A mini report on developmental and educational psychology

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I’m not a psychologist (and I don’t even play one on TV), for reasons I will give you later.  But there are some aspects of the subject that are useful to know, and which I stumbled upon rather late in life.

What education must deliver to a person depends on his mental development, so teachers should know, at least in general terms, what is going on in the heads of their pupils.  Here is a sketch of what I picked up; it is not intended to be complete, but you can use it as a starting point for further reading.

Infancy  

Sensory exploration: Smell, Touch, Visual Recognition, Sound.  Newborn infants are learning furiously.  We believe that it is the smell of the mother that first identifies her to the child, followed by the feel of her, and the sound of her voice.  The baby learns to recognize the sound of the other parent, its parents’ eyes, and their faces, pretty much in that order.  The infant also learns to control his or her own face and smile, control its voice to cry, control its body, to try and sit up, and crawl about.
Logical exploration: Permanence.  You know those peek-a-boo games you play?  Well, it’s teaching the infant that things do not cease to exist once they leave its field of view.  From an universe consisting only of things it can see, it graduates to one where there are things around it and behind it which will come back later!  Isn’t that amazing?

 

Logical exploration: Sorting.  Early understanding of all attributes begins with sorting similar things together.  All that furious sorting has a purpose: the child is learning to generalize.  Generalization is probably the root of all logic.  Mommy gives me food, therefore all people will give me food.  (In an ideal world, yes.  There are dangers to generalizing too far, obviously.)

Not how I envisaged it...

Physical exploration: Mass and Volume, position and location.  Sooner or later, Junior will start transporting things about; little kids are born truckers.  Carrying things around, feeling their weight, putting them here, putting them there; it all has a purpose.  The kid learns geometry, and the facts about distances and angles.  Some friends of mine taught their two-year-old to parallel park, using a tricycle.  Why not?

Early Childhood

Language, Arithmetic.  Using language at home provides a basis for describing things, including how many.  It isn’t that language is more fundamental than number, but that language is an essential tool for talking about number. 
Logical exploration: Conservation of number.  An early discovery ---which does come automatically, but not at the same age for all children--- is that rearranging a collection of things does not change how many there are!  It is fascinating to test a child for this understanding: kids who haven’t quite figured it out will re-count, if you move some objects around.  Others will just smile and insist that it is the same number of things.  The age at which this realization comes about has no implication for how bright the child is, unless it happens extremely late in life.
Social Interaction.  Dealing with its peers and with adults is something that will happen in due course, but skill in this area can help the child get more out of school.  Home schooling takes away the opportunity for socialization to happen routinely, unless parents introduce other opportunities, such as a dance class, or a drama clinic (Christian Youth Theatre, for instance; but you run the risk of Junior taking to it just a little too well, and get hooked on theatre to the exclusion of everything else).

The Middle Years

I mean grades 3, 4, 5, 6.  Another enormous intellectual growth spurt often occurs at this time, and the eyes of young people are turned outwards, to their friends and the families of friends, things they see in their community: stores, books.  (TV should NOT dominate their lives in these years, because TV builds an artificial world that is deceitful and dangerous, and manipulative.)  This is an amazing opportunity for the school and the teachers to give a child the experiences that will determine whether it is engaged with, and has a positive attitude towards, the world of people and ideas out there, or whether the child is steered either inwards, towards self-involvement; or focused on objects and material things, which will doom it to lifelong dissatisfaction.
Abstraction.  This is the skill of extracting essential characteristics from a variety of things, to see their similarities, despite superficial differences; or differences, despite superficial similarities.  Children need to make that intuitive leap, when necessary, but know the risk of jumping to unwarranted conclusions.  Jumping to conclusions is human, and actually a sign of intelligence.  But being aware that jumping to conclusions can be problematic is a part of education.
In my experience, Grade 5 (9, 10, or 11 years old) is prime time for jumping to conclusions, and good teachers who don’t get annoyed with all this cognitive blundering are important.  Students at this age are learning facts and absorbing information like sponges.  The base of facts gathered at this age, and the process of sorting through those facts and analyzing them and grouping them is the basis of all future learning.  You can imagine how desperate matters become if a child must wait until he or she comes to college to learn that there was a Great Wall in China.  Maps.  The World.  Countries.  Climate.  Ancient lands and peoples.  Myths and Legends from your culture.  Voyages of exploration.  The Solar System.  Great artists and musicians.  Great authors, especially for children.  Scientific facts, the Elements, common Chemicals.
This information cannot wait until Junior High.  Meanwhile, Junior should discover some sport or athletic activity that he or she likes: tennis, soccer, baseball, basketball, swimming, running.  Or ballet or theatre or gymnastics.  The more the merrier.  All this is much harder on the parents than the kids, but the kid gets a basis for choosing well later on, because you obviously can’t keep all of it up forever.

The upper grades

The splitting apart into infancy, lower grades, etc is admittedly rather arbitrary; it is again the principle of generalizing coming into play.  Most of this will apply to most children (or people; once they’re fourteen, it seems silly to call them children).
Once a child has accumulated a vast army of facts, or even while it is acquiring them, sorting them and analyzing them is important.
A lot of this organization and analysis does indeed get done in College.  But doing a lot of it in school (I mean grade school or high school) introduces the young person to the methodology.  How do you classify your information?  How was information classified at different times, and how were improvements in understanding driven by changes in classification, and vice versa?

College

In my (possibly wrong) opinion, a child’s late youth ---around the age of twenty--- is a time for studying process.  If a person has to wait until college to learn the process of doing something, there is no time for studying the process itself.  For instance, a person should learn in school the process whereby a law comes to be enacted.  In college, it is time for analyzing the possible weaknesses or strengths of that process.
Parents who have not had a college education might find that startling; they can be excused for (mistakenly) imagining that College just provides more, better, more difficult information.  Unless the word information is being used in a very general sense indeed, this is a bad misunderstanding: in College, a student begins to study how other people think, or thought.  How a Historian thinks.  How an author thinks.  How an ancient Greek thought.  How an Israeli thinks about certain things.  This analysis is built upon all the facts that the person had assimilated while he or she was a child, in high school or middle school.  (To call these ideas information dilutes the value of the word.  One must never confuse information with analysis.  Of course, it's all the same to those who don't care about precision of meaning...)
Some parents, of course, would be delighted if their child only learned how a potential victim thinks; parents who imagine that the ideal preparation of a child is to become an economic predator rather than economic prey!  Present company most probably excepted; my readers are very unlikely to be that sort of person.  But one cannot doubt that a vast majority of US parents are focused on getting their kids a foothold in the Business World, which requires very little living, and a lot of earning.  Perhaps that emphasis helps to distort education as we find it, twisting it away from what it should be, and could be again.  But, on reflection, once education emerged as a major factor in the economic and social mobility of a family, the American genius for competition made education a sort of battle-ground for family competition, and education became a competitive activity rather than a cooperative one.  But politicians became answerable for the quality of education in each locality, and they were quick to transfer responsibility and answerability to teachers, and now teachers are in the position of having to supply proof that they have successfully taught their students what parents want to have taught.  This is a waste of time.
But parents must be the first responders to their children’s need to be supplied intellectual stimulus at the right time.  You could have said that you didn’t know Junior needed to be played with with peek-a-boo games.  Well, now you know.  Have another baby, quick!

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MOOCs and Education, Floods, Unemployment, Public Assistance, and Baby Boomers

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Baby Boomers

Recently there was an article in Yahoo (who knew they had articles?  Amazing) about Baby Boomers.  It was about 10 things that Baby Boomers Won’t Tell You.  As with all journalism, the headline is more to suck in readership than to inform about the content.  But it’s well worth reading, because it is sort of a demographic summary of the Baby Boomer generation.

One thing it says is that Baby Boomers are less likely to leave their kids an inheritance.  Apparently we spend all our money.

This isn’t exactly news.  It is our generation that assumed that sending kids to a good college would take care of everything that we should have done to prepare them for life.  The fact is, we thought we learned pretty quickly that our parents hadn’t prepared us for life.  We learned, much more slowly, that they sort of had; some parents prepared their kids in some ways, others in other ways, but the smarter ones among us kept an eye on the parents of our friends, and learned a lot that way.

The biggest lesson I learned was that parents across the universe could be doing a better job, especially younger parents, who have to work a little harder at their jobs.  (I don’t think jobs have become particularly harder; it’s just that employers are working harder to try and keep everyone’s nose to the grind, with productivity staying pretty much the same.)

The reason I think the older generation saved up like fury, and left money for their kids was because their brand of materialism was a little different: they believed that the only thing keeping people from doing better in life (being better people, more prestigious, better citizens and parents, bigger shots in their communities, and better leaders, and perhaps a little more comfortable) was having money to start out life with.  While our own generation certainly felt that having money from the ’rents was great, (A) not all of us got a lot of money, and (B) we weren’t convinced that those who did inherit a lot of cash were the better people, in the first place.  They certainly had better homes and better education, but they were just as big a$$*%&#s as everybody else, maybe bigger.  Let’s face it: a good education does not always translate into a more functional human being (though it should).

This would have been a good excuse for the Baby Boomer generation not to save so much.  But they had bought into the idea of education, and invested in big colleges, rather than saving money.  Giving your kids a big inheritance translates into the education of your grandchildren, really.  Or rather, it would, if your kids could be trusted to use the money wisely after you were gone.  Generally, though, most parents don’t trust their kids to use money wisely, so money spent on college seems a wiser choice than handing the kids the cash posthumously.

Finally, our generation has done more than its fair share to pay for medical insurance and college and the necessities of life.  We have also worked harder to suck up luxuries that we’ve felt we totally deserve.  (This can partly be blamed on the marketing blitz to which we’ve been subjected all our lives, far more than any preceding generation.  But, generally speaking, our parents ---certainly my own--- did a good job of giving us the tools to resist advertising.  But many others of us tended to think that anything we saw on TV was the Lord’s Truth, and went out and proceeded to subsidize Businesses of America.  This was good, otherwise Business would have been in a bad way.  Yeah, right.)

But the main thing is that we were, generally speaking, rather weak, and unable to discipline our kids, and tell them, "No, I’m not going to buy you that awesome car; I’m going to let you have the money after I’m dead.  And I’m going to die young, so you can have the cash sooner, before it becomes absolutely worthless."  We gave them the car.  (I mean, I didn’t, but most of you probably did.)

Education and MOOCs

Recently, Bill Gates is supposed to have given a talk at Microsoft saying that MOOCs are going to profoundly change education.  I realized that I had been missing the bus in regard to education.

Education has many angles.  First, there are students who need to be taught certain things that they might not want to learn.  Secondly, there are people out there hungry for information, and structured information that is otherwise hard to pick up by just reading a book.  Thirdly, there are bright and persuasive people out there who are desperate to pass on what they know, and know that they’re better at doing this than the average guy on the street.

For kids who need to be strongly guided to learn things that they do not want to learn, MOOCs are useless.  It is the discipline of being kept at his books, and being threatened with bad grades, and the fearsome sight of his classmates working harder than he is that keeps junior more or less on the straight and narrow.  There are an awful lot of these sorts of rich kids out there (to whom you’re not leaving as much money as your parents left to you!!  Just kidding).  On the other hand, there are other kids, and some older ones who may have missed the bus the first time around, or even students who are able to learn better from practically anyone other than the teachers to whom they have been assigned.  That’s the way kids are; the professor in the other class is always better than your own professor, even if her students are dying to get into your section.  At any rate, and I can only guess at this, perhaps MOOCs (massively open online courses) are taught better and produced better, than courses in a typical college.

As to the faculty, the third group: most faculty do not teach because the pay is so amazingly good.  Teaching is something some people like to do.  And it certainly helps that you get your summers mostly off, though some professors do put in a fair amount of preparation for the upcoming year.  And professors are academics, which means that they are better than most people at abstract thinking, which is a way of distilling the essential characteristics of certain things, so that they can be studied in a particular way.  Without abstraction, things can’t be studied to any deep level, simply because the irrelevant details are too confusing and distracting.  Of course, non-academics are fond of saying that academics oversimplify things to such an extent that the real world has no similarity to the abstraction at all, and in some disciplines this may be true.

So when Bill Gates says that MOOCs are awesome, he’s right.  MOOCs are a way of getting fabulous information out to those who are really interested in it.  (Of course, entrepreneurs ---think: businessmen who want to make a buck in a new way--- are out to make a buck out of MOOCs as well.  But long after the entrepreneurs have tired of milking MOOCs, these online courses will probably still be with us.  Look at books and music, for example.  Music- making is not the multi-million-dollar business it used to be, but there’s still free music on the Internet.)  But for hammering training into a reluctant kid’s head, a real live college is probably still your best bet.  On the other hand, there is tremendous diversity in the inclinations and abilities of the younger generation.  The Baby Boomers are probably the last group that could be generalized about with any success; those who come after are too diverse to be dealt with using rules of thumb.  You would have noticed that Rules of Thumb are not as useful today as they might have been in earlier times!

Floods, Unemployment, and Public Assistance

Swimming areas stand empty, while kids go around on bikes. 
(inset shows park sign)

My wife works for the County Government, and gets a good view of how public assistance works.  Throughout the last several decades, fiscal conservatives have been working hard to divert public money from homeless shelters, state and federal parks and reserves, and of course libraries, hospitals, emergency services, schools and public projects of all sorts.  In the poor County in which she works, the people who staff homeless shelters and libraries and such places really work for very little pay, and when the State cuts funding to these places, their incomes go down still further.  We were recently at a State Park, only to find that the public beaches were closed, due to large numbers of geese who have moved in.  Geese tend to fill the beaches with their enormous droppings, which also destroy the quality of the water.

It’s not clear whether the goose infestation is a result of funding cuts, or the warming climate.  At any rate, the Park Ranger who happened to be there told us that it was the geese who were to blame.  It was heartbreaking to see a vast expanse of water recreation area and beach shut down, the concession stands empty, and the parking lots deserted.

Forty miles away, another park was still open, and there were gaggles of teenagers riding around on bikes.  Their families must have come for the pools and the water sports, but geese had taken over that pool, too.  Luckily there were other things for the kids to do, but it isn’t looking too good for the future.  I’m at a loss to recommend a remedy; public recreation areas are a complex thing, and the skills that go to making recreation and tourism work in a state are too difficult for an amateur to advise about.  I’m confident, though, that the cutting of taxes and subsequent downsizing of park services begins a trend that seems very difficult, or even impossible to reverse.

The Republicans are presently successful in encouraging business and industry in Pennsylvania, evidently at the cost of the environment and public services.  This is a clever ploy, because if a Democrat majority were to be elected to replace those who put these manifestly unsuccessful policies in place, they will find it impossible to reverse the detrimental consequences of these policies without massive increases in taxes, which are sure to be hugely unpopular.  This would put the GOP back in the saddle, which is obviously great for the GOP, but terrible for the State.  So the GOP has hit on a strategy that ensures their own success at the cost of the well-being of the general population.

In a completely unrelated piece of news, recently the tiny community of Beech Creek was hit by a flash flood.  There was no possibility of appealing for emergency funds from the State or from the Federal Government, because the damages must exceed $17 million to qualify for aid.  Because it is a poor community, with a tiny population, their homes would not be valued very high, there were few businesses (who are experts at inflating damage costs), so the total damages were under half a million.  By the same token, a half-million grant (or even less) would enable the community to get back on its feet.  A very small grant would probably encourage the building and repairs to be made of reasonable quality.  It would also encourage the residents to stay, rather than become a burden on a larger city or town that surely doesn’t need the extra population.

So, a lot of bad news, in a week of bad news all round.  The George Zimmerman case is depressing everyone.  Mr Zimmerman may not like non-whites loafing around his pristine neighborhood, but we must all tolerate a lot of loafing in all our neighborhoods, because in this economy there’s little else to do.  Let’s face it: blacks and minorities don’t like whites sniffing around their pristine neighborhoods, either, but the incidence of deadly force in black neighborhoods probably is a lot less than in white neighborhoods.  (One wonders whether a defense of Stand Your Ground in a black neighborhood would work in a court of law in Florida.)  The point is that there must not be neighborhoods of any particular color; they’re all just neighborhoods.

So, dear friends, keep well, do good work, and keep in touch!  (Garrison Keillor)

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Christianity: Evangelical or Imperialistic?

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A recent post on the Facebook page of Being Liberal (a political organization), they focused on the war between Religion (mainly Christianity) and Science.  The poster (reproduced here in a composite graphic) depicts the perennial war between both Church and State, and Science and Religion.  No one knows better than I that church policy does not tolerate confinement of religion to private religious observance.  As a kid, I too railed against so-called Christians who buried their heads in the sand, and did not put their votes where their professed beliefs stood.

But that's another battle: true belief versus hypocrisy.  If Christians throughout the US actually voted their conscience, the fight for universal health care would be a thing of the distant past.  The only reasonable objection to a far more robust welfare state is that it just might not be moral to commit an entire nation to stand by the morality of a minority.  "We can't raise taxes to implement the charity that only a minority of us, namely a small fragment of professed Christians, would consider their responsibility."  Okay.  Then we must not force the entire nation to subscribe to any policy that only a small minority can stand behind, such as Creationism, or Right-to-Life-ism, or Prayer-in-School-ism, or Let's-Bomb-The-Crap-Out-Of-Muslims-ism.  Or All Oil Is Our Oil-ism.

There are other battles we can identify.  Many Christians want a limited form of Equality: equality only for wealthy landowners (we got rid of that idea in principle, but it lingers), equality only for whites (that's still dying a lingering death), equality only for men (still fighting a strong rearguard action), equality only for Christians, or Equality only for Traditional Marriage.  See, a lot of people who believe in all sorts of equality would not be happy with the Equality of Religions.  The Founding Fathers, they firmly believe, only intended that the government should be even-handed in dealing with all Christian denominations, and maybe Judaism.  The Constitution expressly outlaws the practice of witchcraft, they would say.  How many teachers would smile if a kid were to get up at prayer time and say, Dear Satan, bless our school today, and lead us safely in Your Ways?

A little extreme?  Well, yes.  But we have to be consistent.

Is there nothing, Christians must be asking, that we can legally do in our daily lives, to practice our faith outside our churches and our homes? 

Oh, where to begin?  If committed Christians would only take their jobs as parents seriously, and not hand off their parenting responsibilities to the schools, there would be no need for prayer or religious education in state-funded schools.  If only people would talk about sex at home, instead of just screwing each other silly, kids would not need sex education in schools.  (Still, trained teachers can probably do it better than parents, but I think the jury is still out on this one.)  If only Christians would take the ideas of Charity and Compassion seriously, there would be far less of a burden on the State to provide a safety net, and there would be far less wealth that each Christian would leave in his estate.  Christians would deny all the principles they pretend to espouse in order to give their unworthy children the opportunity to squander the wealth they have hoarded so assiduously.  Some of the most notorious conservative hatchet-men out there  have inherited their wealth, and their vicious genes.  What a country, that lets them do this, and encourages them.  And they will do anything to keep this country perfect for tight-fisted businessmen, such as the Koch brothers.  And Christians are the front line of their defense.

Finally, it is time that Christians took the genius and the limitations of the Bible seriously.  No one with an ounce of intelligence can support the principle that every word in the Bible is divinely inspired.  But no one can deny that there are varying levels of inspired thinking in that book.  It does not suit the twisted purposes of Christian religious leaders to admit to any weaknesses in their scriptures; they must think that there must be absolutely no chink in its divine armor.  This commits the faithful to the task of defending some of the statements in the Bible that can only be justified on the grounds that they were directed to very small audiences, usually in times of crises, to achieve a limited objective, and were not intended to be general principles for all time.  In short, the Bible should not be read by idiots.  Perhaps Martin Luther had it wrong.

On the other hand, since the Bible is in the public domain (or should be), the christian community should take the task of demystifying it very seriously, and not resort to insisting that every word is literally true.

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A completely unrelated mud sculpture

‘A Book that Shaped Me’ Writing Competition at our Local Library

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If I were to be asked that question: What is a book that shaped you, and why?, I would find it very hard to reply, but you might be interested.  I read an awful lot of crap as a kid, and some of it probably did shape me: children’s books; The Saint books, by Leslie Charteris (probably not a common experience for most of my readers who are more likely to have seen Roger Moore starring in the TV series),but I also read some awesome books.  However, I'm trying to think which were the ones that might have shaped me, and I'm having a hard time remembering.  When I was a kid, books shaped me mostly by encouraging me to read more.

Our local Library works hard to get the populace to use the Library, in the first place, and secondly, to provide evidence (to various funding sources) that it is being used.  (This is one of those things that make me furious: that an institution that was created to perform a public service, and which has performed, and continues to perform practically from the time it came into being, that purpose with fair dedication and great success, must divert some of its energy and some of its financial resources to documenting those facts.  This is why almost all libraries with a decent budget have huge electronic devices at the entrance, to detect and keep track of how many visitors there are.)  Over the Summer, activities aimed at school students go into high gear.  This helps schools, helps the young people, and helps the Library to look good.  (It also helps Republican members of the funding organizations to cut their budgets if a Library in some locality seems to be seeing a decline in use.  Rather than funnel funds to the limping Library, to encourage citizens to use printed media to better themselves and use their resources more wisely, funding is foolishly diverted to large urban areas whose libraries can report greater traffic.  The flow of population to large cities keeps going; increasing library budgets proportionally does not seem quite as important as to keep small town libraries useful, to provide less of an incentive for people to abandon living in small towns.  I must admit that libraries are probably not the main reason people move to cities; it is the lack of employment in small towns.)

A book that did influence me greatly was Charles Snow’s The Two Cultures, and it turned my attention from being preoccupied with fictional things and people, towards real-life heroes and events with whom I could identify strongly.  Snow described such fascinating characters as G. H. Hardy, a much-beloved mathematician who flourished in the early part of the 20th century in Cambridge, and Hardy's almost more celebrated protegé, Srinivas Ramanujan, the South Indian mathematical genius who discovered vast numbers of approximations and formulas for well-known functions and constants; and Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and Pauling, and other famous figures who became important during the great wars.  It’s been a while since I read the books--about forty years--so I don’t remember the personalities Snow discusses that belonged to the other culture.  The book was about scientists on the one hand, and intellectuals on the other.  Snow admired them both, and wanted to compare and contrast their ways of thinking, which at the time I found very interesting and useful (though I’m fairly certain I didn’t understand the greater part of what Snow was describing!)

Another book I found fascinating was the 1974 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.  I learned just how interesting advanced mathematics could be, and I was determined to learn more about this subject amongst which I had fallen (if amongst is the word I want), and about which I had been taught so much.  Some of the books we used in college were amazing, and I was finding out how fascinating reading about the subject of mathematics could be when an author with wit and personality wrote.

Interestingly enough, a person about whom I learned in another interesting book I read: Robert Jung’s Brighter than a Thousand Suns, popped up as the author of a strongly recommended book on my college reading list, namely Richard P. Feynman.  The Feynman Lectures on Physics (about which I have written previously) is a three-volume book written by Feynman, Leighton and Sands, as part of a survey course in theoretical physics given at the California Institute of Technology.  Feynman’s greatest achievement is not only conveying his fascination with various facts and connections, most of which we all know about, but explaining why they were truly amazing.  He could deliver excitement about physics as few others could.

I’ll describe these next books as quickly as I can, because you must be getting overloaded with mathematics and science by this point.  The first is Classical Mechanics by Herbert Goldstein, a wonderful book that is chiefly interesting interesting because of its choice of material and economy of presentation, and the next is a book by the publishers of Scientific American called The Physics and Chemistry of Life.  It is a reader, with contributions by Watson, of Watson and Crick fame, the two biochemists who were principally responsible for establishing the helix structure of DNA.  Finally, I would like to nominate Wolfgang Rindler’s Essential Relativity, which got me started on the road to General Relativity, a subject that kept my interest for several decades.

But this question of: What is one book that shaped your life, and why did it do so? leaves me baffled.  On one hand, it is a heartwarming thought that a single book could change the course of your life.  Authors, particularly, would like to believe that this happens all the time, and would validate their profession.  But for the vast majority of us, it would be difficult to point to a single book that influenced us so dramatically.  If your mind is completely empty, I suppose, a single book could blow you away.  The most one can hope for is to be so inspired by a book that it makes it possible for other books to continue the work that was begun by the first.

To my mind, there is nothing really magical about books, and this is probably true for people who read a lot.  If you’ve never read a book, I daresay the first one you complete will affect you strongly.  But a well-written book can present a complete, well-thought-out argument to persuade you to accept a particular line of thinking.  If your thoughts are in line with, or have the potential for aligning with, the thoughts of the author, something dramatic could possibly happen.  It is rare for anyone to pick up a book that has the potential to do this, but in a society where reading is not a common activity, a book could fell an unsuspecting reader as if he or she had been poleaxed.  Perhaps I’m just jaded after having read tons of workmanlike books.  (I can just hear some literary freaks crying Yes, yes!  You’re jaded!  If you read the right books, you would be a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SHAPE ALTOGETHER!)  I’m willing to conceded that perhaps you don’t have to be entirely soft in the head to be rocked to the roots by a single book, but in my opinion it is the cumulative effect of scores of books that actually shape a person, if shaping is the word I want.

A most wonderful thing is to have such an open, receptive mind that a good book could sway you.  If you do have an open and receptive mind, and you are so fortunate as to have been led to read a valuable book, or a book that will be valuable to you, and who knows how many of those in your immediate circle have the wisdom to do this for you?  If you do, then you are in for an experience that you will treasure for a lifetime.  But once your life has been shaped, I sincerely hope you allow a dozen more books to continue to shape you, and I hope it shapes up OK!  Here’s looking at your shape, kid!

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How to Cherish the Earth, Save the World, and Spread Peace and Brotherhood Throughout the Universe

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Think big!!  After you’ve spent most of your adult life trying to be helpful one blade of grass at a time, you have to seriously start thinking big.  Just keeping my lawn mowed is not going to make much of a difference to the neighborhood, you’re telling yourself.  Taking home one little pup from the animal shelter doesn’t begin to make a dent in the hundreds of pets who are destroyed every day across the nation.  More aggressive action is needed.  (But you have to take the pup home.)

Seriously, though, someone must keep an eye on the big picture.  You’ve done your share for twenty years, but when you look around, things are actually getting worse.  You pick up a hamburger wrapper one evening, but there’s a million kids out there throwing out hamburger wrappers with great determination.  It’s as though they’ve told themselves: this place needs more hamburger wrappers on the street, to be just perfect.

It’s time to step back, and write down some basic principles; some Axioms for doing everything that needs to be done.

We can’t stop doing our part.

• There’s no point in retiring early, liquidating all your assets and giving it all to charity, if you give up steadily doing the right thing at the local level.  You’ve got to keep on with minimizing your resource footprint, leave alone your carbon footprint.   You’ve got to keep grinding on.
• We have to keep alert for what others are doing that’s good.
• Isolation is counterproductive.  Anything that anyone else is doing is worth commending, and worth encouraging.

We must keep alert for new dangers of all sorts.

• New fires must be spotted, and put out.  We have to keep a lookout for large movements by people, businesses or governments that need studying.  In the long run, will they be destructive?  Will they use up resources that will be to the detriment of everyone? 
• We have to keep educating ourselves, because new threats must be countered with new knowledge.  With every advancement in science and technology, the potential for destructive exploitation multiplies, and we must be in a position to act knowledgeably.  It is no longer a time for knee-jerk reactions, if there ever was a time for it.

We have to pass on our attitudes and information to others, especially the young.

• Education is a huge part of the total program.  One of the biggest frontiers is how to mobilize the most effective PR techniques to forward the program of conservation, preservation, protection, and education.  We spoke about the organization called TED, which features exciting and effective speakers to address a carefully selected and influential audience.  They have stumbled onto this idea of making creativity in problem-solving sexy.

We have to recognize that we are not in this alone. 

• The feeling of being in a partnership with everyone is probably a bigger force for peace, generally, than other initiatives for promoting peace for its own sake.  Certainly peace needs no reasons for being a goal: if ever there was a null hypothesis, peace was it.  But in a world that takes conflict as a given, partnership for conservation is good motivation for peace.
• No one is too mean or too young or too anything to be enlisted in the war against senseless consumption of resources.

Identify all resources.

• Some are focused on fiscal resources, especially those who are chained to the dominant economic paradigm in which everything that is done has to be paid for with money that comes from somewhere.  All that they do is designed around how to stimulate certain activities, perceived by them as desirable, with money; how to stifle other activities, perceived by them as undesirable, by denying funding.  These people have to be taken seriously for the moment, because their paradigm will continue to be in force for a long time.  But not forever.
• Some are focused on energy resources, especially economic planners.  This is an industrial mindset, where early in the last century automobiles were the dominant industry, and it took a fair degree of energy to keep the production lines working.  Later in that century, the lack of gasoline threatened the health of the auto industry, reinforcing the belief that development and energy were inseparable.  This mindset is becoming a hindrance, though clearly we cannot do without energy.
• Some are focused on time resources, especially those who believe that time is of the essence for various programs, such as addressing global warming, or developing alternative energy sources.  The elderly are always conscious of their limited resources of time, for obvious reasons.  Busy individuals who are constantly battling the tendency to be given additional responsibility are naturally preoccupied with how much they can do effectively and well in the time they have.
• Some are focused on environmental resources, which is the one resource that cannot be restored easily.  Once an environment is destroyed, not much can be done about it.  Businessmen and traditional politicians tend to ignore the Environment because it is a paralyzing constraint, and highly inconvenient.
• Food resources preoccupy those who are concerned with world hunger.  We have been aware of food resources versus population for so long that we are fatigued.  But it is a real need, and if a sufficient stream of high-quality natural food is not going to be available in the future, as a result of depletion of environmental resources particularly, and the annexation of land resources for more lucrative deployment as industrial real estate or business premises, then we’re going to be faced with food shortages.  As long as business interests are trusted with decisions about land use, land will be funneled towards creating money for businesses rather than growing food for those who cannot afford to pay a lot of money for it.  If land availability gradually evaporates, we will have to make do with low-quality artificial food, and the present uproar about genetically modified foods will be laughable in retrospect.  We will have to start eating foods that are good for us but taste terrible, or food that tastes wonderful and kills us off fast.  If land is used wisely today, we can have food that is both tasty and nutritious.  We had better be careful of where this is going.
• We must not forget human resources.  Businessmen think of human resources as low-wage employees who can be treated like dirt.  But the real issue is how to make use of the human talent that is available to solve the important problems facing society, rather than enlisting them to entertain the bored masses.
• Cultural resources.  This is probably the one that is least thought about by most people.  But we are at one end of a vast chain of humanity, the memory of whose challenges and achievements and joys have the potential to encourage and inspire us.  It is easy to sacrifice priceless historical artifacts for the purpose of locating an office building, or entertainment, or personal glory.  Most of us are accustomed to regarding our own culture and its achievement as the epitome of refinement, and to disregarding the triumphs of other societies and peoples.  But this mindset is self-defeating, and at the least will alienate potential allies, and at the worst will destroy something that we can learn to be inspired with ourselves.  The richness and the diversity on this single planet is the greatest marvel in a marvelous universe.

wikiHow: A review of an unbelievably ambitious undertaking.

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I stumbled on wikiHow, which describes itself as a clearing-house for information on almost any sort of DIY activity.  Visit it: it is amazing in scope, and miraculous in how it manages to accomplish most of what it sets out to do.

Teenagers, as we all know, have embraced the Internet with open arms, together with all aspects of technology.  While we look on such things as smart phones, faceBook, Itunes and such things with a healthy dose of skepticism, kids dive into them headfirst.

Wikipedia, so often maligned by academics who are frustrated by the potential for finding unsubstantiated information there, or information not endorsed by authorities, is in actual fact very useful for practical purposes.  The whole point of Wikipedia is that it does not wait on authorities to endorse anything.  Anyone can contribute information; it is simply flagged as unsubstantiated if there are no links to pages with established reliable information, or references to printed sources.  If you want to use tentative information, you can.  Kids love Wikipedia, simply because it is easy to use, and is relatively complete.  They can Google stuff, too, but with Google you get directed to the most popular websites, not necessarily the most informative ones.

wikiHow appears to have evolved into a home for teenagers who feel the urge to give advice.  The sheer volume of advice on matters exclusively of interest to teens is stunning.  You get instructions, for example, about how to design a pony in Ponyville.  (Ponyville, if you didn't know, is the center of the My Little Pony universe.)

Some of the advice is startling in the sheer nerve the author must have had to offer the advice in the first place; for instance an article about how to get back on your feet after serving a prison term.  When you think about it, though, where would an ex-con go, to get disinterested advice?  Out of the generosity of his heart, one of them has put together a surprisingly down-to-earth set of suggestions, and in fair good sequence, too.

I signed on as a volunteer, and every time I visit the site, there is a message for me begging me to patrol recent edits to posts.  (There is obviously an apprenticeship period, where senior volunteers look over your shoulder.  So far I have received Thumbs Up for good editing.  Evidently younger editors are not careful readers, and sometimes miss problems in contributions entirely, or misunderstand the intention of a contribution.  They're hardly to blame, because often the original intention is utterly opaque, which is the kindest thing I can say about some of the articles.

The articles range from being totally inane, to being utterly useful and inspired in their simplicity and effectiveness.  The simplicity must come from the original article; the editorial process, because of the nature of the software, is more conducive to band-aids and superficial correction than wholesale restructuring.  The routine editing that a volunteer is urged and invited to do is never likely to correct more than spelling, grammar (rarely) and punctuation.

There is also a big problem with voice.  When a sexagenarian like me (my browser's spell-checker flagged 'hexagenarian', which it probably associates with witchcraft) is editing an article by a thirteen-year-old, just trying out her compositional wings, especially one who writes just as she speaks, in African-American dialect, it is likely to end up reading very differently than it started out.  In fact, it could easily turn off other young readers because it sounds as if it originated with an adult.

Luckily they have a forum, and I've raised some issues there.

If any of my readers have the time for it, I urge you to sign up with wikiHow, and help things along.  My advice is to take it slow; getting too involved too fast is likely to burn you out.  It is far easier to keep your smile on if you don't get frustrated by tackling too many tasks on the site right away (even if they want you to).

Other places you ought to think of supporting with your participation are

• Amazon.com reviews.  If you've bought stuff on Amazon, consider reviewing them, despite the fact that your review helps the website.  Amazon hardly needs our help, but the customers do.
• The Distributed Reading Project of the Gutenberg Project.  This is in the same tradition as wikiHow, and has a similar apprenticeship process, even more stringently carried out.  But they have a more difficult task, and unless they have capable volunteers, they'll continue to process useless pabulum, rather than the priceless public domain books that are just a little harder to get into e-book or simplified pdf format.

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The Paranoia about Food Additives Detracts from Legitimate Concerns

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There are times at which I wish I knew more Chemistry (than the far more than average amount that I do), and I was recently reminded of this.

People have been concerned for nearly a century (ever since the Food and Agriculture Industries turned to Chemistry in a big way in the 1900's) about the consequences of ingesting large amounts of chemical additives in food.  Recently there was a conflagration on some social media, with a post titled "Eight Foods we Eat in the U.S. that are Banned In Other Countries," which caused me some alarm as I followed the link.

Whenever a concern is raised about something--take the Global Warming phenomenon, for instance--in the electronic society we live in, the concern spreads faster than wildfire, and, unfortunately, finds resonance in people who are nervous, but who don't have the scientific background to assess the relative significance of various aspects of the concern.  So, depending on circumstances, a person could get bombarded, quite by accident, by a number of worries about food additives, which kicks them off on a Wild Google Chase.  Depending on what pops up on their search on Google (and remember, that service, which is also the Mama of this blog you're reading now, is fine-tuned to give the searcher what is likely to grab their interest from among the literally thousands of links that they could give you in response to your query) it is likely to reinforce their worry, rather than set it to rest.  Luckily for me, a blogger on In The Pipeline (?I'm not exactly sure whether he was quoted there, or whether that is where his blog lives,) responded in detail, and mostly convincingly.  You should read this, just to absorb some biology and chemistry principles, which will generally provide a context for discussions of this sort.  My crude summary of some of the issues is as follows:

A.  We eat a large variety of things daily that are poisonous in large doses.

We know this already; almost every medicine we take is typically a poison in large doses.  The word poison, which we use in a colloquial sense, can be probably given an exact meaning, but remember the toxicity of anything depends on the circumstances: the person, what else you've eaten, how much of it you've eaten.  Being a diabetic, even sugar in large doses would kill me for certain (though if I don't eat sugar for long enough, that would probably kill me, too).  Even Vitamin C can be toxic, depending on how it is delivered.  I'm betting that a huge amount of it administered intravenously continuously for a long time is going to be pretty devastating, especially if the body can't get rid of it fast enough.  (The body does indeed excrete excess Vitamin C, but how fast is fast?)

B.  Some of the things we do eat, that could be poisonous in large doses, are eaten because of their beneficial effects. 

Iron, salt, Chromium, Magnesium, Potassium, you name it.  We gotta have them.  Water.  Other things we eat TCBPILD ("that could be poisonous in large doses)" is because they're not beneficial, but are unavoidable. 

C.  Sometimes it is because it is convenient for commercial food manufacturers to put it there, and they don't care about us enough to not put it in there, like trace amounts of pesticides, which we must be concerned about.

I was also recently made aware of the fact that when non-stick pans are allowed to get overheated ---e.g., you forgot to put the food in it one it was hot--- they release some rather nasty chemicals both into the air, and into the food.  It all depends on how much overheated the pan must get before this happens, and whether the pan is safe after it has been carefully cleaned.  Generally speaking, Teflon (and its successors) is an amazingly useful material, but it can easily be abused.  If you tend to be careless when cooking, either use some other sort of cooking receptacle, or give the cooking to someone else.  (In this century we have come to regard being careless with the cookware as a god-given liberty, justified by the Bill of Rights.  That's progress, I suppose!)

Derek Lowe, who wrote the response to the Eight Foods article, did not allay my nervousness about food hormones that are routinely administered to cattle, and antibiotics that are administered to almost all farm animals not in response to diseases, but as preventatives.  Big Farms do things whose harmful effects will not be established for many years, by which time, the Big Farms are betting, they will have made enough profits to pay off any lawsuits, or just go bankrupt, with the money safely in the Cayman Islands, or wherever.  Do please check out the facts for yourself; I'm being lazy not to do it for you, but I don't think a sedentary lifestyle alone can account for some of the beefiness of some of the younger members of our society.  I'm not alone in suspecting that hormones administered to cattle have something to do with it.  Derek Lowe does address something close to this issue, but I'm not convinced.  At any rate, eating beef is not going to kill us because of an additive.  It can kill us more directly because of its essential beefiness.

Now, I agree with Derek Lowe about fears about Arsenic: it is found naturally in the environment, and we had better get used to a little more of it in the environment than we've had in the distant past, just because of how much we tend to use the stuff in various convenience materials (e.g. rat poison), and how all that tends to go in the landfill, and finally, how runoff from the Landfill will eventually end up in the water.  We just can't afford to be too upset about teensy-weensy bits of Arsenic all over the place.

But, if any of you finds yourself in a position to influence policy, here is the scary part: unlike vitamin C, as far as I know both Arsenic and Lead tend to be accumulated in the body.  Now this is not intended to send you into a panic or a coma, but prolonged exposure, even at moderately high levels, to environmental Arsenic and Lead is bad, because of the cumulative effect.  Being in a room containing lead paint for a week is probably not at all dangerous.  (Lead paint is pretty good at keeping the lead trapped in the paint matrix.)  But having lead paint in your bedroom ceiling is very worrisome indeed.  I might not be an expert on these issues, but I believe that if I have alerted you appropriately to concern about Lead in the environment, that's probably good, and if you take my remarks to mean that having enormous doses of lead paint in your environment is nothing to worry about, that was not my intention.  Just keep a sense of proportion about these dangers, and be aware of them, especially where young children are concerned.

Must we be concerned about food additives?  I think we must.  The occasional loose cannon who goes berserk on Fb only distracts from the real concerns.

Must we be concerned about Global Warming?  I think we must.  It is true that a statistical analysis of temperatures around the globe over time does not reveal a warming trend that rises above the variations that have been observed (or inferred indirectly) over geological time.  But science has indeed shown that human activity has resulted in warming, or aggravating the warming.  But that warming is smaller than warming that took place before people were on the planet!  Nevertheless, we're adding to the warming, and, to put it mildly, consequences of continued warming is going to be very uncomfortable for most of us.  It is like being on a leaky boat.  Suppose we're all bailing like mad, but the boat continues to sink, because of natural causes.  Just imagine learning about a number of folks who are actually poking little holes in the hull.  Well, they say, the boat is sinking anyway!  What harm will a few holes do?  What difference will a few extra holes make?

Some people believe that we were put on this planet to make holes in the hull, and they justify themselves by saying that the hull has been leaking for centuries.  I know it isn't a perfect analogy, but that's how it looks from where I'm sitting.

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