that students simply aren't reading as many books as they used to.) The goal of any professor worthy of the name is to produce students who can go on learning after their formal education has ended. For those purposes the question of how to teach is far less import than the question of why we teach and why students should want to learn. The answer, of course, is because a good education, which is one that leaves us with a love for learning and method for doing it, can be a vital part of what it means to live flourishingly. But when our own pedagogical discussions center on such matters as how Twitter can make learning fun, or what the correct number of PowerPoint slides should be, it brings to mind the parable of the Zen master, pointing towards the moon, who looks down to discover that his students are staring at his finger.

Blogging

I like to claim that I live without bigotry, but in fact I harbour a secret prejudice. I loathe opinion columnists, those hacks who get paid to spew at the mouth two or three times a month on issues about which they have no expertise. As a professor of history, I consider it my very great responsibility to get my facts straight before lecturing to my thirty or so students every week, but there are opinion columnists who make a living by pontificating to tens of thousands without, as near as I can tell, giving a moment’s consideration to what they’re saying. Indeed, there are certain well-known columnists who I read with great devotion - not because I like them, but because it has the same appeal as a horrific and bloody roadside car wreck: can’t look at it, can’t look away. They are everything good scholars should not be: certain, smug, self-righteous and, worst of all, consciously contrarian — making arguments that they know to be false because it amuses them to do so.

Looking back over this blog’s fifty columns, I have begun to see that coming off as certain, smug, and self-righteous probably is an inevitable consequence of regularly writing about one’s views. I admit that, in person, I can exhibit these traits, too, but I’ve been making a concerted effort to do better (it would help if others would at least try to act smarter than they are). Here, on this blog, however, matters are different: when sharing one’s opinions without rebuttal it’s hard to avoid coming off as very sure of oneself. And the very curious thing is this: I am not - hence the title of the blog itself. I can, however, claim with good conscience that I have never, at least not on Measure of Doubt, argued a position that I do not believe for the sake of doing so.

At any rate, the whole thing has been immensely therapeutic, and it has lasted much longer than I had anticipated. Much to my own amazement, I have fifty posts — some 41,000 words — under my belt. As I said in one of the earliest posts, I’m doing this for my own sake, not in anticipation of anyone reading it. However, while I don’t keep tracking statistics, gradually I have discovered that people actually are reading this thing: friends, colleagues, enemies, students, and even random passers-by.

So, up for another fifty? I am if you are.

PS

I would like to announce the creation of a second blog: Suspended Judgment, which will be devoted solely to the discussion of teaching-related issues. Already reading Measure of Doubt? Never fear - for now, at least, nothing will appear there that won’t also be here. The point is to cleave off a small part of cyberspace strictly for my professional work.

Dinner

For this, my fiftieth post, I promised to turn to the eternal question, the one that has bedeviled human beings since the first of our protohuman ancestors vocalized a thought, namely: “What’s for dinner?” I wonder how you would feel if I told you that Dawkins, pictured on the left, was on the menu.

Did that thought fill you with revulsion? It did me, because I rather like the little girl, even though she bites our feet and tracks slightly moist kitty litter onto the bed in the morning. But, really. Why not eat her? Why not brain the little sucker, bleed her, skin her, cut her into parts, hang her up to let her age (the meat we eat is decomposing, you know - after all, rigor mortis makes for tough chewing), then joint her, and cook her up in some olive oil, sprinkled with rosemary, sea salt, and freshly ground pepper? Yum yum. Why make pets of some animals, but imprison, fatten up, slaughter, and then chomp down others? Intelligence cannot be the dividing line — she’s is not very bright, trust me — so why should cuteness be?

I have been troubled by this question for some years now. On what warrant do we claim the moral right to select certain animals for food and lethal medical experimentation, but not others? I have no satisfactory answer to the question. Clearly the mere fact that something benefits us does not make it moral. I long ago concluded that higher-order primates, our evolutionary cousins, must absolutely be left alone, regardless of any impediment it puts in place to scientific research. We share something on the order of 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, for example, and I can locate no rational defense for performing experiments on them, or for making them perform circus tricks for us, that, were we to be consistent, wouldn’t also apply to certain human beings with cognitive impairments.

Anyway, dinner. About a year ago, my wife and I made a quite conscious decision to become flexitarians - consumers of a mostly vegetarian diet who aren’t dogmatic about occasionally eating meat. We reduced our consumption of meat, poultry, pork, and fish from about six dinners per week to one, and did the same with lunches. (Breakfast was mostly vegetarian anyway.) Some flexitarians would say that we need to go further still, which is why I prefer Mark Bittman’s term “lessmeattarianism” to describe our diet. We did this for a variety of reasons.

First, we are utterly convinced that industrial meat production is cruel to the animal and environmentally damaging. On these grounds alone, there would be sufficient cause to stop or hugely reduce meat eating. Add to that the following fact: the average steak or piece of pork or poultry from the supermarket, shrink-wrapped onto styrofoam, doesn’t taste like anything - it's basically a dead delivery vehicle for spices and sauces. Might as well save the money.

When we do eat meat now, we try to select it carefully from those rare vendors whose practices, we believe, are more ethical and ecologically sustainable, and which result in a better-tasting critter. (We have abandoned our former favourite fast-food, sushi, altogether: either it’s fake, the seafood equivalent of McDonald’s — that bright red tuna is dyed, people — or real but involving endangered fish flown in from the Pacific, in which case it’s environmentally catastrophic.) I realize that some vegans in particular would rebut that we are therefore simply reducing the amount of murder that we’re complicit in, but, as I’m constantly reminding my moral relativist students, the number of corpses one generates does matter.

Our second reason for reducing meat consumption concerns matters of health. While we’re convinced that there’s no particular evidence that eating meat generally is bad for your health, the enormous quantity of meat that most Westerners eat almost certainly is, if only because it comes at the expense of other things that are good for us, which is to say, plants. The dismissal of vegetables as "food's food" used to be a joke around our house, but no more, and people who don't eat them would be amazed with how good they taste if you prepare them properly.

And what has been the consequences of all this? Well, for one, we’re better and more imaginative cooks. I’ve lost 14 pounds by this expedient alone. My resting heart rate is down. My blood pressure is down. My cholesterol is down. Our grocery bill is down, too - by about one-third per month.

But, for me, at least, there’s something lacking. An important point of any personal ethics is that you should never ask someone to do something that you wouldn’t be willing, in theory, at least, to do yourself. (Educators take note.) Therefore, I feel that it’s rapidly coming to the point where I’m going to have to get my hands dirty or else give up meat altogether. That means that I either have to try hunting or at the very least witness the slaughter of a cow, pig, or chicken first hand. I made this point earlier when I discussed the death penalty - that people who support the death penalty, it seems to me, have an obligation to support public executions or at the very least must witness an execution sometime. The people calling for blood, I said, don’t get to shield their eyes from it when it’s spilled. And the people eating the flesh of animal shouldn’t get to pretend that it’s something other than what it actually is.

Psychics

Here’s a headline that you don’t see very often: “Psychic Wins Lottery.” And why not? If their powers of divination are real, then that sort of headline should be as trivial and commonplace as ones about Senators having sex with staffers. Moreover, clairvoyants should be cleaning up in casinos, racetracks, stock exchanges, and on their SATs. But they never seem to. Well, they say, we only use our gift for good, not evil. The powers of prognostication come screeching to a halt when personal gain is involved - and the Psychic Friends Network, I suppose, is a nonprofit organization. But let us take the point as granted. That being the case, why not win the lottery and donate the proceeds to charity?

A couple of years before she died, my mother, on a lark, went to a psychic for a reading, and returned slightly surprised by the accuracy with which the alleged medium could divine the details of her life. Reviewing a tape of the proceedings later – this was provided for an additional fee, of course – she was rather less impressed. Upon a second glance, it was clear that the alleged psychic was doing nothing more than the crudest kind of cold reading and was not even very good at it. Her supposed “hits” were actually generalities or elaborations upon information that my mother had herself volunteered. And would it be grotesque of me to mention that the alleged psychic failed to note a rather big event on my mother’s horizon - the imminent discovery of a nearly 100% lethal form of cancer?

Some psychics, quite clearly, are entirely conscious charlatans. Others, I think, really believe they have some sort of gift. By way of comparison, a British psychologist named Christopher French did an interesting study of dowsers, and demonstrated quite clearly that none of them could locate water at a level above what we’d expect by random chance. A curious thing, though: the dowers themselves concluded that it was it the test that was faulty, not their alleged powers, even though these had conclusively failed them. In any case, no psychic or alleged mindreader has yet met managed to demonstrate their abilities under reasonable scientific controls. Nor have they have been anecdotally impressive, in my opinion. Not one among America’s psychics gave us a clear warning of the events of September 11th, 2001? None among the mystics in that most superstitious of cities, New Orleans, saw Katrina coming? Is it too much to ask for just one accurate, specific prediction of a forthcoming global event? No, the powers don’t work that way, they say. The spirits of the departed are with us and sending us messages, but, for some reason, the messages arrive in the form of generalities and banalities or in messages left in tea leaves and Tarot Cards. They never arrive as clear as day: “Your grandmother is saying, ‘I left the meatball recipe tucked into page 580 of the Joy of Cooking. Also, go with the 5-year, 6% GIC instead of the Mutual Fund. Trust me on this. Weather is terrific - wish you were here. Love, Grandma. P.S., my new e-mail is grandma@afterlife.net.’ ”

Polls show that about half of people believe in psychic phenomenon, past lives, reincarnation and the like, but, then, half of people also believe that the sun goes around the Earth, and a Harris poll from 2003 found that more than a third of people believe in astrology. In other words, a lot of people will believe in anything. Allow me to observe that since about 80 percent of people in the United States and Canada are Christians, the simultaneous belief by about half of them in such things as Horoscopes and reincarnation and spirit photography means, as I have said before, that many among the allegedly religious haven’t got a clue what their own churches teach.

Belief in paranormal phenomena tends to decline as education rises. People with graduate degrees are much less likely to believe in psychics and astrology and whatnot than, say, your average high-school dropout. I point this out because it reinforces my belief that education tends to cultivate the rational mind. Admittedly, I have met some smart people who have told me some spooky things about psychics that I can’t explain. But I do know that elaborate deception, trickery, or the failure of one’s own comprehension of an event are vastly more probable than the idea that a weirdo with a deck of cards or a crystal ball can violate the physical laws of the universe - but never win the lottery, too.

Nonetheless, some people will say that they do believe in this sort of thing, and that in times of trouble it gives them great comfort to drop some money on a reading by Madame Mysteriouso and her crystal ball. Who am I to rain on their paranormal parade? Fair enough - whatever gets you through the night. But who are they to rain on my rationalist parade, to make me smile and nod while they profess their belief systems without giving me a moment to express mine? The possession of any belief carries with it a vital corollary: you can believe whatever you want, provided you leave other people alone. And if you can’t keep it to yourself, if you absolutely must tell it on the mountain, then you have to be willing to listen to others in return, and sometimes you aren’t going to like what they have to say.

I want more than anecdote. I want real proof - the kind of proof that would pass muster in a peer-reviewed journal. If you tell me that there’s a ghost in your house, I want cameras from multiple angles to capture the moment that the candlestick moves on its own and Newton’s Second Law falls. If you tell me that there are spirits all around us, I want scientific instruments to measure their presence, not some crank with a crystal ball telling me that somebody whose whose name that starts with “M”, possibly Mary or Margaret or Melissa, and who might have had some sort of illness related possibly somehow to the chest area, and who possibly passed in the last few years, is here with us now, and wants to send me some messages that could have come from any greeting card. Please.

Want to really impress me? I’ll pick a word at random from the Oxford English Dictionary, write it down, and seal it in an envelope. Get your psychic to tell me what the word is.

Addresses

What follows is the preliminary text of an address I will deliver to incoming undergraduates during their orientation the week after next. I believe that the most important quality a teacher can have is empathy. As time passes, however, I wonder more and more if I’m able to empathize with teenagers. How would I, at age 18, have received this talk? I’m honestly not sure. Let me know what you think. I borrowed the bit about students today and when they’re going to be retiring from Ken Robinson’s talk at TED, and I’ll say so in the speech itself when I deliver it. GB.



My Address to the Undergraduates
September 2009

Probably you’ve heard people say that a BA means absolutely nothing - that everyone has one. It’s not true. Only about one-in-five Canadians have a BA. In your age group only one person in three is in university. Those numbers are going up but it will be a long time before it reaches one-in-two. It’s also not true that a BA doesn’t count for anything in the job market. The job market is tough for everybody. You wouldn’t believe what it’s like for PhDs. A friend of mine with a PhD just spent the summer working in a bookstore. I kid you not. It’s rather frightening, isn’t it? But the statistical fact - and we have study after study to prove this - is that, on average, the higher your education the higher your lifetime earnings. It isn’t always true, but it’s true on average. A person with a BA will, on average, make more money than a person who has only a college diploma, and that person will tend to make more money than someone just high school.

But what I want to suggest today is that there’s a lot more to it than that. It has to do with the real value of an education in the liberal arts and social sciences, and it’s a value that is constantly under attack and that we have to do more to defend. And I want you to think of it this way. The purpose of an education isn’t just to help you get you a job in three or four years. It’s to help you lead a good life - which means that your education has to serve you over the course of your life, not just in the years immediately after graduation. But the problem is this. Most of you are going to be retiring sometime around 2060. I’ll say that again. Most of you will be retiring sometime around 2060. No one in 1910 could have predicted what the world would be like in 1960, and no one in 2010 can make that prediction about 2060. One thing I can promise you, though: most of the information that you accumulate over the next four years will be forgotten by then. If you take my Canadian history class next year you won’t remember much of it by 2060, and the same goes for most of your other classes. I took a class in medieval literature. It was wonderful. I’d take it again in a second if I could. And I’d need to, because I’ve forgotten every word of it.

So you might ask, then, what’s the point? Some people would say - and you’re going to hear a lot of this sort of thing - that all you learn in university is a lot of useless nonsense that gets you a useless degree. But they’re wrong. We need to stop thinking of an education as merely the accumulation of more facts that will help you get a job. We teach history and philosophy and literature and all of the other subjects not just because they’re rewarding in their own right, but because studying them teaches us how to think, and learning to think well is one of the keys to the good life. This isn’t a new idea: it’s one of the oldest ideas in our tradition: it goes back to the one of the very first institutions of learning in the Western world, the Academy, in ancient Athens, where the motto was “know thyself.”

But it seems like an odd idea, doesn’t it? Teaching someone how to think. Because you’re sitting there saying, “Well, I know how to do that already.” But consider it like this: nearly everyone can move their arms and legs. But that doesn’t mean that they can play professional sports. Playing professional sports takes long and arduous training. It’s the same with thinking. Everyone can do it, but not everyone does it well, and you can learn to be better at it.

If we do our job right - and if you do yours - over the next four years, through the study of the arts and social sciences, you’ll learn to think better and more creatively, to reflect, to ask questions, and to find answers on your own. Because, whatever else happens, those are skills that are needed in the job market, and those are qualities that that will serve you over the course of your life, and it’s one thing we can say for certain that the world will need in 2060, and that the world needs more of today.

Well, you may be asking, how do I do that? How do I become a better thinker? Going to a good school helps - and you’ve done that. There are professors here who can stand alongside any teachers and scholars anywhere in the world. Second, you have to take advantage of what the school has to offer. The main difference between high school and university is this: here, you are joining a community of scholarship. Your professors aren’t just teachers - they’re scholars who are actively engaged in research and publication in their field. You are being invited to join that community, and that means your education is for the most part self-directed. We try to point our students in the right direction - whether or not they go there is up to them. And that means that you’re going to have to work hard, and that means putting in a lot of time.

But, fortunately, because you’re young people, time is something you have a lot of. Time is the greatest asset you possess; it is also the one asset you have less of with every passing minute. And so let me leave you today by encouraging you to use your time here as well as you possibly can.

Thank You.

Signs

Last summer, an atheist organization put some rather silly signs on buses, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, as if riders were going to get off at the next stop and torch the nearest cathedral. As I’ll argue in the near future, it isn’t nonbelievers that the faithful need fret about, but the damage being done to religion by some among the faithful themselves. On my way to work — depending on which way I go — I pass probably a dozen or more church signs day after day, and it strikes me that, in many cases, nobody is working harder to keep people from churches than the churches themselves. Does the local corner parish really think that “Exercise your heart: walk with God!” emblazoned on an ugly roadside rental sign is going to get me through the door this Sunday?

Over the course of the summer, I’ve made note of a few such signs. These range from the inane and the unfunny (“Hot outside? We’re prayer-conditioned!”), to depressingly asinine (“if you’re going in the wrong direction, God allows U-turns”); and, perhaps most commonly, the straightforwardly menancing: (“Pray now or Pay later”.) My favourite in the latter category is this one: “Afraid of burning? Ask Jesus for Son block.” Nothing like the threat of torture to make people see things your way.

From time to time, I admit, I’ve noticed church signs that struck me as vaguely clever. Some years back, a local adult video store put up a sign that read, “membership has its privileges.” The adjacent church countered with, “membership here has its privileges, too.” Well done. Then again, this was the Church of England, which holds that pretty much everybody is saved without effort, so it’s not clear what those privileges are. (The comedian Eddie Izzard has observed that a Church of England inquisition would give heretics a choice between “cake or death”, and then be surprised that there was “such a run on cake.”)

In a summer of looking, I found signs that were coy, some that were smug, some that were straightforwardly hateful, but never once did I see one that was profound. And why not? With one of the great works of English literature — the King James Bible — and millennia of theological thought before them, surely they can do better than something that sounds like it was written by the runner-up for a job at a greeting card company. The threatening ones, at least, had the virtue of sincerity, and I’ll take “Pray now or pay later” over “Rainbows are God painting" any day.

Taken together, the manner in which so many churches sell themselves these days suggests something slightly pathetic and out-of-touch, like those television and movie-trailer ads that use the latest slang to get teens to stop using drugs. (In my day, they told us that staying clean was “rad” and “totally awesome”, and while I never did drugs I was tempted to start, just to hit back at whatever boneheads thought it was a good idea to condescend to me and my friends.)

One needn’t accept the metaphysical assumptions upon which churches are based to recognize their importance as social institutions, making contributions to the conversation about how we ought to lead our lives. It is therefore painful to see so many of them reduced to hawking their wares like the most undignified used car salesman. There is the rule about books and covers, of course, but a lack of imagination and whiff of desperation in exteriors seldom bodes well for the interior contents.

I could go on and on. Just last week I saw, “Christians never meet for the last time” - in my books, at least, that's not a selling point if it includes people who think up slogans like that. Same for, “prayer is the key to Heaven’s door”, since keys can lock doors, too. And just this morning I found a blog — defunct now, sadly — that catalogued crummy church signs. My favourite is: “Heaven is not Burger King. You can’t have it your way.”

Damn. And here I was hoping for extra pickles upon arrival.

Orientation

A mentor of mine said recently that I was wrong when I told my students that the purpose of education was to get smarter. No, he said, the purpose of education is to get wiser. The difference, you ask? A smart person knows when he’s right; a wise one knows when to say it.

I raise the point because last week I received an intriguing invitation to address the incoming class of undergraduates during their September orientation. I'm going to do it, but I'm not sure what to say. Certainly not that I’ve always been mildly irritated by "O-Week" – the initiation of first year students to university life. Twenty years ago, I attended the first few events of my own and then headed for the hills. How I hated it. Everything about it: the binge drinking; the compulsory “fun” (two words that should never go together); the uniformity of, well, uniforms; the inane group cheers; the shabby slogans; the unimaginative activities; the inculcation of "school spirit" amongst students who have not yet had time to decide for themselves if their school is any good, struck me then and strikes me now as antithetical to one of the larger purposes of university education: to produce independent thinkers.

On my very first day, twenty years ago, a trio of third-year students, complete with painted faces and enormous excesses of personality, made me sing the national anthem – readers of this blog know my feelings about that song – before handing over $20 for my "mandatory frosh kit", which turned out to be a bag of flyers, pamphlets, and junk being freely distributed elsewhere. Well, hell. I left high school hoping to escape precisely that sort of nonsense and precisely those sorts of people, and there I was in the thick of it two months later.

Over the years, I’ve had a great many students, and even organizers of these events, tell me that they found none of it "fun" in the least. But try being the one who says, "Actually, I don’t want to paint my face and wear this t-shirt another day and chant this, well, rather insipid and offensive cheer. And my roommates are troglodytes who won’t do dishes and think it’s funny not to flush the toilet. This isn’t quite what I was promised at the University Fair, where all the talk was about cultivating the mind and the human spirit."

A few years back, during "O-Week", members of my former faculty's "student fun team" scrawled "Social Science: the Biggest and Best Faculty!" in chalk on the sidewalk outside of our oppressively ugly faculty building. (Some wag respond by writing: "Would you like fries with that?" underneath.) Later, I saw students practicing a cheer on the same theme. But a good education in the social sciences should actually call such conclusions into question. A proper slogan might read: "Objective, long-term consideration of the available evidence leads to the highly tentative conclusion that for a significant portion of motivated undergraduates in the social sciences, their undergraduate experience is, on the whole, intellectually fulfilling. More longitudinal studies are required to determine whether or not social science degrees are of actual utility in the rapidly-reorienting job market in terms of both starting salary and lifetime earnings. " But try making that into a cheer.

Anyway, there I will be, during O-Week, and when the time comes I hope I'll have the wisdom to not say what I'd really like to say, which is that if you’ve come to university to learn to think for yourself, now is the time to start. In fact, consider O-Week your first test.

Twenty years. Did you catch that part? It was twenty years ago this month that I hopped on bike, rode up to the university, and chose my classes. English, History, Political Science, Philosophy, and Psychology (stupidly, I did not take French.) I remember all the profs. They seemed unfathomably old and learned to me, but I know now that two of them were ABDs, and a good deal younger than I am now. Twenty years. I can scarcely believe those words as I type them. And so I've decided that there is one thing I'm going to say for certain five weeks from today, and it's this:

"You’re seventeen or eighteen. I don’t mean to condescend, but it’s hard to appreciate at that age the rapidity of the passage of time. Twenty years ago this week I started university. The intervening years have passed so quickly I can hardly describe it. I still have projects, left over from high school, that I’ve been meaning to work on. For me, there have been good things and bad things in the past twenty years. I wouldn’t go back, even if I could, but I can tell you that I would like an extra twenty years before me. So my essential message to all of you is this: the greatest asset you possess is time. It is also the one asset that you have less of with every passing second. It is therefore urgent that you use your time well. If there's one thing that you derive from your education, I hope it's a better understanding of how to do that."

Time. Hear that ticking sound, students? It gets louder with every passing second.

Conferences

I sometimes caution my senior students, thinking about grad school, that the jump-on-the-sofa passion they feel for history may not survive the first few weeks of their MA year. If their prior experience is like those months of fun and flirtation at the beginning of a relationship, grad school is like moving in together, and discovering that the object of your affection puts ketchup on eggs and breaks wind in her sleep. The love may persist, but you have to put up with a lot.

Take academic conferences. Please. My own dissertation advisor once opined that conferences, like wisdom teeth, were best suffered through only once and preferably in a stupor; renewing the former metaphor, they also illustrate how one's own infatuation is often the source of bafflement and tedium to others. Recall Walt Whitman's description of his own encounter with a scholarly lecture in this famous poem from Leaves of Grass:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Look around the room sometime at an academic conference, fellow scholars. What do you notice? Most people aren't paying attention. In fact, it's probably the case that, much of the time, you aren't either. Oh, there are good papers and there are bad, but, admit it: after lunch in particular it's hard to stay focused on someone reading a sheath of pages excerpted from their latest book or article. I try to take notes when other conference presenters are talking, but I confess that these often degenerate into "to do" lists, especially in those too-frequent cases when the speakers seem to have learned nothing about the art of public speaking in their long careers. During a conference I attended recently, I saw academics nodding off, chit-chatting, reading the program, sorting their wallets, and, in the case of some younger ones, texting, while papers were being presented. I looked up during the middle of my own to notice that most of the audience looked, as Whitman put it, tired and sick. I felt a certain empathy - it was a data-heavy paper and I was slightly tongue-tied and uncharacteristically nervous. Quite reflexively, however, I slipped into professor mode and said, "So…everyone with me? Everyone good? Any questions up this point? Okay, I'll go on then." There were visible looks of annoyance. It was a very professorial thing to do, but, then, this audience of professors was doing the very things they chastise their students for doing in class.

In the question period that followed, I received not one useful question or piece of commentary, but I departed that day with an extra line on my CV and, more importantly, a hefty honorarium and a cheque to cover my flight, meals, and accommodation. In academe, we call this expanding the frontiers of knowledge. Others can be forgiven for seeing it as their tax dollars at work.

Helpfulness

Last week, I spent the afternoon with a book called 8 To Be Great: The 8-Traits that Lead to Great Success, by Richard St. John. It's a two-hour read and I don't regret buying it, but you can probably guess what's in it from the title alone. The author interviewed or read about several hundred successful people (call me typically academic, but he never actually defines "success") and concludes that they have eight things in common. These include passion for what they do, a strong work ethic, good ideas, perseverance, and so forth. No real surprises.

Like many self-help books, it's written in that cloying, indifferently punctuated, stream-of-consciousness style that Strunk and White call "breezy" (example: "A cabin in the woods! Hey, maybe that's what I need. I mean there are so many distractions here in the city I'm having real troubling concentrating long enough to finish this section on concentration.") It's amiable enough, I suppose, but there's no particular reason to read it. There's a three-minute video on TED and a six-minute video on the author's website that sums up everything you need to know. The rest of the book consists mainly of supporting quotations from well-known people, followed by a brief and breezy annotation by the author.

Is this sort of advice actually helpful? It's hard to say. Most self-help books suffer from selection bias, and this is no exception. The author has interviewed the rich and famous and sorted their qualities into categories. But to be meaningful, an equivalent study would have to be conducted of unsuccessful people: bankrupt businesspeople, failed inventors, forgotten athletes, unpublished writers, penniless actors and artists, hated teachers, anonymous academics, and the like. We might very well find (in fact, I'd be surprised if we didn't) that many of them possessed the same passion, work ethic, focus, and perseverance as those who succeeded, but failed to succeed all the same, and for a very simple reason: because the universe doesn't care about us. In fact, if the universe does have some sort of guiding intelligence, there's every reason to believe that it hates us and wants us dead, after a suitable interval of tormenting us with a host of disgusting bodily infirmities and albums from the runner-ups on American Idol. What kind of god would give us both irritable bowel syndrome and Clay Aiken?

The fundamental problem with self-help books is that they convey the impression that life is fair and that we are in control of our own destinies. But this is a conclusion that no one with an acquaintance with history could possibly reach. Of course, we must take responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of our own actions, and I am grinding my teeth down to nubs from dealing with students who feel that they are entitled to academic accolades without working for them. But history is jammed to the rafters with people who did everything right but who were forced into bankruptcy by economic circumstances totally beyond their control; who were resented, hated, feared, and consequently held back because of their talents; who were victims of monolithic forms of racial, religious, or sexual prejudice; and who were making their way in the world just fine until suddenly they were buried by landslides, drowned by tidal waves, stricken with cancer, or killed by Nazis.

So much for the hideous pseudo-therapeutic daytime talk show piffle that "no one can make you a victim without your consent." Tell it to these people. Is their problem that they don't know The Secret? Do they not have enough perseverance? Perhaps they need to learn about neuro-linguistic programming. Oprah, after all, overcame her troubles with weight gain - several times, in fact. If she can do it, why can't they look on the bright side of famine and genocide?

I think you get the point. Before you go accusing me of making a strawman attack, you really should read my friend Alison Hunter's review of The Secret, a book that actually does say that if you're victim of, well, anything, it's because you've got a bad attitude. Let me, instead, leave you with much a better consideration of the human condition from the most famous and widely-read self-help book of them all:

(Ecclesiastes 9.11) I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

War

" War is Not the Answer" states a small poster on a bulletin board where I work. Well, it depends upon the question, doesn't it? The failure of the 1930s was not a failure to settle Europe's troubles through peaceful negotiations, it was that peaceful negotiations were attempted for far too long. Negotiation is not possible when confronted with an ideology that regards peace only as an interval during which one prepares for war, and war as a natural state for imposing "racial purity" on a vast scale. Nazism could not be appeased, contained, or co-existed with. It could only be destroyed, and its destruction was, as the late Stephen Ambrose once observed, "the supreme accomplishment of the first half of the 20th century." Today, adolescents can re-create that cure in hyper-realistic, graphically-intense video games, digitally reliving for their amusement the horrors that a former generation actually experienced. Some games even allow them to play the other side, as if the two sides were or ever could be morally equivalent.

As an historian, I meet all sorts of history buffs whose interest is confined to years 1939-1945. A quick look at the history section in any bookstore or at the History Channel's lineup of programming will confirm that the public seems to have an insatiable interest in the Second World War, despite the annual scolding we receive from that cadre of fusty antediluvians at the Dominion Institute. However, as an historian one will, from time to time, meet history buffs who will tell you , often in a slightly conspiratorial tone of voice: "You know, Hitler had a lot of good ideas. He just went too far." My former response to this sort of thing was to take a sharp step in the opposite direction. Now I prefer a policy of engagement. "And what," I usually ask, "do you consider 'too far'? You were with them at the book burning phase, but drew the line at beating Jews? Or perhaps they had you at beating Jews but you jumped ship when involuntary euthanasia began?" The fact is, of course, that the regime was a lunatic asylum from the outset, and my advice is to avoid people who are willing to flirt with the idea that a racist, totalitarian, single-party state, organized for endless war, may have something going for it.

Sixty-five years ago today, a combined Anglo-Canadian-American force fought its way, inch by bloody inch, up the beaches of Normandy in what was probably the single most complex military operation in history. Over the next six weeks, they would utterly destroy two German armies in the Battle of Normandy, decisively proving that the Nazis (and their subsequent admirers) were utterly wrong to believe that totalitarian societies are better at war than democracies. Sufficient aroused, the power of free people and capitalist economies to wage war proved to be far beyond that of the dictatorships. While fighting the Battle of Normandy, the Allies simultaneously conducted vast campaigns on land, sea, and air on many fronts across two major theatres of war, while all the while supplying —crucially, as we now know —vital logistical support to the Red Army through the auspices of the Lend-Lease program. As the civilians of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were to learn, the fury of democratic societies, aroused to what was for them the very unnatural state of war, was both awesome and terrible to behold. Allied bombers had reduced nearly every major Germany city to rubble and ash before the Red Army — carried, incidentally, on American trucks — set foot on Germany soil, while the Japanese were to suffer the immolation of dozens of their towns and cities, acts of vengeance culminating in the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

War is a dreadful thing. But it is not, as some on the say, to be avoided at all costs, nor is it true that there are no winners in war. Pacifism is morally defensible only when it is a choice you make for yourself. The pacifist who allows himself to be beaten has made one kind of moral decision; if he allows someone else to be beaten, he has made another one entirely. Sometimes we must fight. The destruction of National Socialism and of Japanese militarism was necessary for the safety and survival of free societies throughout the world. For all their faults and foibles — and these are, as we all know, numerous — the liberal democracies do not murder or enslave their own citizens. We are, as I have said, the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most culturally prosperous people in the history of the world, and in large measure because our grandparents had thrust upon them the dreadful duty to fight those who would have enslaved us all.

Executions

The fact that some people deserve a good killing is not, by itself, a persuasive argument for capital punishment. There's no particular evidence that the death penalty deters crime (last year, American states with the death penalty had nearly twice the homicide rates of states without it), and the principle of an "eye for an eye" belongs to the long list of cruel and tyrannical Old Testament injunctions that should give a moment of pause to those who believe that scripture both automatically and axiomatically provides instruction in good morals. But the foremost objection to the death penalty is more straightforward: so long as the sentencing option exists, there is a chance that it will be carried out on an innocent person.

The Innocence Project has a list of over 300 wrongly convicted felons – many of them freed on the basis of DNA evidence, while the Death Penalty Information Center maintains a list of an astonishing 133 convicts released from death row after having been exonerated. Nearly sixty of these cases occurred in the last 10 years. There certainly are some sociopathic killers who seem to have abdicated their right to life, but my concern is with the innocent. The evidence suggests that the probability of sentencing error is very far from negligible, and death is the one form of punishment for which no compensation could be provided in the event of error.

Polls show that most Canadians want the death penalty back , but polls also reveal that people favour all kinds of frightening and undemocratic ideas (such as random police searches of homes) if you ask them in the right way. Fortunately, there is little chance that the death penalty will return. Our Parliamentarians are, I am convinced, mostly incompetent, but there's something to be said for stupid people running things, provided that they're also lazy, because at least they accomplish nothing, whereas stupid people with ambition can do all kinds of damage.

At any rate, I suspect that the death penalty never will return to my country. If it does, however, executions absolutely must be made public again. The people crying for blood don't get to shield their eyes from it when it is spilled.

Classmates

A month ago, I had been prepared to tell my senior students that they should under no circumstances go to graduate school, much as this author did in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. (It's worth reading.) I still think that it's a momentous decision, and not something one should choose by default. If you're one of those people who just loves to learn, well, the library and a book club can probably satisfy those cravings just as well as more school. As I've argued elsewhere, it may very well be the case that doing a PhD will actually impede your personal education. Moreover, the academic job market is very tough and getting tougher year by year. Some people are publishing monographs before their PhD is done these days, and I have heard of candidates for academic jobs who have hired personal trainers, wardrobe consultants, and even voice coaches in preparation for their interviews.

Of the past 30 graduates from my former department's PhD program, nine have secured full-time academic positions. Moreover, in the past two years that program alone has graduated more PhDs in Canadian history than there have been academic openings for full-time historians of Canada in the entire country. You heard me right: in terms of numbers, that one program could supply the needs of the every university in the country for new tenure-stream professors of Canadian history. For those graduating with PhDs in American and European history, they are in competition for an equally small number of jobs, but arrayed against them is a potentially larger pool of applicants, including graduates from elite America and European universities.

If you get a tenure-stream position anywhere, it will be because you beat at least fifty or sixty others who applied for the same job. I know of one recent case where there were more than one hundred applicants for a single position. This should give even the most gifted undergraduate, thinking about graduate school, some serious pause. The six or seven years you are about to spend getting your PhD are not a meal ticket, and your chances of getting a full-time academic appointment are probably less than one-in-five. Oh, I know: there's a wave of retirements coming up. And we will all have flying cars and live in domed cities on the moon.

However: over lunch with a former student on Saturday, something occurred to me that made me reconsider my pessimism. In 1999-2000, the year I began my Master of Arts degree, my program at the University of Western Ontario accepted five M.A. and two PhD students. It was a remarkably small cohort, even for those days, and I got to know the others in classes of just two or three. Of those seven people, I know not the whereabouts of two. Of the remaining five, an astonishing four now have full-time university appointments. Lynn, whose dissertation won a major award from the Organization of American Historians, is associate professor of history at Lethbridge; Amy is an assistant professor at the same institution, and has an accomplished new book out; Andrew is assistant professor at Laurentian, has a book out and another under review (I know that none among my cohort will object when I say that he was the brilliant one); I am myself at King's University College at UWO. And the fifth? Well, he's doing what he wants to do, too: Peter's a high school teacher, which was his plan all along.

Not bad. In fact, staggeringly good. I doubt if any cohort from any graduate program anywhere in Canada in the past decade can claim to have done so well: of the four people who entered wanting academic appointments, all of us got them, and very shortly after our respective graduations, too.

But there was more to it than that, even, at least for me. I entered graduate school both professionally and intellectually unprepared, and the shock of encountering serious people such as these, while studying under the tutelage of senior professors with decades of experience, helped me to realize that I had a great deal of work to do if I was going to make it through.

In the mega-cohorts of today — my former program will accept approximately seventy new graduate students this fall —I would almost certainly have come to a bad end. Instead, I emerged from my course work and field exams incomparably better off than I was before – and in large measure for having been in the company of a cohort of such excellent people, people who were far more generous of spirit to me than I was to them. I realize that a gesture of thanks, however sincere, can seem somehow hollow when it arrives ten years after the fact, but I offer it nonetheless.

For my graduating students, then, I offer the following reconsideration. I know that you are probably quite uncertain and perhaps even afraid right now. After so many Septembers of school, the prospect of something different must be very unsettling. And it is undoubtedly true that when you enter the workforce, it may very well be near the bottom, and you will have to spend some years paying your dues and climbing the ladder. We all have to do things in life that we do not want to do; in measure, doing them can ennoble us, and is part of leading a good life. But we also live in what most certainly is the healthiest and wealthiest society in the history of the world, and yet so many of us seem to endure rather than enjoy our lives. If I have had one truly staggering realization over the past ten years, it is this: life is short. We have four thousand weeks, if we are lucky. So if you feel that you must do more school – not in the sense that you don't know what else to do, but in the sense that you would not enjoy your life if you didn't– then do it. Do it. Life is too short to live in alienation from yourself. Find a good school – a small school, if you can; get to know people; make friends; be generous; work hard; read outside your field; go for beer sometimes; pass on what you have learned; accept the reality of the job market, and hope that chance will favour you with classmates such as those that I had.

Reform

This column will be of interest to history teachers only, and I don't think that many of them will like what I have to say. But I've been thinking about this for a decade now, and it's time. If you have not yet read my columns entitled "Teaching", "Learning", and, especially, "Reflecting", or if you have forgotten them, you should read them before this one, as they form part of an extended argument about what I believe to be a much-needed curricular reform in my profession.

I contend that the manner in which history typically is taught to first and second year undergraduates serves neither the purposes of imparting a sophisticated and lasting understanding of history, nor of fulfilling the loftier purposes of a liberal education. Those lofty purposes aren't discussed; the history is forgotten in short order. Such are the consequences of adhering to "coverage" - of demanding breadth over depth.

Most disciplines have survey courses, but in history they are considered the backbone of an undergraduate education – "Plato to NATO" courses, they are sometimes called. Surveys are designed, in theory, to provide students with a foundation upon which further, more specialized studies can be built. In my last three entries I argued that that the superficiality of survey course coverage, combined with the well-documented inadequacies of our attention spans, of memory, and of our ability to apply lessons outside of their immediate curricular context, present serious queries against the standard justifications for why and how we teach.

What, then, is the solution? The first step is to discard the whole notion of the survey with its emphasis on "coverage". Rather than trying to survey a whole field— which will in the case of all but the most unusual student lead to superficial understanding — we should reduce drastically the number of topics covered. A mentor of mine once joked that he had fifty lectures and fifty decades to cover, so it worked out well. I propose, instead, that we examine a very small number of topics in great depth rather than many in surface detail for the sake of doing so.

In American history this might involve, say, a careful, lengthy, multifaceted, and indeed interdisciplinary examination of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the social and political upheaval of the 1960s. Everything else would be left aside. In this way, weeks rather than an hour or two could be devoted to each topic. In Canadian history, it might involve the conquest of New France, Confederation, the First World War, and a thematic topic such the creation of a social welfare state or dominion-provincial relations. It needn't be those topics, of course: the point is to promote deep and lasting understanding of a few important issues, to teach students disciplinary methodology by exposing them to different approaches to a single subject, to encourage them to look beyond the boundaries of their own discipline, and, perhaps most critically, to offer them actual opportunities to apply what they have learned outside of the confines of the classroom.

At this point, I know I have lost many of you. You're wondering, "But what about all the other important stuff that they won't learn if I don't lecture about it?" My response is that they're not really learning it anyway, and I'm willing to bet that you saw ample evidence of this on your last set of final exams. I'm sure that, like most professors, you spend much of your time these days not sure whether or laugh or cry over exam answers such as, "the Emancipation Proclamation was Woodrow Wilton's idea to give women the right to vote." (Yes, I actually got this.)

While the emphasis on coverage will only produce a marginal and short-lasting understanding, an in-depth examination of a few topics could have an entirely different outcome. As Howard Gardner argues in The Disciplined Mind, "Only a rich, probing, and multifaceted investigation of significant topics, makes it reasonably likely that more sophisticated understandings will emerge." If "gaps" between the topics covered in depth really need to be filled — and in some cases they will be — they could be covered by the simple act of having students read from a good textbook. This, too, will produce a surface understanding, but it will be sufficient to support the immediate curricular needs , and the students will graduate from the class better equipped and, hopefully, more willing to explore those other topics in greater depth on their own. The purpose of an education, after all, should be to equip students to go on learning for their entire lives - not just to prepare them for the final exam.

Imagine history classes where we could say, "Next day, we're going to take an hour to discuss how differing historical perspectives on the New Deal might shed light on the Obama's administration's bailout plan" or "One of the stated goals of this institution is the building of moral character - let's go beyond a recitation of the mere facts of the bombing of Dresden, and spend some time assessing them in the light of moral philosophy. Get on your laptops. After the break, I want you to tell me what Utilitarianism is, and why it might be useful for this discussion." Instead, in defacto terms, we make the following announcement, "I'd like to discuss those things, but I can't. I spent an extra seven years in school in order to become the equivalent of an audio recording of your textbook." Well, that was perhaps more aggressive than it needed to be, but it is, in effect, what I personally have been doing these past five years in my survey courses.

Needless to say, the approach I am proposing will require us to reduce the number and length of lectures that we give in favour of other instructional approaches. This should not alarm us. We have not years, but decades, of research that has by now demonstrated quite conclusively that even well-designed and expertly delivered lectures are only about as good as solitary reading for conveying raw information and not much good at all for engaging higher-order thought processes. Study after study has proved conclusively that students need to be engaged actively in their own learning: at times, listening, but also and predominantly discussing, debating, reading, researching, writing about, and teaching the subject to themselves and others. Much more than lip service needs to devoted to these approaches.

The allegation will be made that I am saying that students have no responsibility for their own education, and people will protest that the old methods worked just fine for them. I'll leave aside the obvious observation about anecdotal evidence, and merely note that the approach that I am proposing hugely increases students' responsibility for their own education by reducing the emphasis on the professor as the fountain of all knowledge. But it also involves a proportional and somewhat intimidating increase in the responsibility of the professor. No longer a sage upon the stage, the professor becomes a fellow traveler, pointing the way ahead, as Shaw put it in another context, ahead of ourselves as well as of our students.

Food

People eat the most abominable food, and in my misbegotten youth (d. 2005), I ate a good deal of it myself. Fast food, frozen food, food served in chain restaurants where, three or four times an evening, the waitstaff emerge half-heartedly to sing a happy birthday song that is not actually "Happy Birthday." I've eaten white bread that claims to be wondrous but that has no taste at all; "Chinese take out" that no person from China would recognize as Chinese food; edible oil products that are dyed orange, sliced thin, wrapped in plastic, and called "cheese"; and even Minute Rice. The passage of time has taught me the virtues of brown bread and authentic ethnic cuisine; that cheese is not orange; that all rice can be made in minutes, and that moreover Minute Rice is not rice at all. As near as I can tell, it is some sort of Styrofoam that tastes vaguely like soap. "Minute Rice," says Mark Bittman, the brilliant New York Times food writer. is "the stupidest food ever invented."

People will, in the supposed name of convenience, eat an astonishing array of truly repugnant edible consumer goods that I won't dignify with the title "food." An alarming number of these products seem to be manufactured — that is the right word, by the way — by Kraft. Consider these gastronomical hand grenades, marketed as a quicker alternative to bagels, in order to spare frequent bagel eaters the anguish of toasting real bagels and then having to spread cream cheese for themselves. How did we ever survive before our bagels were produced in factories, crammed with chemical goop by machines, flash-frozen, wrapped in plastic, dropped into a cardboard box, and shipped thousand of kilometers to our breakfast counters? The wonders of modernity never cease. Why, next somebody will think of pouring tap water into plastic bottles, trucking it across continents, and selling it for four times the cost of gasoline!

If the development of an eating disorder is among your life goals, I highly recommend that you spend some time on Kraft's website, checking out their recipes. Consider this burnt frozen hamburger served on a bed of pasta (and tell me that it doesn't look exactly like the killer robots from The Matrix.) Yum. Yum. And for those parents who truly despise their own children, the good people at General Mills market Pizza Pockets, which are made with the same loving care for children's health that Big Macs are.

If I sound slightly evangelical about all this, it's because I turned 39 today, and birthdays are occasions for reflection. The 90th Psalm allows that the number of our years are "threescore and ten" or, "by reason of strength" fourscore - this upper extremis being a mere twenty-nine thousand days. Of those, there are about fourteen thousand behind me, and I'm resolved that I will not spend any of the remainder eating food that reduces the number of my days and that tastes bad, to boot.

So, listen up, you students! (I know you're reading this.) This is the most important lesson I'll ever teach you. Tonight, you'll pick up that phone and chalk up another $25 on your VISA for a soggy pizza from some crappy place that sells "2 for 1" to students who don't know any better. Don't. Stop at the supermarket on the way home. And when you get home, follow these directions:

Heat some olive oil in a big frying pan. Chop up some onions, celery, carrots, and a couple of gloves of garlic. Throw them in. Add some salt and pepper and, if you've got it, a bit of oregano or thyme (in the summer, use the fresh stuff.) Cut up some peppers or mushrooms, if you want. Again, in summer, get the locally grown kind. Add some diced tomatoes and their juice and let it simmer while you boil some water for pasta. By the time the water is boiled and the pasta is cooked, your tomato sauce will be done. Grate some real parmesan on it (not the kind that comes in a green cardboard shaker.) If you're either totally alone or trying to impress somebody, get a bottle of this on the way home, too.

There. The whole thing (minus the optional wine) will cost less than the pizza, will be ready in the same time as delivery, and you'll have plenty of ingredients left over for future meals. It will taste better, too, and in no small measure because you made it. Next time, experiment. Serve it with a little salad or some bread from the local bakery.

If you can read, you can cook. There's no reason to buy and eat tasteless, high fat, high sodium, nutritionally worthless "food" manufactured according to same principles that Henry Ford used to build cars. Because the fact is that it is not cheaper; it is not faster; it is not more convenient. What it is, is just another product marketed by people who, in another lifetime, with a different spin of the wheel, would probably be tobacco lobbyists.

I mentioned the brilliant but down-to-earth and highly pragmatic Mark Bittman before. Here's his column at the New York Times, and the next time you even think about eating a meal that involves a cardboard box and a microwave oven, dip into this article instead.

Oh, and do the dishes before you go to bed.

Jobs

Most people hate theirs, and for good reason. I worked for eight or nine years in the corporate sector, and it was hard to generate much enthusiasm for it. To listen to my bosses — I had about eight of them when I worked for the paper — you would think that they spent every waking minute thinking up new ways to make the fantastically rich people who owned the newspaper fantastically richer. This usually involved "going the extra mile" and putting in unpaid overtime for people who did not know you existed and who eventually were going to lay you off. Yeah, that's smart. But people did it anyway, and, yup, they got laid off just the same.

"I believe there is far too much working being done in the world," Bertrand Russell wrote in 1932, "and that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous." He called for an "organized diminution" of work - an expansion of leisure time brought about by the rational allocation of resources and the mechanization of certain kinds of inescapable toil. If this sounds like some sort of utopian socialism it's because it is, but the basic point is a good one: for most people, their working lives are a form of tyranny - they do their jobs not because they want to but because the alternative is poverty. A choice between work one hates and starvation is not a free choice, however much corporate propaganda might tell us otherwise. Our time is the most precious resource we have — it is also the one we have less of with every passing second — and no society is truly free that compels its members, en masse, to sacrifice their time to work that they hate merely in order to survive.

Work is part of life, and, as such, the key to being happy in it is to do things that you find interesting and important, and to have a healthy degree of autonomy in how you're permitted to go about doing them. In the 10th grade, my English teacher instructed us to write a letter to our future selves, a letter that would include a prediction of what we'd end up doing for a living. We were told not to open them until our 40th birthday. I cheated and opened mine a couple of years back. I predicted that by age 40 I would be teaching and be a "big time novelist". Well, damn. Neither a novelist nor "big time", but I do teach and write, and that's not a bad prediction for a 15-year-old who was adamant that people would never give up vinyl for CDs because they liked album covers too much.

I can therefore count myself among the lucky few whose working life functions harmoniously with their leisure time. Most days I look forward to my "work" with renewed pleasure, because it entails doing many of the things I would pursue in my leisure hours if I had some other job. Oh, there are stresses and strains and sacrifices to be made; and, of course, there's petty politics and pressure to publish, but, in effect, I get to do my hobbies for a living. Not many telemarketers, cab drivers, or nursing home laundry workers can say the same.

But with great jobs come great responsibilities - especially when those jobs are paid for by the community. Above all, such jobs entail a responsibility to do them well and to give something back to the people who make them possible.

Abstraction

That's me, in New York's Museum of Modern Art, last Monday. The painting is by Jackson Pollock. New Yorkers, I notice, take pride in and are slightly defensive about their abstract expressionists, who seemed to capture the beat and tempo of that big, weird, and wonderful city's frenetic way of life. But many others have more difficulty appreciating such art, and, in fairness, the artists themselves wanted nothing less: their work was part of a quite self-conscious act of effrontery to mass taste and mass opinion.

At the National Gallery of Canada a few years back, I heard a woman remark about a Kandinsky, "I just can't get into the new stuff." New stuff? Had she read the little label next to the painting she would have discovered that it was executed in 1911 - probably around the time her grandmother was born. Still, I understand what she was getting at. There is something not merely difficult to appreciate but actually mildly threatening about art since, say, 1907, when Picasso did this. One experiences a slight fear in an encounter with Cubism, futurism, surrealism, and abstraction - not to mention some of the more peculiar forms of postmodern art. It's the same fear that a traveller feels in a foreign country where he does not speak the language. One feels no such fear in familiar surroundings - which in artistic terms means the more readily comprehensible world of portrait painting and landscapes. I have witnessed it myself a hundred times in the National Gallery of Canada: people hustle through the abstract galleries, averting their eyes, like somebody walking through a bad neighborhood, until they come to the comfort and familiarity of the Group of Seven gallery. "Oh," they exclaim. "It looks like the lake at our cottage." And it does: familiar and safe.

Do not think that I am arguing for the primacy of abstraction over realism. Rather, I am arguing that the really meaningful cultural experiences in our lives demand something of us. Great art — like great music and great literature —rewards us in proportion to our efforts to come to terms with it over time. Abstraction, however, confronts us with an additional challenge, for it suggests the possibility that it is just painting - that there is no content, only form, that, like the night sky or a flower garden, it is beautiful but has no meaning.

Or am I wrong – about the night sky and flowers, I mean? In the most memorable of all the lines in Conan Doyle's works, Sherlock Holmes, happening upon a rose, muses: "Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers."

That's a remarkably unHolmesian leap in logic, but the basic point, I think, is a good one. The presence of beautiful things in what is, at times, an ugly world, can furnish us with much to hope for.

Reflecting

If Western philosophy has a motto, it surely must be "know thyself", the phrase that, tradition has it, was inscribed above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo of Delphi; Immanuel Kant added the suggestion that there is something fearful and even subversive about doing so, when he said that the motto of the Enlightenment was "dare to know". Here is the root of the mission of the liberal arts: to aid students in thinking, reflecting, and considering - to give them the tools to know themselves and the world around them, according to the light of reason, rather than by the crude instruments of instinct and gut feeling. A report issued by a faculty group at Harvard put it this way: "The aim of liberal education is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar…to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves." These ideals are contained in the mission statement of thousands of institutions of higher learning throughout the western world, and many professors in the arts and humanities would consider them axiomatic. And yet, in case after case, the actual teaching of undergraduates goes forward on the basis of the very things that enlightened thinking is supposed to contest: unexamined custom and bureaucratic inertia, much of it brought on by the low regard — sometimes even disdain — with which teaching is held at many research-oriented institutions. Too often, the reflective, skeptical, rigorously empirical standards that members of the professoriate apply in their research and writing are suspended when it comes to teaching.

In my last column, I discussed very alarming evidence which suggests that many students are learning curriculum only well enough and for long enough to regurgitate it on the final exam. In most cases, they are unable to apply what they have learned outside the immediate curricular context. The conclusion, then, is a very pessimistic one. For if it is true that curriculum is both forgotten in short order and does nothing to forge the reflective habits of mind that the liberal arts are supposed to, what defense is there against those critics who charge that the arts and humanities are a waste of time?

Howard Gardner, the famous psychologist, believes that the solution lies in courses that offer a "rich, probing, and multifaceted investigation of significant topics", as this will make it "reasonably likely that more sophisticated understandings will emerge." But survey courses — the bedrock of an undergraduate education in history — are in most cases anything but rich, probing, and multifaceted. In theory, they are designed to provide students with an understanding of the narrative, or chronology, of historical events of a given country or region - "Plato to NATO courses", the joke goes. But is even that claim true?

Lest anyone think I'm pointing fingers, let me be clear that I count myself amongst the company of the guilty. Still, I caught myself doing it again last week. In the midst of a fascinating, provocative, and really very useful discussion with the students in my survey class — a discussion prompted by a student's question, incidentally — I looked at my watch and, in a moment of mild panic, said, "Well, I've got to cut this short. We have to move on," and resumed lecturing. But why? Why did I "have" to move on? Why justify a superficial examination of one topic by the need to provide superficial examinations of other topics? The usual argument is that survey courses aren't meant to provide deep or specialized knowledge, only a foundation from which more sophisticated studies can be undertaken, and such courses would be partially justified if they actually did so. But I am increasingly pessimistic about the claim. In the first place, the standard mechanism by which survey courses are taught – the lecture – has long since been demonstrated to be inferior even to solitary reading for conveying raw information. By such means, students can learn something long enough to reproduce it (in most cases not very accurately) on the final exam, but they are not likely to be able to recall much of what they have learned in future courses. As for the claim that an undergraduate education produces students better able to think critically, who are more literate, more articulate, and so forth, these are, as I have said many, many times, admirable ideals, but they cannot come to fruition unless the most serious effort is devoted cultivating them. In survey courses, such efforts are often sacrificed to the necessity of covering more topics for the sake of covering them.

In my next column, I'll begin with some desired outcomes and then describe how I would build a survey course that might, I think, go a long way towards achieving them.

Learning

Okay. Do this. Toss a coin. This thought experiment applies to all kinds of things, but for the sake of ease, let's toss a coin. After the coin has been tossed, what forces are acting upon it? You probably guessed the initial impetus of the toss — a gradually diminishing force that your hand and thumb transferred into the coin —and, of course, gravity, which is what makes the coin come down. Congratulations: you're in good company. The vast majority of people, when asked, say the same thing. The bad news is that you're wrong (I admit that I was wrong, too, when confronted with this problem a few months back.) In fact, the only force acting on the coin after you have tossed it is gravity — at a rather imposing 9.8 m/s^2, which is why the coin comes down very quickly. Same if you throw a ball, or shoot a bullet, or jump from one roof-top hoping to reach another, possibly while dodging balls and bullets.

This is basic Newtonian physics, worked out three centuries ago by one of history's great geniuses, and the failure to understand it illustrates the way in which our uneducated "gut" reaction is often at odds with the way things really are. What we see and hope and feel and wish to be true often aren't. One promise of education is that it will give us the necessary base of knowledge to improve upon unschooled snap judgments.

But how effectively does it do that, really? Our educational system is predicated upon this promise, but there is good evidence to suggest that things aren't as simple as telling students what's true and what isn't. Let me give just one example. In the early 1980s, a scholar named John Clement posed the same coin-toss question I asked above to engineering students at a top university. Nearly three-quarters of the students, who had just taken a university-level physics course, incidentally, gave the same wrong answer that you and I did. Only 12 percent got it exactly right. They had memorized the principles of Newton's Laws well enough to pass an exam, but couldn't apply those laws to real world examples, even in the case of something as trivial as a coin toss. In short, what they thought had not altered how they thought. Educated in physics, their ability to apply what they had learned outside of class was no greater than that of someone completely without education. This is by no means an isolated example, nor is the general lesson to be derived from it limited to physics. The implications for all teachers is very large, for it suggests that a conventional, fact-based education has far less social utility than we like to believe.

On several occasions on this blog, I've expressed my skepticism about the standard defense of history as a subject for study. The defense goes something like this: by learning history we are able to apply its lessons in the present, and to live better lives thereby. But this assumes that history provides clear lessons; it assumes that students of history are being taught the right lessons; it assumes that they remember those lessons for any length of time; and it assumes that they can actually apply them outside the curricular context. Each of these claims is highly suspect. In fact, historians already know that the first claim is false: history is a series of arguments about the past and what it means, not a bill of facts (and yet we continue to teach our survey courses as though history is an immutable narrative to be committed to memory) and so it's difficult to see how clear lessons can be derived from its study.

At any rate, the evidence presented above suggests that the basic claim, that the study of history enables us to live better lives in the present, may be flawed from the start. Like the undergraduate students of physics, students of history might only be changing what they think rather than how they think, and any lessons (assuming that lessons can be found at all) might be left behind when the final exam is over. The ability to name the Presidents, recite the order in which the provinces joined Confederation, and name the year in which Queen Victoria died might satisfy various kinds of exceedingly tedious patriotic quiz makers, but if the ability to do so has no broader implications, then it is just, well, academic.

Fortunately, there have been a lot of people thinking for a long time about how a curriculum might be designed so as to produce students who are not merely more knowledgeable but actually more thoughtful. Some of this involves ideas that would seem to many professors of history to be positively radical - but, as I suggested earlier, a good deal of it involves only a revival of some very old ideas about education. If the reader will bear with me, I will in the next week propose what I think such a curriculum would look like, and thereafter we can return to some much-needed and well-deserved tomfoolery on Measure of Doubt.

Teaching

We might begin by defining two approaches to education. In the first, education serves to teach skills of immediate and practical application in the workforce - the vocational approach to education. In the second, the purpose of education is to produce students who can think clearly, reflect before they act, find answers to questions on their own, and whose broader and more informed outlook affords them greater empathy for others and therefore serves as a basis for a moral worldview. When it is centered on the study of literature, art, music, philosophy, and history, this second model is often referred to as a liberal education, by which is meant liberal in the classical sense of the word. In antiquity, it was an education fit for the free individual, while the specialized skills imparted by a vocational education were intended for slaves.

There has always been tension between the first and second models, and we see it today in every blustering politician or exasperated parent who asks "what good is a degree in English?" We see it, too, increasingly, and, in my view, distressingly, from administrators within the universities themselves. Consider John Sperling, the billionaire founder of the vocationally-oriented University of Phoenix. "Coming here is not a rite of passage," he says. "We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that "expand their minds" nonsense." Notice that Sperling is not merely indicating his preference for vocationally-oriented postsecondary education - but a contempt for any other kind. More recently, Margaret Wente (always good for a smug and condescending quotation) wrote in The Globe and Mail: "A vast proportion of the student body neither wants nor needs a traditional liberal education anyway. They have no desire to sit at the feet of cloistered masters debating truth and beauty." I'll ignore Wente's presumption that she actually has any idea what the "vast proportion" of the student body wants (and indeed the idea that a typical academic, probably polylingual, well-travelled, and politically active, is somehow "cloistered") and instead observe that the ability to consider questions of truth and beauty is vocationally important. Can anyone examine the behaviour of corporate America in the past few years and say that a healthy dose of moral philosophy hasn't been required?

We must be cautious, however, in assuming a liberal education will always or necessarily yield a more moral and empathetic worldview. In The Nazi Conscience, Claudia Koonz offers chilling examples of liberal education gone terrifyingly askew. In the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, to cite just one example, a lifetime's pursuit of the truth — he had studied theology and then philosophy — served as the basis for a moral and intellectual absolutism that led him to embrace a political and racial ideology that represented the point of absolute negativity in human affairs. For those who believe that a liberal education is a defense against precisely the kind of bigotry and thuggery that the Nazis embodied, the thought of men, listening to Beethoven and Schumann while discussing Kant and Goethe long into the night, and then going forth the next day to operate the bureaucratic machinery of the Holocaust, is particularly chilling. Heidegger himself, who played no direct role in the genocide, but who was an ardent, enthusiastic, and largely unapologetic Nazi, was an acknowledged expert on one of richest and deepest contributions to moral philosophy: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

It is no easy matter to say what, precisely, went wrong, not just with Heidegger but with hundreds of thousands of people like him. Some Marxist cultural critics have argued that Nazism was the terminus of the Enlightenment project - that the 18th century celebration of reason evolved into a 20th century tyranny of reason - though reason of a particularly perverse sort. Koonz offers the more hopeful suggestion that it represented a failure or even an explicit rejection of the Enlightenment program, but either the way the fact that it emerged in the most educated nation in Europe should give us a moment of pause.

But if an education in the liberal arts is no guarantee that a more generous, understanding, and moral outlook on life will result, it remains the best mechanism we have for producing one. (I exclude religious instruction here, since it is demonstrably true that not all religious denominations teach lessons than can be called "moral" in any sense of the word.) The point is not that professors will always have answers, nor that they should give them even if they do (recall Gotthold Lessing's famous observation that, given the opportunity, he would refuse God's gift of truth in favour of a lifetime of groping for the truth). Rather, the point is to aid students in thinking intelligently about how the curriculum they are learning will aid them in answering the difficult moral and ethical questions that they will be faced with in their lives.

In my professional discipline, the format of many courses provides us little opportunity to pause to consider such matters. We pay lip service to the idea that we study history because it offers lessons about how to live well in the present, but spend very little time actually helping students to understand what those lessons might be. But how could it be otherwise, when we have 400 years of history to teach in about 70 classroom hours, and when the students are evaluated in large measure on the accuracy with which they can reproduce lecture notes on tests and exams?

What is needed is not so much new ideas about how an undergraduate education should be organized, but a resurrection of very old ideas that have faltered under pressure and prejudice.

Sports

It seems as though everybody I know has a four-year-old these days. It's like four-year-olds are the new black. "Where did you get that? It's charming." "Oh, we made it at home with some things we had laying about." I like them. Four-year-olds, I mean. I wouldn't want one of my own (I have nothing to wear with it) but Amanda and I don't mind borrowing other peoples' from time to time.

Anyway, four-year-olds are perfectly splendid until their parents do a stupid thing and decide it's time for them to start playing sports. The terminus of this decision is invariably a form of postmodern sadism called dodge-ball. Dodge-ball was the first and last recourse of every hilariously stereotypical gym teacher I ever had, the agonizing hour when subliterate troglodytes who should have been held back got to take it out on the rest of us - which is to say, on those of us who could count to ten without using our fingers. (That is why the one-handed pushup was invented, incidentally, so that people who can do one handed pushups can count the number they've completed using their other hand). What sick mind invented this game? What kind of sick mind gets children to play it? Well, that's not hard to answer: subliterate troglodytes who should have been held back, but who managed to make it through some shady teacher's college and who are now, vicariously, taking it out on the rest of us - which is to say, on their students who can count to ten without using their fingers.

It doesn't end there, either. I once suffered through the indignity of being on an academic softball team. One would have thought the purpose was to have some fun and then have some beer, but, no. A gaggle of mostly male, mostly pudgy historians seemed to have a real interest vested in winning, and the competition was unpleasantly fierce. Oh, there were women, too — one friend was a machine in the field, nothing got past her, and she rarely came away from the game without significant and hard-won cuts and bruises — but some of the men, at least, seemed to resent their very presence. I recall one game, when we were getting the hell beaten out of us by a chain-smoking gang of economists (seriously, they smoked running around the bases, apparently on the premise it makes good economic sense to pay gigantic tobacco companies to kill you), and a teammate suggested to me that we should change our line-up to keep the "girls" from getting a chance at bat. Fun, hell: winning, and thus manliness itself, was at stake. I don't think we changed the batting order. But we did lose.

Well, I've never been terribly sensitive about appearing all that "manly". That ship sailed a long, long time ago. In my case, it departed during a fifth grade sports day-camp, when, after the locker-room tortures became too much to bear, I begged and received permission from my mother to spend my summer days working in the back room of her flower shop instead. I learned a lot about flowers back there, and about work ethic, because my mother was far less tolerant of lazing about when it came to her business. By contrast, as I've said before, I think there's good evidence that the argument that sports help teach children the virtues of character, teamwork, and fair play is often the opposite of the truth. In my experience, sports encouraged boys to be vicious, taught them that aggression is its own reward, and above all conveyed the impression that to be academically rather than athletically inclined was to be effeminate by definition. I actually know a parent who has said that he doesn't want his four-year old to be involved in such things as music and drama and dance, because kids who are get picked on. Better that he play sports, and be the one to do the picking.

For my male friends and I, our youthful encounter with school and extracurricular sports also taught us — or attempted to teach us — that girls were not merely different but actually biologically inferior. I'll never recall the two weeks that the boys were wrestling on one side of the gym and the girls were square-dancing on the other. Why not have the boys square dance, too? And have the girls learn some wrestling? Some dancing skills would serve me well nowadays: like most middle-aged male academics, I dance with the approximate grace of a rhinoceros. By contrast, I have little use for the wrestling "skills" I learned , whereas I had female friends in high school, who, in all seriousness, could have used some wrestling skills to extricate themselves from more than one date that turned ugly.

Okay. There's an element of hypocrisy here, in that I practiced martial arts enthusiastically for about fifteen years, and have done so on-and-off ever since. But I took up karate in the first place in order to protect myself in gym class. Strife is part of life — schooling should naturally be attended by a certain degree of anxiety. But in my case — and I know I speak for a great many friends here — gym class was attended not by mere anxiety but by actual fear. It was the place where smart kids were bullied and intimidated, and as much by the teachers as by our Alpha-Male classmates. As it turns out, the karate didn't help (it was actually the subject of more ridicule when it became generally known). By contrast, quitting gym as soon as I'd taken my requisite three credits did help. I should note that, as I got older and the karate schools opened their doors to progressively younger and younger students, I witnessed the replication of gym-class behaviour inside these clubs, too. I also witnessed something I'd never seen first hand, because my overworked parents never forced team-sports upon me - parental bullying, and this is worse than any other, because it continued after the game was over.

Oh, I know that there are parents who put enormous pressure on students to perform academically, too, and I wish they would strike the right balance in that regard also. But at least math and French and chemistry can get you something in life. What does hockey and soccer and football lead to, in the long run, for most young boys who take it up or play it for any duration? For one in ten thousand, a professional sports career. For the rest: well, injuries, of course. And memories of being pushed around in the locker room, of being yelled at by other parents and perhaps by their own, and, if they play long enough, the very real probability of academic underachievement. Sarah Palin joked that the difference between pit bulls and hockey moms is lipstick. Not so. The difference is that hockey moms are actually likely to harm children.

Resolutions

Happy New Year, gentle readers.

 

Okay. I admit it. I'm middle-aged. And like most people suffering from that condition, I have a decades-long track-record of not keeping my New Year's resolutions. Re-reading the ones I made a year ago, I found that I kept only one and failed to keep four others. That's a 4:1 to ratio of resolutions broken versus resolutions kept, and that's depressing. So, here's one idea. I could make resolutions that I'm actually going to keep this year. For instance:

 

I resolve to not go to the gym.

I resolve to not cut back on the wine.

I resolve to not read Northanger Abbey.

I resolve to not watch less television.

I resolve to not be nicer to stupid people.

 

I could five-for-five in a snap. Especially with that last one.

 

But another idea occurs to me. Bear with me here.

 

Natural selection occurs whenever there is biological reproduction and a finite amount of resources. Certain heritable traits increase the probability of an organism living long enough to reproduce and pass them on (we tend to resemble our parents), whereas organisms without those traits are more likely to die before then. Over the long term, the accumulation of inherited traits can result in the emergence of new species. This is called evolution by natural selection. Some people don't like this idea, just as some people used to dislike the idea that the Earth revolved around the sun, but it happens whether they like it or not.

 

It's also the reason I'm a fat blob. Well, it's part of the reason. And also "fat" and "blob" aren't quite the right words. Let's call it a pudgy blot. I was in fighting shape well into twenties and then I got a job in a cubicle, lost my hair, ground my teeth down to nubs, and gained forty pounds. Further schooling, with days spent reading and long nights of much beer (and hands-down the worst served anywhere in the world, at UWO's Grad Club) didn't help. Through extreme exertions, I lost the better part of fifty pounds later on, but since then I've gained about half of it back.

 

At least half the blame for this goes to evolution. You see, you and me and everyone you know is a miracle, in the broadest sense of the word, because all of our ancestors lived long enough to reproduce. And one reason that they did is because they ate whenever food was available.  For most the biological history of our species, the availability of food simply couldn't be taken for granted. For most people living in Canada today, however, that's not much of an issue. There's abundant food everywhere — much of it highly processed, high salt, high fat, high calorie, nutritionally worthless food — but our DNA is perpetually screaming at us to eat now while we have the chance, which is good advice, from an evolutionary perspective.

 

So I wonder, sometimes, is it is my personality or my genes (or is there a difference?) that loves warm bread, cold bread, hot buttered bagels, eggs over-easy, eggs scrambled, eggs poached, eggs Benedict, sausage, back bacon, front bacon, and hash-browns; rib-eyes, New York strips, tenderloins, hamburger, chicken breasts, chicken thighs, chicken wings, drumsticks, pork loin, pork chops, pulled pork sandwiches and mashed potatoes with gravy; lasagna, cannelloni, manicotti, spaghetti and sausage meatballs; cheddar, gouda, brie, sage-derby, and camembert;  white wine, red wine, ice wine, port, sherry, lager, and ale; peach pie, strawberry pie, apple pie, blueberry pie, pumpkin pie…oh, God…

 

There was a rather sad scene in the movie Supersize Me where a young woman, having attended a seminar about the so-called Subway Diet, said remorsefully that the diet wouldn't work for her because she couldn't afford to eat at Subway three times per day. Apparently she believed that the subs themselves had some sort of special weight-loss inducing properties, and, fundamentally, that's the belief that underpins every nutty fad diet that comes along. But the basic solution — and probably the only real solution — for me and you and everybody else whose biology has not yet caught up with the circumstances of superabundance in which suddenly find ourselves, is stoicism. Recognize the inherent nobility of moderation. Put down that big of chips. Push away that plate. Refuse that dessert. Cork up that bottle of wine. And get some damn exercise. Try this. Do it right now. Lie on your chest. Then, push up. It can be done.  We can appeal to the fitter angels of our nature. For evolution — or, if you prefer, the agent that made evolution happen in the first place —  endowed us with another trait, unique in all of nature: the intelligence to defy our basest biological impulses. 

Friendship

Well, it's Christmas, devoted readers, and, yes, like all great writers (I'll pause while you clean the coffee you just coughed up), I write every day, including Christmas Day. And I thought that, being as it's Christmas, I'd write about the subject of friendship and what my three closest friends mean to me.

Aristotle likened a friend to "another soul", and he believed that friendships stood as proof that altruism rather than egoism was the norm in human affairs. For my part, I prefer the old adage that there are two kinds of friends: the ones who will help you move, and the ones who will help you move bodies. I am very fortunate to count three such people in the latter category: Geoff, Shirley, and Alison, and while it's unlikely that I'll ever be phoning them from some seedy roadside motel in the middle of the night and explaining that the whole thing was a terrible accident, it's comforting to know they'd be there in a flash, with shovels, bleach, and plastic bags, if I did.

More than two decades ago, Shirley was my first real girlfriend (take note, young people, it is possible to successfully make the transition to "just friends") and has been unstinting in her friendship over the years, even in proportion to my (unintended) neglectfulness. Alison is like the sister I never had, and I derive immense solace from knowing that I am never more than a phone-call from her insight into the vagaries of life on topics ranging from B-class 80s horror movies to educational pedagogy. As for Geoff, well, he is the only blonde I've really loved and, I mean this quite sincerely, one of the smartest people I've ever met. They are, all of them, better friends to me than I have been to them; they would be worthy companions for anyone, so I feel blessed — in the secular sense of the word, of course — to count them among my own. A curious thing: I met Geoff in elementary school and Shirley and Alison in high school. Our friendships now span not years, but decades, and it is in such fires that real friendships are forged.

I admit that I botched the opportunity to make several solid friends in graduate school. I blame myself, but, then, I've always believed that real friendship requires that all measure of pretense be dropped, and, in my experience, at least, graduate school was all about maintaining pretensions. Only once and with only one person did I successfully manage to jettison that baggage while in school, but I went on to marry her, so her case is the exception to the rule. Amanda's is a lifelong companionship that transcends friendship in its ordinary meaning.

In the years since then, I've managed to settle down, become more-or-less comfortable in my own skin, and I am very glad to have made some new friends. They look like a promising bunch, and, who knows? If they play their cards right, they might just find me calling them at midnight from a Motel 6 some day.

Oh, and to all my friends, comrades, colleagues, acquaintances, and unknown readers of this blog, a very sincere Merry Christmas to you.