Re-runs

Author's note: our regularly scheduled blog post has been replaced in our programming lineup by a special repeat broadcast of Measure of Doubt's most read and most requested column, Hell, a 666 word rumination of the topic of damnation from 2011.

Hell

A parable.

So, there ’s Gordon. In Hell. His crime? Religious dissent. On Earth, we call governments that punish religious dissenters totalitarian, but he has long since learned to let that go — eons of torture and burning tend to take your mind off of things.

Gordon is holding a tray and is in a long, long line in Hell’s Cafeteria. The air conditioning is on the fritz again, and it's hot as Hell. Over the speakers, they're playing Muzak arrangements of Barry Manilow ("Mandy", 24/7, for eternity) and they're serving fish-sticks, again, for the hundred-trillionth day in a row. As he approaches the counter Gordon notices a small sign, written in blood. His blood. "Tomorrow’s special: fish sticks." Bastards: they think of everything.

Time has no meaning here, but Gordon keeps a day-planner anyway, because he’s always been a planner sort of guy. For today, it says:

8 AM burning
9 AM drawing-and-quartering
10 AM hanging
11 AM dismemberment
12 PM lunch (poisoned)
1 PM the rack
2 PM root canal
3 PM drowning
4 PM re-runs of The Golden Girls
5 PM buried alive
6 PM beating
6:30 PM dinner (fish sticks - poisoned)
etc.

He flips forward a few pages. More of the same, although on Thursday he has an hour of cardio-kickboxing. He makes a mental note to get that changed to burning.

Gordon looks up. Ahead of and behind him, queuing with their trays, are the teeming billions of the damned. They are of every race, ethnicity, social station, and period in human history. Some are warlords, murders, rapists, and thieves; some are adulterers, some are liars, some liked the new Star Wars movies better than the old ones. But the majority are quite ordinary people who never hurt anybody. The ones from Gordon’s time lived their lives, went to school, read a few books, watched TV, cooked meals, raised their families, drove their kids to soccer practice, gave some bucks to charity, some even went to church now and again, but, wouldn’t you know it, they were improperly religious and consigned to Hellfire for eternity. There are also countless millions of truly, deeply, sincerely devout followers of literally thousands of different faiths that turned out to be false, and even devout followers of the Right Religion who were guilty of theological or liturgical misconduct.

Gordon hears different things about what the Right Religion is, about what he should have believed or how he should have behaved. Some say faith in a certain prophet alone. Some say sacraments. Some say accepting that a particular iron-age book was the final and perfect revelation. Some say that there are four truths and an eightfold noble path, and they can’t quite figure out what this eternal damnation business has to do with them. Some even say there was nothing to be done – that the game was rigged from the get-go. There are all sorts of ideas. He even heard that the correct answer was a life led in conformance to the will of the Goddess Maat, which would explain why pretty much everybody except ancient Egyptians seem well represented here. Who knows? Inwardly, Gordon shrugs. What does it matter now? There’s no reprieve. There are billions of people here who knew in their hearts that they were right and then — poof — fire, brimstone, perpetual torture, fish sticks, and Barry Manilow. Sucks to be you. Forever and ever. Amen.

Anyway, directly ahead of Gordon in line is Adolf Hitler. But Gordon has been in hell for a million trillion billion years already— that’s zero percent of his sentence, incidentally — and his memories of Earth mostly have faded. So while Hitler seems somehow familiar, especially with his postage stamp of a moustache and swastika armband, Gordon can’t quite place him. He’s about to ask him if they’ve ever met when Hitler looks over his shoulder and decides to strike up a conversation first.

"Gootentag," Hitler says. "So: what are you in for?"
"Skepticism," Gordon replies. "And you?"

Commemoration

Today is the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, in which three thousand people perished in flame. Judging from the many hostile e-mails I received to my blog post about visiting La Cambe, many people will be spending a portion of the day in quiet commemoration of those nineteen terrorists who made the ultimate sacrifice for a cause they believed in. After all, they must say, in order to be consistent, who are we to say that what they did is wrong?

Q.E.D. 

Sequels

Invariably are a disappointment, the last refuge of the creatively dead. Some are worse than that even – more like forms of vandalism against our hopes and dreams. Lucky for me that Measure of Doubt never embodied anyone’s hopes and dreams, so there’s no chance of that.

But I do take a certain sense of pride in the first one hundred. I work in a profession where writing badly on obscure topics published in journals that nobody reads is considered the gold standard of excellence (if you don’t believe me, try making your way through an issue of the Canadian Historical Review some time – seriously, I dare you) so the blog served as an important outlet for me, and I look back on the one hundred with some satisfaction. I worry about sullying it with another fourteen or so, spread out over two-and-a-half years, gradually petering out.  On the other hand, I have a great deal to complain about, not least of all because Christmas is just over six months away...

Another hundred, shall we? Look for the first one tomorrow.

Apocalypse

Okay, everybody good? Whew. Dodged that one.

Well, in fairness, it wasn’t supposed to be the End of the World per se. According to Harold Camping and his followers, about 200 million people were supposed to have been saved, and the rest of us left to await the actual end of the world, which will occur in October. But there was supposed to have been a monumental earthquake. And 200 million people disappearing. And all manner of apocalyptic whatnot.

Okay. Avoid cliches, students. But sometimes they’re inevitable. This is shooting fish in a barrel. But there is a larger point that this minor, media-inflated incident raises. Predictions of apocalypse come and go. Many authorities in the field of Biblical Exegesis agree that Jesus himself was (historically) an apocalyptic preacher who (scripturally) predicted that the End would occur within the lifetime of his own followers. We could go on and on, covering a truly staggering number of failed predictions, from those made by some very noble Roman Christians trying to understand the catastrophes of the world around them in a pre-scientific age, to the seediest of money-grubbing American evangelicals such as the late Jerry Falwell, who in 1999 predicted that the Big Wrap Party would occur “within a decade” based upon his “reading” of recent events in the Middle East.

I’m an historian. Reflecting upon the past and attempting to rescue wisdom from it is the essence of what I do. Just yesterday, I bought new translations of Herodotus and Thucydides in preparation for an academic suicide mission I'm embarking on this fall, and last week I turned the last page on Karen Armstrong’s engaging The Bible: A Biography, part of the excellent “Books That Shook the World” series. But it’s one thing to search for meaning, guidance, and wisdom in old books (or very old bronze-age books).  It’s another to thing to organize one’s life around one particular reading of them. Camping, his followers, and people of their ilk live in a small, shriveled, self-centered, mean, miserly, intellectually constipated world.  In a world full of causes worthy of pursuing, they decided to devote their lives to preparing for an apocalypse that didn’t even happen.

It is now 12:02 AM in Apia, Samoa, which means it’s May 22nd everywhere, and not everybody is good. Yesterday, about 20,000 people starved to death. Some people console themselves by believing that they are in a “better place” now. Harold Camping and people like him believe they are in Hell, eternally to be punished unless they died in a (proper) state of grace. Am I mocking Camping and his ilk for their religious beliefs? To quote one of the great figures of American politics of the modern era, you betcha.  Me, I’m always willing to listen, at least for a while, to what people have to say. But there must be fairness in any such relationship. Proselytize, and I should be permitted to argue without fear. Threaten, and I will defend myself.  And if you tell me that I’m going to Hell, I get to tell you to precede me there. 

Update: May 24th:  Harold Camping has emerged unraptured. To his thousands of followers who quit their jobs and spent their life savings spreading his message, he offered the following: God has decided to do the rapture and the end-of-the-world thing in one fell swoop, October 21st. The remarkable thing is how many of his followers are standing by him. As always, the problem isn't the ability to absorb information. It's the ability to think.

Beer

The problem with wine is that it breeds wine snobs. We are not wine snobs. We love wine. Rare is the night that a new bottle isn’t corked around Broad-Green Estate and a glass with any lunch worth having is customary, too. We are particular about what we like and what we don’t. A big yes to French syrah, a big no to Australian shiraz, even though they’re the same grape. We know the difference, sometimes on sight and smell alone, between major varietals (though Chardonnay, which can be manipulated into almost anything these days, often fools us.)  We reserve our right, in decent restaurants (hard to find in this city), to ask for small pours to sample; we solicit opinions from knowledgable waitstaff (harder still) but don’t always follow them. Amanda and I are also compiling a very substantial collection of futures to open after aging for a decade or two, and I maintain that, yes, there is something to all that nosing and swirling and decanting and tongue-smacking. But we are not wine snobs.  My wine-tasting vocabulary extends as far as such words as, “yummy”, although I confess that the scrupulous avoidance of wine-tasting terminology could be viewed as a form of pretension, too.  I also believe that it’s undeniably true, as the enormously likable and sensible Billy Munnelley says, that “we live in a golden age for wine” where there are a ton of great wines for under twenty dollars and a lot of good ones for under ten. Our everyday go-to pours are screw-top bottles from Italy, France, and, yes, Niagara, and they all come in under twenty bucks, positively a steal when one considers that the cost of psychotherapy ranges upwards of $150 an hour.

An aside for my American readers, who are probably thinking that twenty bucks is a lot to pay for a decent table wine. Indeed it is, at least in a civilized place such as, well, anywhere in the United States of America. Not so in Soviet Canuckistan, where government-owned provincial monopolies are the order of the day in all provinces except one.  The Liquor Control Board of Ontario is the biggest single buyer of wine in the world.  They have a good gig.  It works like this: Ontarians pay taxes to maintain a crown corporation that sells wine back to them at inflated prices. In other contexts this is known as a “protect racket.”

Now, concerning the matter of beer. The words “wine and beer” are often uttered together but the experience of consumption usually is very different.   Unfairly is beer denounced by wine drinkers as nitwit juice, mass produced in watery forms such as “Coors Light”, to be swilled one after another by fellers with big guts, who like football and eating nachos and hitting on the woman from the next trailer over when she’s visiting to watch the game on the big-screen they’re paying down over eleven years, while meanwhile their wives are in the same room, half-passed out on the sofa from too many vodka coolers at four o’clock in the afternoon while their gaggle of kids, all precisely eleven months apart, scream like monsters running from room to room shooting at each other with squirt guns loaded with bleach. This is unfair stereotype, as Coors Light is consumed by many hockey fans, too. 

Moreover, good beer also has its partisans and its snobs. I myself have just downed a rather engaging, bitter and spicy little lager from San Francisco. (Put this in the “Did you know?” file, readers: your noble author almost always consumes some sort of alcoholic beverage while blogging. Can you tell? Hint: the passive-aggression meter goes up depending on the time of night and number of beverages consumed.)

A few weeks ago, the commissars at the LCBO decided that it was in the public interest to remove from their shelves forthwith and forevermore a beer called Smashbomb Atomic India Pale Ale, produced by the cheeky Flying Monkeys brewery (formerly the Robert Simpson brewery). Their reason? Because the name of the beer might promote violence. Read that again, dear readers. It might promote violence. Two observations, if I may. First, of course it will promote violence. It’s alcohol. Second, it’s not the name that’s the problem. It’s the alcohol. From the window where I type, I watch every morning as a group of homeless and/or destitute men gather in front of the LCBO, waiting for it to open, so that they can rush in and buy the cheapest bottles of swill they can get their hands on, and the LCBO sells it to them quite obligingly. But I can’t buy an India Pale Ale because the LCBO is afraid I might go and go and build a nuclear weapon in my kitchen. Good Lord. What goes on in their tiny, tiny brains?

A few days later, I discovered that a local bar and grill that serves serviceable food pours Smashbomb Atomic on tap. It was a done deal. In a fit of rage against the machine, I had a pint at lunch and went back for another the day I wrote this. Take that, Liquor “Control” Board of Ontario! I am drinking the beer because you took it off the shelves. It’s good, incidentally. Positively terrific with fish and chips.

And did I give in to fits of violence? Did the name of the beer make we want to go out and smash or bomb somebody? Well, no. But, after lunch, I immediately went home and decided to turn against everything good and decent in Western civilization and violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a hobby project.

Oh, dear. Did I just get myself flagged by a number of security and intelligence services? Probably. Hey, guys: I was just kidding. It’s a joke. Let me make it up to you. Have a Coors Light on me.

Twilight

People who make a living by writing fiction are as rare as rock stars. One study found that the average novelist in the United States makes less than $10,000 per year from his or her writing - and that’s before taxes, the cut his or her agent takes, the cost of doing business, etc. So kudos to Stephanie Meyer for selling cargo ships full of books and for making a fortune from the sweat of her creative brow. It’s not for me to begrudge her, personally, for writing something that millions and millions of people adore. I hope that, before it’s all over, she makes a hundred trillion dollars. I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity if I could. That’s right, faithful readers of Measure of Doubt, your noble author would sell out in a second, if he could. The trouble is that nobody wants him to.

It might have been different. Longtime friends can confirm the following facts. Aged 16, in the 11th grade, I wrote a full-blown novel: 120 single-spaced pages. A sequel followed that summer (90 single-spaced pages). I have retained a hard copy of them but have not looked at them in years. The first novel concerned a high school girl who discovers that she’s a wizard. Or whatever a female wizard is called. The geekiest guy in school turns out to be a great warrior (ahem) and the two of them set off to foil the plans of an evil Dark Lord who killed the girl’s ancestors and who has now returned for her. I kid you not. And there was a giant named Hagrid. Okay, now I’m kidding you. Anyway, the sequel involves the girl falling in love with a boy at school who turns out to be a vampire. I also kid you not. His name was Edward. I am still not kidding you. The main difference is that my Edward was evil, whereas Meyer’s is merely boring. In fact, you could have a more interesting time having a conversation with his plastic doppelganger, pictured above.

Yes, I actually read Twilight. I did. There it was, staring at me in the used bookstore and I decided that it was time. Bearing in mind, once again, that I would never begrudge Stephanie Meyer for her success, allow me to say the following: Twilight is a piece of crap. It is not so much a work of literature as it is a work of typing. The plot is unoriginal; the writing is banal; the dialogue never rises above cliche; the characters, even the vampires, are entirely uninteresting; and nothing happens. The book goes on and on and nothing happens. Chapter One: nothing. Chapter Two: nothing. Chapter Three: nothing. (I think you see where I'm going with this.) Even the climactic fight scene doesn’t happen, because the central character mercifully loses consciousness (I was tempted to myself, at that point), thus sparing everyone the agony of reading Meyer, who has probably never even hit a golf ball, trying to write action. And the most preposterous thing about the book is not that there are teenage vampires, but that these teenage vampires spend decade after decade in high school without ever once deciding that, that’s it, I can’t take this crap anymore, I’m sucking this place dry.

Why is it popular with certain audiences? Why have millions and millions of young people fallen in love with it? I’ve heard all kinds of psychological gobbledygook about this (e.g. “At this point in their lives blah blah blah when they are exploring their blah blah blah teenage girls especially need blah blah blah and to vicariously resolve the tension that blah blah blah” - thanks, doc, where did you mail order your PhD from?) but the bottom line is this: if you’ve only ever eaten at McDonald’s, you’ll hate the first real food you eat. In short, teens eat it up because they don’t know any better.

And this, in turn, leads me to the point that I want to make. Schooling is only part of a young person’s education, and is not, in the overall scheme of things, the most significant one. University professors argue about students today – whether the student body as a whole is getting better or getting worse and others arguing you can't compare apples to oranges. Whatever the case may be, it is demonstrably true that many university students in arts and social science programs today read less than they did in past generations. Nothing is more detrimental to their education than this, and, in all likelihood, it’s too late to do much about it once they’ve reached second or third year university. We create lifelong readers — and hence lifelong learners — from a young age or probably not at all.

I count myself as fortunate (and I know that at least one of my readers was similarly blessed), to have had parents who took the time to read to me, and later to encourage me to read by furnishing me with books by the likes of Roald Dahl and C.S. Forrester and Jules Verne. Some people say that Stephanie Meyer and her ilk are “at least getting kids to read” as if Twlight were some sort of gateway drug. Today, teenage vampires; tomorrow, Anna Karenina. Maybe. Or it might be that the opposite is true: that people raised on salt and grease and Coca Cola will just seek out more of the same and get fatter and lazier as life goes on.

Any professor will confirm that the most common criticism we receive from students is this one: “It’s boring.” The readings, the lectures, the discussions, the professor him or herself. Boring. No wonder. If Stephanie Meyer is the extent of your literary horizon; if your idea of a great film is anything starring Adam Sandler; if your musical tastes extend no further than Susan Boyle; if your most significant artistic experience to date was winning Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, it will be difficult to understand that many of the cultural experiences worth having in life are not always or immediately gratifying. On the contrary: they are supposed to difficult, they are supposed to demand something of us, and they are supposed to change us by destabilizing our worldview.

Oh, we all need diverting entertainment, of course. It helps, though, if the entertainment is actually diverting, as opposed to time-wasting. And my comparison between Twilight and McDonald’s was not entirely fair. McDonald’s serves reliable french-fries. Twilight has nothing to recommend it except to serve as a rare example of a case where the movie, dreadful though it was, was actually far better than the book.

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 binge drinkers 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, students? 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.

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 it makes you feel better about me, take note: what I'm about to say is far, far less radical than a lot of what you'll read in most pedagogy journals that are available in your libraries.

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, with its emphasis on "coverage" of the historical narrative, 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 unavoidable tendencies towards superficiality in 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 history.

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, as a means of teaching the real lesson. The real lesson is not "the narrative" (this can be learned by anyone willing to a read a textbook.) The point is to teach students disciplinary methodology by exposing them to different approaches to a single subject, to encourage them to approach the subject in an interdisciplinary fashion, 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."

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.

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.

Theft

I'm back earlier than expected, but only because I have an important message about the crisis facing our nation. I'm speaking, of course, about the fact that my Trek 7300 has gone missing. If you see it, drop me a line.

I oppose capital punishment for several reasons. Still, some people deserve a good killing. Bicycle thieves, for instance. I got home yesterday afternoon to discover that our shed had been broken into and, yup, my bicycle was gone. Amanda's was still there, curiously, which leads me to believe that either there was only one thief or that it was an inside job. I think that the latter is extremely improbable. So that means that somebody with a sizeable pair of bolt cutters hacked his way into the shed (which is at the front of our house) in broad daylight and took my bike. As friends and devoted readers of this blog know, I don't drive, and so my bike is my primary method of transportation when the weather is a good. It wasn't yesterday, so I took the bus instead. Big mistake, it turns out.

The bicycle is one of the great democratizing inventions in human history. It provides reliable and relatively inexpensive transportation for hundreds of millions of people around the world. In my case, it gets me to work in about the same amount of time as driving at rush-hour, and in about half the time it takes to ride the bus. It's fun, on paths it's safe (and on roads, too, with a little care and, for me, unaccustomed automatic deference to others); I get some exercise out of it, and I get the satisfaction of not contributing to the global warming experiment that the rest of you are conducting with the only planet we have. So, bicycle thief, you've not only taken something that didn't belong to you, you've hastened the end of the world. Well done. If I knew who you were, I'd karate chop you.

Anyway, now I need a new bike. And more money. I liked my old bike just fine. It wasn't low end. It wasn't high end. It was just right. With a few repairs (it needed a fairly expensive one – take that, bike thieves!) it got me through the last ten years without a hitch. We had some good times, including some substantial bicycle trips. The photo, above, is me on the Niagara Parkway, the time Amanda and I cycled from Niagara-on-the-Lake to the Falls. My only consolation is in hoping that maybe, just maybe, my beloved bike will be sold to somebody who needs it, too. Some slightly addled graduate student who is too dumb to figure out how to operate two pedals and steering wheel at the same time, for instance. There are plenty of those, at least.

Here's a test, by the way, of anyone who claims to be a Marxist. Steal his stuff and see if he really believes in the abolition of private property. If he catches you, just say, "Hey, I had the ability to take your stuff, and I really needed it, too."