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 9.81 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 – historiography, we call it — not a bill of facts (and yet history survey courses tend to be taught as narrative rather than as historiography) 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 threatening - 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. I personally pay lip service to the idea that we study history because it offers lessons about how to live well in the present, but I spend very little time actually helping students to understand what those lessons might be. But how could it be otherwise, when I 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.

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."