Education and The Earth

When people talk about loving the planet, some of us immediately get a mental image of people hugging trees.  How reasonable is this?

Of course, most large trees have been around for years and years, even as individuals; in the east, a large maple, for example, probably has been alive for a minimum of fifteen years; possibly a quarter of a century; certainly they deserve respect, because they give us shelter, get carbon out of the atmosphere, and provide a spectacular show in the fall!  Nature lovers go crazy over rivers and woods; you can hardly complain about that.  Decades ago, Emerson and his friends went on and on about the beauty of unspoiled nature.

But loving the planet in the world we have now can't be all about a world without people.  I mean, face facts: there are a lot of people.  However, as you grow older, one begins to appreciate little things about people whom one doesn't even know.

Being a grumpy user of bookface--you know what I mean--I get posts from complete strangers: unknown people and pages and companies, and, of course bookface itself, (they do this so that its users spend more time on the site, so that ads can be shoved in their faces), and if you ever look at a funny cat video, well, you've gone and done it: you'll get at least one cat video a day.  But often there are clips and photos of people who say and do things that make you think that they're OK; that the planet is in fairly good hands.  (There are also clips and articles about people whose goals are good, whose hearts are essentially in the right place, but who try to express their anger in a variety of 'clever' ways, which are ultimately destructive.)

About thirty years ago,  in most colleges, students were taught things about the various parts of the US, and about foreign countries, which helped them to be able to relate to those countries, if they happened to be in the news, and to relate to foreign people, if they happened to meet them.  It is this population that, with great--inappropriate, I believe--idealism, set about to replace the word "foreign student" with the world "International student."  Think about that.  'Foreign' seems to me a perfectly serviceable word, with negative connotations only among the uneducated set.  (This is an example of so-called "PC" behavior, which has resulted in such amusing and pathetic neologisms as "policeperson, fireperson, serviceperson", and so on.  OK, I suppose that a woman who joins the local fire company probably resents being called a 'fireman,' but I'd like to have that confirmed; probably they don't.  The same goes with policeman.

We all know about the Taj Mahal, or the Great Wall of China, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the Pyramids of Egypt.  We consider them our treasures, which is a good thing in some ways; if some foreign nation waltzes into China and sets about reducing their Great Wall to rubble, I absolutely believe that we should offer to head over there and help defend it.  It's our wall too.  However, if China itself decides to reduce its own wall to rubble, we're going to have to bite the bullet and let them do it (after sending over a strongly-worded expression of our disapproval).  All these wonderful things are ours only in a very limited sense.

Let's consider the problem with the Venezuelan elections.  (We're all beginning to see what a fragile thing national elections are; we can't just leave voting to the highly-motivated; we can't suck down any public expressions of sentiment about election candidates without checking them out carefully.)  When the administration thinks about Venezuela, are they making calculations about political advantage?  Do they know to what extent our covert operations have interfered with Venezuelan politics?  Are they aware how we have (like the Russian facebook agents have done to us, or even more crudely) interfered with Venezuelan political succession, and possibly contributed to the corruption of the supposedly socialist former prime minister (still hanging onto power)?  I do not know any definitive information about the situation, but the very possibility of taking advantage of Venezuelan oil reserves, with the resulting opportunity for a corrupt Venezuelan political leader to enjoy a lot of wealth from the US, can completely distort the balance of Venezuelan politics.  In the last analysis, Venezuelan citizens must take charge of their own destiny, and it is difficult to see how the US can poke their political balloon to the advantage of Venezuela as a nation.

It is the easiest thing in the world for unscrupulous foreign people to pretend to be Americans and spread false rumors about our Presidential candidates.  We have to make sure that those messages are originating on US soil with Americans, and that the statements they make are verified.  It is partly our own fault for being such suckers.  Is Bob Mueller going to investigate hundreds of Russians for spreading false rumors?  Sometimes I feel that, just because the FDA makes sure that there are no unhealthy oils in our processed foods, we too quickly believe that Twitter and Facebook are idiot-proof.  No, they're not, and we have the President to prove it.

Some time ago, I arrived at the belief that Education ultimately was designed to connect students with the World.

To be honest, I myself wasn't entirely convinced that this belief made sense, but I could not find any fault with it.  As we know, education at the college or university level has two aspects to it, and often these aspects overlap quite a lot: there is the expectation that the student will get an in-depth training in some field.  This is usually the major field of emphasis, or just The Major.  The second aspect is to convey a large number of pieces of information to the students, to make the World understandable to the student.  This is called General Education, and in the past, a lot of this was taught in high school, and even earlier.  Unfortunately, the youth of today are--many of them--highly resistant to education (I apologize for saying this), but the young people are unaware that this resistance is generally self-defeating; they will just have to learn this material later on somehow, and have the elementary material crowded in with other stuff, and as a result, they have to be taught the same material repeatedly.  That virtually ensures that the student will not take it seriously, because there is a subconscious expectation that it will be taught yet again!  This is similar to being taught long multiplication in third grade, and then being tested for it in fourth grade, and of course, they haven't learned it properly, so it is taught again in fourth grade; they're tested for it in fifth grade, diagnosed as deficient, taught the skill again . . .  By the time a kid gets to sixth grade, he or she will hate the very thought of long multiplication.  Actually, long multiplication isn't particularly difficult.

So, to summarize, a healthy view of the world at large is now not only a matter of creating a healthy, functioning citizen of oneself and one's offspring, it is a matter of being able to elect a suitable and competent political leader.  Many of the faults of the conservative elements in the government flow from not knowing their country well enough, not knowing their world well enough, not having gotten to know people well enough, except for the very few in their immediate circle.  When we accuse Donald Trump of being ignorant, he doesn't realize that we mean it literally.

As always, most young people will refuse to accept that they have such a moral burden on their backs when they go into College, already bending under the load of having four more years of school, which they see as attending gym class reluctantly, and resisting the onslaught of sex education, or whatever it is about school that they despised.  We can probably say goodbye to a functioning democracy if we leave such things entirely up to our kids.  Luckily for us, some kids actually are up to the challenge!

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A number of different concerns: Just Cleaning Up

Trump
Democrats and progressives everywhere are going berserk with hostility, disparagement, annoyance and fury against, Trump.  Some of the hate--yes; make no mistake, it is hate--is downright inexcusable.  Don't get me wrong; the GOP as a party deserves a lot of angry dressing down.  But Trump's failings are all about (1) listening to bad advisers, (2) selecting bad helpers, (3) taking the bad objectives of the GOP seriously; and, of course, being insincere about treating women and minorities fairly and equally, and (4) being unable to disguise his shameless pandering to whites who despise Latino and Middle Eastern immigrants.
To people of little imagination (and possibly little education), an enormous wall across the border seems like a no-brainer.  Just so do people in any neighborhood think that a big wall around their property would keep them safe.  I can only laugh.  But it won't be funny, five years from now, if the biggest money-spinner is going to be a company that builds walls around the homes of wealthy people.  (And some not-so-wealthy people, too; you'd be surprised just how many middle class folk think they are plutocrats!  Sad.)  A big wall could make things harder for simple, law-abiding immigrants, true; but my guess is that the drugs will still come in, and the really big felons will also sneak in.
Mean-spirited responses to GOP actions can easily backfire.  At the moment, the Democrat-dominated Congress is grinding along with determined obstructionism.  There are a few Congressmen and women who want to serve notice on the President.  In my opinion, abuse of Emergency Powers is strong enough to warrant impeachment.

Education

I recently saw a British youth holding up a placard which read: Why should we go to school if you won't listen to the educated?
Let's leave that aside, for a while; people ignore the 'Educated' for various reasons.  But no one can really understand the value of education except through a distorting lens.
People who have received a certain amount of education--and bear in mind that being put through the education machine is no guarantee that a person is educated.  It suits the purposes of an educational institution to push a student through and out as quickly as possible, because unsuccessful students spoil the profile of a school--have all sorts of distorted views of how much their offspring can benefit from this process of 'being educated' by a college or university.  In the end, the view of a student's parents, the view of the student's institution's administrators, the view of the teachers, the view of the students themselves, are all different, and all distorted.  Even more distorted are the views of the government, of prospective employers, everyone.  Some people are lucky; they're interested in what they're taught, and they have teachers who're interested in what they're teaching.  (That last is largely true; very few people take on teaching as a last resort, or as a means of getting rich.)
I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed my education.  I just loved every minute of it, which is part of the reason I ended up as a teacher.  How hard can it be, I told myself, to teach a bunch of kids something they're probably going to love?
It took a while for me to realize that a few kids did love the material; others hated it, but they endured it because they felt sorry for me!  Others pretended to like the material, hoping I would give them a good grade.  But what a waste of time.
There's an expectation that teachers can make students like the material.  You can only expect this to work so far; it is called motivation, and it is rare to find a teacher who has the art of motivating students, but who also know their material thoroughly.  And, after a while, they burn out; motivating students is a joy-sucking way of life!  These days, especially, students have a "Go ahead; make my day!" attitude towards being motivated; it's sad.
But education is actually about enjoying life.  Life has many aspects; the more of these aspects a young human being can relate to, the less he or she is going to be bored.  What about specialized education, such as in STEM fields?  They enable students to possibly find jobs in occupations that will earn a lot of money for their future employers.  Will the students themselves earn a lot of money?  Probably.  But probably not as much as the employers are going to earn!  As the last year or two has demonstrated, those who make the most money are not the cleverest and best at what they do!  Learn as much as you can, and focus on the things that are interesting to you; that's where you're going to do well.  Don't neglect the basics: reading, writing, math, computers, and little bits of everything else.  If you don't understand those basic things, you won't be useful to anyone for very long, and you're going to have to fight to stay alive.

More later.

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Good Writing: A Video by Steven Pinker

The actual title of the video is "Linguistics, Style and Writing":  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV5J6BfToSw and it gives an amazingly concise (as concise as an hour-long talk could be) explanation as to why bad writing is so prevalent.

From sitting through that video, what I gained most was the point of view of a writer, and what a writer is trying to do.   On the way, Steven Pinker dealt with a vast number of little pieces of conventional wisdom that perplexed me, (and, to be honest, will continue to do so,) and put them in perspective.

The takeaway was that languages evolve, and words that Victorian authorities despised, become essential words in later centuries.  One such word was finalized, for which I did not quite catch the superior replacement; I suppose it was finished.  But these days, of course, finalizing is an essential technical term in a number of areas, while finished remains a general-use word that could never replace it.

There are numerous aphorisms that we are saddled with, which, incidentally just can't be jettisoned, because they are often useful :  Always use the active voice, for instance.  Using the Wikipedia description of the story of Oedipus, Steven Pinker showed how using the passive voice kept the continuity of the description, so that the reader was not distracted by agents who were entirely incidental to the story.  It was about how the infant Oedipus was delivered to his foster parents, despite his father's belief that Oedipus would someday kill his father.  (Let me say, as an aside, that the Wikipedia article as it now stands, is an example of the worst kind of writing.  Perhaps before my readers look it up, miraculously someone will get into Wikipedia and improve it, but it is certainly a disaster at this moment: 1:35 p.m. on Wednesday the 13^th of February.)

Another issue he touched upon (Pinker, not Oedipus) is the use of the singular they.  Some people object to the modern tendency to strain to be gender-neutral.  Now, I long to write a diatribe against Politically Correct Speech, but it can make me so many enemies that I have to think carefully about it.  But I believe gender-neutral expression is a good thing.  Males have had ascendancy in so many infinite ways up until the present, that we can hardly object to a sentence such as "The sole heir indicated that they would prefer to give the effects to charity."  This makes it unnecessary to determine, or to convey, whether the heir was male or female.  (That was my example, and Steven Pinker should not be blamed for its weakness.)

This is a video very much worth watching; there are many pieces of practical advice, and much attitude adjustment.  Language is important, and clear, effective writing is important.  There is a lot of humor, and it is politically neutral, so everyone can watch it without being annoyed!

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Books versus Reading!

A lot of--certainly well-read--people are up in arms against digital media.  They praise paper books to the skies.  They deride non-paper media.  They consider themselves a cut above the rest for having read books; they measure their worth by the size of their own (paper) book collection, and praise great and famous men whose (paper) libraries filled out enormous cathedral-sized rooms.  (In the past, not in these days of digitized cathedrals.*)

Well, OK; I myself cannot remember reading more than, say, a few hundred books.  Most bibliophiles would snort, saying that they have read many more books than that, though they would be hard pressed to recall their titles, or even the contents, of these fabulous books.

You would gather, by the paragraphs above--which have the makings of starting off a diatribe--that I didn't think much of paper books.  This is not the case.  I'm just against the idea of thinking of paper books as the only game in town; I'm not for digital books exclusively.

I think that those who are passionately fond of paper books are largely those not educated in a technical field; their collections are probably weighted towards books that dispense wisdom, that contain literature and poetry and memoirs, for those of a contemplative disposition.  That's fine.  But it irks me when people express admiration to books nicely bound in leather, over against books that are cheaply bound, because they're necessary books for someone in a technical field, and those books would not be affordable if they were to be leather bound.  So, unconsciously, these people are expressing their class biases.  I don't hold it against them (at least not very much), because the veneration of books is characteristic of a classical education, which society is realizing is expensive, not least because of its price in timber.  The recent, misguided emphasis on Scientific, Engineering, Technical and Mathematical (STEM) education is an overreaction to historic preference of citizens to study subjects "for gentlemen", which did not include the STEM fields.  After a few years, one hopes, those (technical) fields will take their rightful place alongside other subjects, and not ahead of them.

The important thing is to be able to read and write, and read and write well, not just like some of the more notorious graduates of the University of Pennsylvania.  (Evidently, a requirement for being President in the future is the ability to Tweet effectively and accurately.)

If the physical medium were to be taken out of the discussion, the point is well taken that being widely read, is certainly an important skill in navigating these confusing times.  It is a great disadvantage in trying to understand, for instance, issues of immigration, or of closing down the government (recall poor Wilbur Ross, trying to--either understand the positions of citizens who live a hand-to-mouth existence, or trying to think of diplomatic ways of advising them!) or responding to violence and chaos abroad.  (Of course, it would help even more if certain heads of state could read, and yet more if the US were to stop helping to destabilize their fragile economies.)

I think the situation in Venezuela deserves a paragraph.  They had a corrupt head of state, who mismanaged the economy; then the election that seemed necessary at that moment was not called.  (The existing administration has power over whether an election is called, so it appears that they though they could stay in power indefinitely by not calling elections ever again.)  The most popular politician in the country declared himself Prime Minister (or president, I'm not sure).  At this point, Donald Trump's administration chose to recognize this un-elected politician as the legitimate national leader of Venezuela.  In my humble opinion, this was a serious misstep.  And, to make matters worse, a number of foreign governments followed, recognizing this other gentleman.  Think, if this had happened here.  If China, and Russia, and Britain and Australia had recognized Hillary Clinton as President, instead of Trump.  Not even Hillary Clinton would have appreciated the gesture.

One of the important benefits of reading is its ability to enhance our capacity to think like someone else; to put ourselves in the place of others in our imaginations.  This is not exactly empathy; it is not about feelings, necessarily.  It is about seeing another point of view.  Going back to the Venezuela example (which I had not planned): if by some chance, Mr. Juan Guiado's new government were to become--temporarily--legitimized, it will have to live with the accusation that it was set up by the USA, and therefore beholden to it (which is a great burden); and that stigma could eventually end it's life, possibly in a bloody uprising.  Mike Pence is reported as saying that this is no time for dialogue, but that it is time for the Maduro regime to end.  Washington should not be deciding whether such a time has come, and certainly Pence should not be doing so.

Anyway: in any time, having read widely in one's youth stands one in good stead.  Another thing we hear too little about is that travel too broadens the mind.  But it is all too common for one's tourist experiences to wash off of one, like water off the back of a duck.  It is reading that prepares one to take full advantage of one's travel!

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*This is an attempt at a joke, of course; digital cathedrals are not expected to get here before 2020.