Education in America: Lots of Differing Views

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I’m most definitely trying to be non-judgmental, and trying to present as balanced a view as possible, but no matter which way you may look at the matter, someone is going to get upset.

Firstly, I had a talk with A, an immigrant who came to the US 40 years ago on the promise of a place as a teacher at an elementary school.  She had lots of adventures teaching second grade, but it left a very negative impression of the level of preparedness of her colleagues, just as products of the education system firstly, and as teachers in their chosen area secondly.

Then I had a talk with B, a brother-in-law, who teaches science in secondary school, who is good at what he does, and loves his work, but has very negative opinions of the administrators at his school.  He teaches in New York State, and because of the Regents' Examinations that are routine in that state, the Federally mandated testing programs do not make him and his fellow teachers anxious.  He concedes that the constant testing gets his colleagues down, essentially because the tests are seen as a way of winnowing out teachers.

Teachers in other countries (C), no matter how tactfully they phrase it, tend to be aghast at the quality of US teachers not because they see them as uninterested in teaching, or unconcerned about their students, but because of the variation in their level of preparedness, echoing the opinion of A above.  Furthermore, there is a general suspicion across the USA (D) that it is not the best students who go into teaching in the US, but the most mediocre.  There is only anecdotal evidence for this; obviously some of the brightest people many of us know—and I know a host of these—are teachers.  But we have to see the statistics.  Is it the case that the brightest among our classmates in college and high school chose to go into occupations other than teaching?  You tell me.

Finally, there is my own observation of my own students, year after year.  One thing I have noticed is that their geometry preparation, to select just one little area, is highly variable.  Instead of actually teaching my students advanced topics in geometry above and beyond what is required of them to teach in high school (which is what is supposed to happen), I find myself trying to make sure that they're not afraid of high school geometry.  It should be possible for me to give them a quick review of high-school geometry in three weeks, and go on to showing them the delights of other topics, such as hyperbolic geometry, projective geometry, and solid geometry, just so that they could have a context for the traditional geometry that they do have to teach someday.  Similarly, in college, a would be high-school history teacher, for instance, must learn history above and beyond the historic facts that they have to deliver in high school.  Can we have an elementary teacher just know his or her mathematics facts up to the twelve-times table, and no more?  We insist that all teachers must have a robust knowledge of algebra, geometry, and, ideally, a little calculus.  But unfortunately, most elementary teachers live in deadly fear of any and all mathematics other than the little arithmetic that they are called upon to teach, and what is more, there is a vast host of citizenry out there whose considered opinion on the matter is that an elementary teacher need not know much more than simple arithmetic.

That's all fine and dandy, but you must know that elementary teachers in most other countries are significantly better prepared in mathematics than the vast majority of elementary teachers in the US.  This is especially true of teachers in Japan, Germany, Finland, and other countries with which we have set out to compete in education excellence.

I hope no particular teacher feels insulted by any of this; unfortunately the variation in teacher quality in the US is enormous.  There are bound to be countless teachers out there who are exceptions to anything I've described above.  But, by the same token, I daresay that there are teachers out there who don’t know their right hands from their left, and who have in their incapable hands the future of any number of future citizens.

What’s the bottom line?

If the US is to improve the quality of it’s schools, the following has to be done.

(1) We cannot privatize education.  We must bring it up from the bottom, because teaching is so poorly paid that it is very likely that it is those in the worst schools that are inspired to teach, and we must make the worst schools better than they are.  We must make all schools better than they are.

(2) We must pay teachers better.  Taxes must be raised, and salaries improved, and teachers must be given the respect that will encourage young people to consider teaching a good career.  Without respect for learning, nothing can happen.

(3) We must break the death-grip that publishers of textbooks have on the schools.  Wonderful texts are available, even in the US, because they are sent abroad by UNESCO and other organizations to be used in the Third World.  They can be used here.

(4) Testing must be continued, but on a voluntary basis.

(5) Testing of Pre-Service teachers must be conducted before they are certified to teach, and after a teacher is hired, it seems appropriate that raises in salary and other benefits may be tied to testing of the teacher.  We do know that teachers of any sort are difficult to find, because the pay is low, and teachers are often treated poorly by students, parents and administration.  But this trick of hiring anyone to be a teacher, and then persecuting them after they’re hired must stop.

Most importantly, I think teacher salaries must be raised gradually to levels competing with any professionals.  If this does not happen, only second-rate candidates will offer to be teachers.  And, as a liberal, I believe that excellence in teaching has to be a national initiative, because otherwise the best in every state will migrate to states with the best jobs, so that no state will have an incentive to improve its schools, for why bother to teach a kid who's going to leave the state anyway?  Teacher salaries should be paid by the Federal Government.

I suppose it's too much to ask.

Arch

Angst in Academia: Professors who Ditch their Jobs

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I take up this topic reluctantly, because I write this Blog not as a member of an academic institution, and most certainly not as a representative of Academe, or one who is in any way typical of the academic.  I see myself more as someone akin to a high-school teacher, albeit a more educated one, especially since my students are more likely to take up a job outside academe than to pursue an academic career.

A posed photograph that accompanied the Slate post

A recent article in Slate magazine by Rebecca Schumann (about whom I know next to nothing, to my shame,) highlights both the large number of professors who leave academia in disgust or dissatisfaction, either before or even after receiving tenure, and the large number of articles these people have written, to explain their reasons.  So much so that Rebecca S. suggests that “Why I Quit Academia” could well become a sub-genre of the American Essay.

I’m admittedly an outsider to the society of professional intellectuals.  I was more interested in what was going on inside the heads of my unworthy students than inside my own head, or even inside the heads of my colleagues.  I have known, in a vague kind of way, that many of those in the humanities (I suppose I ought to capitalize that): Philosophy, Literature, and History (and, at our own institution, Religion, which is a shame,) are accustomed to thinking deeply, and no doubt are convinced that it is better not to think at all than not to think deeply.  They talk of Kafka and Wittgenstein, and are probably acutely concerned about how the thinking of these gentlemen may be translated into something that can apply to the world of today.  But, as I confessed earlier, I am completely devoid of philosophical angst; I was content to know that it was in good hands.

But why are people leaving academe, and why are they making a fuss about it?

There is general belief that in many instances, American universities reward mediocrity than excellence, especially if the mediocrity is accompanied by an easygoing disposition, and the excellence with perhaps an irascible nature.  It is hard to discern whether this opinion is the result of unhappy experiences in seeking tenure, or whether there is a trend in this direction because of the way tenure works and is awarded in typical universities.  Let’s face it: giving tenure to some curmudgeon dooms a department to potentially years of suffering.

There is belief that the trends in the hiring of Administrators disgusts and offends the faculty of many institutions.  Some big universities have hired CEOs of big corporations as their presidents, and to be honest, a lot of universities are beginning to see themselves are being more able to cope with the problems of funding with a corporate boss at its head.  (As I observed in an earlier post, universities have been driven to desperation deliberately by certain vicious elements among political conservatives and certain business interests, and universities don’t often have the insight to see what is happening to them.)

There are issues that were not discussed in Ms Schuman’s post (or article).  Faculty who are concerned with teaching (as opposed to only research) are anxious about whether succeeding generations of incoming students are able to cope with the material they have to offer.  It is irksome to have to review and re-deliver information that should have been absorbed years earlier by students, and to re-teach skills that should have been acquired long before coming into college.  This is what will drive me from the “groves of Academia,” though the hiring practices at my institution could begin to play a role sooner or later.  There is a steady pressure to lower standards that never lets up.

Something that infuriates almost every colleague I know is the attention given to university athletics.  Honestly, the athletics programs at many schools is a source of income, and the old hands in the Admissions Office know that they would have a tough time beating the bushes for prospective freshmen if not for the hordes that want to play football for the school.  Well, f%#$ football, I say.  In the same line of thinking, the relentless marketing that the school needs to deploy grinds me down.  The TV spots, the endless magazines, the constant presence of photographers in the classroom ... all this promotion is undignified at best, and often disgusting.

I can’t do justice to the whole subject of the brain drain that is at the heart of the phenomenon I’m trying to report on, because many of this category of academic took up their fields because of the kind of subject they were in; there was little for a philosopher to do, outside of a university, in a different way than there is little for a mathematician to do outside the mathematics classroom; while I would much rather teach mathematics than have to jockey a calculator for some building contractor, I do have other options.  Leaving academe is not death to me.  And now, it appears, leaving academe was not death to a lot of these others, either.

Still, we have to be concerned.  The university was an essential part, a very special part of the world in which I grew up, just as was the library, the concert hall, or the museum.  It seems desperately important, to me, that the institution of the University should be rescued from extinction, and not by commercializing it, either.  I would suggest that it was the attempt to Free-Enterprise-ify the university that began the spiral of decay that this most recent essay illuminates.  We cannot insist that all members of our society must be productive enough to satisfy some arbitrary criteria.  It does take all sorts.  But can we keep them all in the style to which they’re accustomed?  Why, or why not?  Describe.

Arch.

The Future of the Republican Party after 2013

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The Republican Party as we have known it since the end of the last Century is an uneasy alliance of libertarians (who aren’t familiar with the term), fiscal conservatives (who disapprove of “government run wild,” and unbalanced budgets), Christian conservatives (who oppose abortion, and various medical practices they deem contrary to their religious principles, and, in some extreme cases, teaching Evolution in schools as an accepted theory), and neo-conservatives (a term which has come to stand for those who are eager to establish the USA as the primary military power on the planet).  All of  these groups have forgotten that the only reason they have banded together is because they oppose some principle for which the Democrats have stood.  Of late, the so-called Tea Partyers have received a lot of attention, but they are really people of a poorer economic class than traditional Republicans (who, it seems to me, have traditionally come from the educated upper-middle class), but who have been persuaded that taxes go towards helping poor minorities rather than poor white Americans (which, incidentally, is very far from the truth).  So being a supporter of the Tea Party (which is probably only a party in the loosest sense of the word) is actually more a matter of posturing than philosophical congruency, because it appears to suggest that individual in that group make enough money for their tax bill to be a great burden.

A photograph published in the British tabloid
The Daily Mail

But as the Republican Party regards the extremes to which it is being driven with horror, things are going to change.  Not everyone in the GOP is anxious to win every election at any cost.  In the excitement of election season it might briefly appear that crushing the Democrats, responding to their rhetoric with vicious lies, and smearing their bleeding-heart candidates is an excellent idea.  But Republicans of a more moderate hue, who depend on the Democrats to look after the interests of the poor and indigent, widows and orphans, and the lonely and the unloved, (whose interests are boring, at best, and a nuisance most times,) do not, I believe, have their hearts behind crushing the Democrat Party utterly and setting up the structure of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House in such a way as to allow the GOP to do anything it wants.  (Allowing the GOP to do anything it wants very likely looks more unpleasant by the minute, even to them.)

John McCain is only the most visible Republican to reject the party strategy, dictated by the extreme Right, as unacceptable, and not useful.  As someone said, the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) regulates the Insurance Industry, not Health Care.  The Health Insurance Industry is being viewed more as a national utility, rather than a lightly-regulated business.  Why would anyone be opposed to this move?  Merely to oppose the Democrats.

While I’m not absolutely confident about the prospects of seeing the Republican Party come apart at the seams, it is quite possible.  If the much-talked-about Default comes to be, and if it cannot be successfully pinned on President Obama, then the GOP will have a great deal of mud on its face, and they’re furiously applying detergent to forestall or minimize this mudpack.  Poisoning the well never worked for anyone who wanted to take leadership.

We have to wait and see.

[Added later:

it has just come to light that late at night on September 3oth, the House moved to remove the privilege of any House member to call for a Senate amendment to a House bill to be opened for debate.  In other words, the GOP changed the House rules so that only Eddie Cantor or his designee can bring the Senate amended spending Bill to a vote.  So, once again, the GOP has tricked the Democrats into being helpless to move the spending bill forward.

It will take a Democrat majority in the House to restore the House Rules to their former level of reasonability (or unreasonability), and the Democrats will have their work cut out for them to ensure that this happens.  Gerrymandering is a terrible thing.]

[Added yet later:

Apparently the Senate and the House have come to an agreement over a compromise spending bill on which a vote will be taken around 7:00 P.M. today.  We are told that the bill contains most of what was originally in the Senate spending bill.  Texas senator Ted Cruz has promised not to filibuster the vote, but he is unreliable and not to be trusted.]

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How Republicans have Set out to Change the Game in Washington

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Some of the things that have been happening from the time of Clinton in the White House, and even earlier, have been done under our very noses, but I failed to see their implications.

For twenty years, we know, Republicans have been Gerrymandering all over the US, changing the shape of electoral districts.  Democrats may have also indulged in this little game, but the GOP has embraced the practice wholesale.  As a result, as a commenter on a recent piece on the New York Times website observed, (and even the young fellow in the video I linked a couple of days ago mentioned,) there are an enormous number of Congressional seats that will remain solidly Republican for the foreseeable future (unless, of course, further Gerrymandering takes place, but that is a two-edged sword).

This means that, in these districts, the “only meaningful elections”, to quote the gentleman whose comment sparked off this blog post of mine, “are the GOP primaries” in which the candidate is selected.  This means, of course, that the successful candidate will most likely be the most extreme, least-likely to compromise, reddest of the red among those contending for the party candidacy, in order to present him- or herself as the most Republican among them.  In other words, Republicans will be electing a large number of members of the House who will never compromise, and never work with Democrats on any initiative, no matter how beneficial to the country, or how beneficial to even their own electorate.  The road on which the GOP has set itself is the road for success of the Party, and, not entirely by design, the road of disaster for the USA.  To be fair, they, of course, see the success of the GOP as the salvation of the Nation.

Rank and file Republicans, and, most notably, Tea-Party Republicans, are completely on board with this agenda, even if they don’t see the long-term implications of it.  The GOP is the party of Big Business (though most of them probably don’t see themselves as such), and if Big Business is to increase its profits, the money will come from the American People first (though, again, they may fully intend to get it from other nations, or “Trading Partners”).  But it will be a long, long time before Tea Partyers become disillusioned with the GOP.

Another, separate point made by an observer is that this ploy of threatening to default on the National Debt is not a move intended by the framers of the Constitution.  While we may disagree on whether the original intent of the Liberties, or the Human Rights in the Constitution are as they are understood today, it is an entirely different matter to alter the balance of powers of the three branches of government by these blackmail measures of defaulting on the obligations of the Treasury.  (It could never have been foreseen, two centuries ago, that the national debt would ever reach these proportions, or that the currency structure of World Trade would evolve into what it is today.)  So the GOP has set out to upset the balance in Washington, hoping that things will tumble to their advantage.

A retired caboose from the PA Railroad,
absolutely nothing to do with the blog post.

There is at least a little belief that the GOP is being manipulated by a very few individuals to their own advantage: and the names of the usual suspects keep cropping up, such as the Koch Brothers.  That brings us into the realm of Conspiracy Theory, which is an embarrassment I prefer to avoid.  But my sorrow for what the GOP has become is probably ill-advised.  There will always be people who feel that it is their duty to think first, and only of their own interests, and the two parties being what they are, the Republican Party is now their home.  But it is sad that though even in Republican households, idealists are growing up, questioning the motives and the principles of their parents, the structure these youth will inherit will forever favor dysfunctional politicians, whose agenda will for a long time be focused on programs that ultimately bring about widespread suffering.  Unless something extremely creative is done to forestall this crisis from arriving, things are going to get a lot worse before they become briefly better.  But look on the bright side: the weather today was perfect!

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Focus on Education: Diane Ravitch

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I have no right to address this issue, because I’m reacting to a report of a book by Diane Ravitch (see here for a brief bio, and a summary of her latest ideas)  that I have not read. This author seems to be saying most of the things that I have tried to say, and has said them better, and has more information with which to support her points. Rather than state that she has said these things, (which she may have), I’m saying them for myself.

The furious testing that goes on is misguided. I’m not at all against tests; I think they allow students to know how good they are. But that’s all they should do; they should not be used for anything else. They should certainly not be used to assess teaching. It is unfortunate that there are no better ways to tell whether a teacher is doing his or her job than to assess his or her students —and in the fee-for-service atmosphere that we find at the present time, there doesn’t seem to be an alternative—there is nothing that can be done, as far as I can see. If tests are going to be administered, someone is sure to use them in a way that they find convenient. All over the world, it seems that tests are poisoning the water of education, and as tests become increasingly indispensable for establishing the value of people, other abuses inevitably come into play: private tutoring, available only to those that can afford it, and, I’m sure, someday corruption and bribery will not be far behind.
Teaching is a profession that seems to destroy those who take it up. The social climate is such that so much hangs on the outcome of education that everyone looks for a scapegoat, and the teacher is a natural one. Don’t be too surprised if very soon only the scum of the earth will take up teaching. No amount of marketing or PR will serve to persuade any but the most gullible into the trap of taking up teaching. You truly have to be naïve to want to submit to the humiliation of being a teacher in the United States of America, the land of the brave, and the home of the constant testing!

The effectively privatizing of education, towards which the US is being pushed, by commercial interests, obviously, will inevitably create economic stratification of education as much as there is stratification in other aspects of society. While society rebelled against racial segregation in the sixties, today segregation of all sorts is being encouraged by the conservative elements among us, and the very people who are aghast at the increase in the use of Spanish across America, and at the access that the underprivileged have for all sorts of goods and services, will prefer to have their children educated in an environment free of what are probably perceived as the marginal elements of society. The rush to embrace Charter Schools, Diane Ravitch seems to say, is just the desire to have minority-free classrooms in disguise. Even if such a motive is furthest from your mind, be careful: to have poverty and diversity hidden from your child’s eyes is not the best thing for your child.

I had forgotten what a broadening thing it was, to have a college education. Those of us who have had the privilege of schooling beyond the twelfth grade sometimes forget how different the world is as we see it, from how it must seem to those who only learn about the world outside through the distorting lens of the Evening News, or worse, Fox News. Or through telescopes from their bedrooms.  Some of the inexplicable attitudes of people like the former governor of Alaska become a little more understandable. The attitudes of conservative members of Congress who have actually had an education are truly inexplicable.

The main job of a teacher, as I see it, is to teach the student to understand and love the world, all of it, all that it has been, and all that it is now, and to delight in how things work (when they do work). But that will not happen, because it isn’t profitable.

I was recently made aware of several books that had titles something like: How Science Poisons Everything, in opposition to another book that said something like: God Isn’t So Great. It’s time someone wrote a book titled How Business Poisons Everything, or How the Profit Motive Destroys Everything We Hold Dear, Including Education, Society, Our Homes, Our Children, Our Government, And World Peace. So There.

[Added later]

AND ANOTHER THING.
We’re told that Diane Ravitch has come out against not only No Child Left Behind, but also Obama’s program and slogan: Race to the Top.  If you read Ms Ravitch’s bio, you learn that she was educated at Wellesley, an excellent, very selective East Coast college (no criticism there; I live on the East Coast myself) which was, until a few decades ago, a women-only institution.  If we go on the assumption that her elitist education had an impact on her thinking, we might begin to understand why she first supported clumsy initiatives like No Child Left Behind, and then abandoned them.

Any idealist who has received a good education knows that there is an amazing amount of things out there that would be even more amazing if people weren’t so dumb.  And certainly, ignorance is the greater part of dumbness.  So it isn’t surprising that anyone with any sort of heart who’s been to college wants to set out to change the world; and plans brimming with energy, like No Child Left Behind, promise to be almost the only thing that’s going to make any sort of difference in the monolithic monument to stupidity that US schools appear to be, from the outside.

The inside, too.  Except for a few cracks here and there, and a little intelligent erosion around the edges —and let us be grateful to the intelligent termites who have kept working at the pile of petrified crap for so long— the monument survives.

There is some suspicion that politicians in office are sort of divided on the issue of education.  It seems obvious that cynically, an ignorant electorate is to be desired, because they will believe anything.  But it is not easy to pile lies upon lies, because lies are harder to defend than the truth, and so there is something to be said for an intelligent, educated, well-informed electorate, which is able to knowledgeably judge what the issues are, and judge how well you have addressed them.  When it comes to competing with foreign technology, though, we have two options: import educated labor, or educate our own.  Neither option is easy, with folks being as lazy, and as hostile to all things non-American as they are!

It is not that the rest of us want our youth to remain ignorant.  It is just that the American approach had become: leave it to the professionals.  If they don’t fix it, sue them.  We forget that we can’t do that in every case, but we continue to do that, because it is the lazy thing to do.  I don’t know what Ms Ravitch advocates; there is no simple fix.  The road to good education is long, and it takes first raising a generation of young people who value education for its own sake, who must grow up to become teachers who value teaching because of their love of children and their hate of ignorance, and their faith in a better world, and become parents who are actually interested in what their kids are learning each day, and know the constraints under which their friends, the teachers, work.

I know.  I know.  It’ll never work.  Perhaps something like No Child Left Behind might be easier. . . every decade or so . . .

Arch
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A jolly tune from Switzerland

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This is a tune my mother taught me!  It apparently isn’t as well known today as it was several decades ago.  I played it for my wife, and she says it definitely sounds very Alpine, and she can almost imagine some fellows in Lederhosen and feathers in their hats furiously playing it on their brass instruments, but she had never heard it before.

It is called Weggis Song, and the first line goes: “Von Luzern auf Weggis zu, Hul-di-ri-di-ya hul-di-ri-ya!”  Most of the song is “Hul - dee - ree - dee-ya, huldiri deeya hudiriya!”  The song is intended for yodeling, of all things, so these are just nonsense syllables.  We were supposed to sing the tune very fast, to make the yodeling more effective.


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Osculating Circles, Serenade, Reverse Video, and all that Jazz (Not)

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Well, dear readers, I’m blowing my own horn here once again, mostly because I want to drum up some viewers for a little YouTube video I put up which, I think (but I’m biased), is a particularly nice piece of work, and because I think there’s so much to talk about.

On second thoughts, I’m not going to talk very much about all that has to be talked about.  At time of writing, the Republican dominated Congress has voted to Sequester, which is a system of automatic and arbitrary cuts in the Federal budgets and services settled upon a couple of decades ago.  The branches of the Federal Government that are cut are those considered inessential, such as Food Stamps, the Federal Parks (certain forest preserves and recreation areas, for those of you who are so lucky as to live abroad), and such things that do not actually discomfit actual Members of Congress, some of whom are among the most vile individuals on the face of the Earth, both ignorant and vicious, while others are merely team players, who have found themselves on the wrong team.

The reason for the Sequester is that the new Health Plan put in place by Democrats and President Obama to provide reasonable health care for most members of American society (and still provide a handsome profit for Insurance Companies) needs a certain amount of government funding to get started.  (As will all insurance schemes, you have to provide a certain amount of startup money.)

Here is an explanation of what is going on through one possible interpretation:


And why do the Republicans want to not fund the health plan?  One reason, supposedly, is because it provides government funding for birth control.  The Pope has declared that religious preoccupation with birth control is disproportionate to its importance.  But certain (very small, but vociferous) sectors of American society are outspoken about the Principle that the government should not participate in birth control.  Ironically, the USA funds birth control in foreign countries.

There has been an onslaught of media advertising that provides a mixture of misleading information and outright lies about the new health plan, urging private individuals to stay away from it.  But it appears that large numbers of people are signing up nevertheless, which means that government funding is not as important as it might have been if people did not sign up.  The American people seem to have weighed in on the side of the new health plan, called the Affordable Care Act, officially, and Obamacare unofficially.  If it goes on to be a great success, the next step for the Republicans, who are now in the majority (the Act was passed in the previous session of Congress, which was dominated by the Democrats) will be to make some minor changes in the law, and relabel it the American Apple Pie Act, or something like that, and take credit for its success.  The changes might be as little as allowing condoms, but not contraceptives, or something equally stupid.  When private companies use marketing tricks to deceive customers it is irritating, but when Congress plays with words and tinkers with the truth, it is truly disgusting.  I sincerely hope the Democrats never indulge in Marketing.

Osculating Circles

An osculating circle is a simple thing.  Suppose we have a curve C, and some point P on the curve.  If you pick three points on the curve, you can easily make a circle pass through those three points.  Now if you make the three points all move to P, the circle gradually becomes the osculating circle at P, which is a circle that matches the shape of the curve perfectly just at the point P.  The radius of this circle is called the radius of curvature of the curve C at the point P.

In the figure we have a curve, in pale blue, unfortunately, and three points F, G, and H.  We also show the circle through those points, and how it was made, using perpendicular bisectors, and so forth.  Now imagine F and H moving towards G.  As you can see, the circle will not change very much, and becomes the osculating circle at G.  This can be done at any point, really; at flat points of the curve, such as F, the circle will be large; at point where the curve turns rapidly, such as A, the circle will be very tight.  In fact, it will be precisely the circle along which you would be driving, briefly, if the curve was a road.

I forgot to say: wherever the curve turns sharply, the Osculating Circle will be small, wherever the road curves hardly at all, the Osculating Circle will be enormous.  The smaller the radius, the tighter the curve.  (Each point has its own osculating circle.)  The video was made by tracing the osculating circles; in other words, the circles remain as the point moves on, so that there are hundreds of circles, which were set to fade gradually (but don’t seem to fade at all, unfortunately). [Added later: I figured out why there was no fading; I had forgotten to click in an important box.]

In the video below, the point A moves along the curve, taking the osculating circle with it.




Meanwhile, down at the farm, my friend is a horn player, and I had visited their home back in the Fall of 2010 --Rally to Restore Sanity, remember?-- and played them a MIDI version of my Serenade, my only original composition --except for an early Chorale-prelude.  Just the other day, my friend said that she had begun playing in a wind quintet (Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn, and Bassoon), and may she play my Serenade with her gang, just for fun?

A typical woodwind quintet:
the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet

To have my Serenade really played live!  OMG!  Of course, I had to make it worth playing by a quintet, which meant that it had to be rewritten in true 5-voice form.  (The piece I had written was in four parts, which is the easiest thing to do, with the bass being doubled.  That doesn’t really count as 5 parts.)

For the first time I found myself actually engaging with issues of instrumentation: how high can a bassoon go, how low, how long can they play without taking a breath?  Suffice it to say that I had to rewrite the harmony extensively to keep it more or less the same, and to make sure all the parts were within the ranges of the instruments, and that each of the parts was fairly interesting to play.  So that’s what you’re hearing, going on behind the osculating circles.  No, not a live performance, but the new rewritten composition, played by MIDI sequencer.  If and when the live performance actually takes place (possibly even this weekend), and if the parts are all in feasible ranges, and if they happen to record the performance, I will post it here!!!

[Added later:  The Quintet was performed, but it sounded so bad that they never recorded it.  So I have to be content with the version played by software :( ]

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Is there a concerted attack on the Higher Education System of the US?

A recent article in a website called Alternet, puts forward the idea that conservative and capitalist forces have set out to destroy higher education systematically.

The argument goes like this: During the Sixties, the Universities were a source of protest, anti-establishment sentiment, suspicion of Big Business, anti-war propaganda, and support for diversity, sexual liberation, protest against racism and against exclusionary policies at all levels, in short, everything that stood against traditional motherhood and Apple Pie.  The conservative elements--rightly--identified this left-leaning thought with Universities specifically, and post secondary education generally.  The author (not identified clearly on the site) suggests that a movement was put in place at least thirty years ago, to effectively destroy higher education as it existed then, and replace it with something friendlier towards Business, the Armed Forces, and conservatives, or the so-called Business-Industrial Complex, though it was not identified as such in the article.

The article describes how the author believes the Universities were set on the Road to Destruction in 5 Steps.

Step 1:   Defund higher education.
Step 2:  Impoverish professors.
Step 3:  Move in a managerial class to "prefessionalize" university administration.
Step 4:  Move in Corporate structure, and corporate money.
Step 5:  Destroy the Students.

While we may think that the path of higher education, generally, and the paths of practically everything, has followed this path ever since Ronald Reagan took office, there is reason to believe that certain individuals had actually planned this route, notably one Lewis Powell, who joined the Supreme Court in 1971, who is reputed to have sent something now called the Powell Memorandum, which declared that the Universities were the source of a concerted attack on the Free Enterprise System, and called on a concerted counter-attack, in terms of increasing the power of the Congressional Lobby, and its ability to shape the priorities of members of Congress.  The article quotes Anna Victoria, who points out (Pluck Magazine) that this agenda bore fruit, as Universities had to turn to private sources for funding.  Private funders, of course, use their leverage to influence the tone of activity in the schools that they fund.

The (identity unknown) author of the Alternet "Five Steps" article compares the anti-education procedure adopted by US Business as being a subtle variant of the Chinese action of sending dissending intellectuals to "re-education" camps.  Though the condition of the US 'professoriate' is not visibly as pathetic as that of either Russian or Chinese intellectuals in the decades of the fifties and sixties, one can indeed see that while, on the one hand, University Presidents (and football coaches) do enjoy fabulous salaries, most other professors earn far less than one would expect with salaries of the 1960s adjusted for inflation.  Professors are being bullied into cooperation with Business.

Though it is difficult to see the entire problem of higher education in the framework of the Five Steps article, it is nevertheless easy to imagine that certain parties, at least, have incorporated the idea of the destruction of universities into their private agendas; in other words, I do not see the entire sad recent history of Academe in the US as the story of victims of a conspiracy.  But I do have to admit that any conspiracy one can imagine on the part of Business can easily be true; there are so many instances of business organizations that seem to compete on the surface, but which have cooperated in order to destroy some common enemy.  All that remains for us to believe is whether American Higher Education is seen as The Enemy of Big Business.  Well, that certainly seems to be a no-brainer.  Big Business seems friendlier towards Community Colleges than big universities, because the latter have, historically, been full of intellectuals with a liberal bias, if not outright socialists.

I don't know whether I'm truly upset at the picture being painted here.  While it is true that the universities have nurtured liberal values for many decades, it seems to me that today, perhaps by the success of the grand design put forward by the Five Steps article, the big universities are nurturing fewer liberals than simply a lot of people who whine all the time.  If we're going to have a free enterprise system, it makes sense that we must educate our workers in the way that will be most useful to the bosses who will hire them.  If we don't like that plan, we have to jettison the free enterprise system entirely.  In other words, you can't have the pleasures and surpluses of Capitalist Society, and the freedom of thought of a Socialist Society at the same time.  The big contradiction we've clung to so far is that it is possible to keep Big Business happy, and keep Poor Workers happy, and Socialist Professors rolling in lucrative grants, all at the same time.  Marx knew this, and he said that the whole world has to be Socialist, or the whole world has to be Capitalist.  Otherwise, the Capitalist businesses will suck the socialists dry.  And looking at Cuba and Mexico, we know that it is true.  What about China?  They chose Capitalism.

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