"College At Risk", says Andrew Delbanco

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The Chronicle of Higher Education is one of the most widely-read journals for college professors.  Recently Andrew Delbanco (a professor at Columbia, according to the Chronicle,) wrote an articulate and insightful article, in which he describes many of the issues facing American citizens and the American education system.

First of all (he points out), both President Bush and President Obama have said that education is an important aspect of getting the country ready to compete in the future. The products and inventions and new industries of the future will be in countries with the best education. Delbanco quotes Obama as having said in 2009: "Countries that outteach us today will outcompete us tomorrow."

In what follows I will describe some of the points that caught my attention, but you should read the article for yourself.

Education has various functions. Elementary education provides one with the skills absolutely necessary for day to day existence. Secondary education provides a basis for the skills required by someone who works in a clerical occupation, anything that requires moderate mathematical and literary skills: a mechanic, a grocery store clerk, a low-level worker in an office. In the past, a secondary education was enough to teach, be a nurse, do all sorts of things that today requires a college education. More young people complete high school today, but not all of them have learned as much as high school graduates in the early 20th century. Education has declined simply because today, more than in the past, people of more varied skill levels remain in school, and today's teachers must cope with far less motivated and capable kids. But we want all these kids to learn a great deal, because life today is more complicated than it was 80 years ago. To a minor extent, we succeed in educating all our kids.

In ancient Europe, where higher education was first provided to the elite, it was intended to promote the kind of thinking and reflection that is very far from the utilitarian product obtained in most American colleges. Delbanco reports that the President of a well-known for-profit college said: "I'm happy that there are places in the world where people sit down and think. We need that. But that's very expensive. And not everybody can do that." This encapsulates perfectly the attitude that just thinking is a waste of time; what most students (and their parents) want is for the students to be efficiently filled with information and skills that will enable them to get a job.

It is hard to convince someone who has never been blessed with a liberal education of the value of one. (Even those who have had a liberal education are not convinced about its value; a large proportion of those who have been through even a good college, leave their alma mater baffled by the whole experience. College should never have been inflicted on them. But of course telling them so is hardly a kindness.)

The increasing cost of college education results in increasing class sizes, and students in such environments are less likely to get the benefit of the carefully orchestrated discussions, and the one-to-one interaction with adults with various intellectual gifts and specializations, and the experience with teaching young people. The young people hardly have the opportunity to get to know their classmates, and, as the author explains, these lateral interactions are at least as important as the interaction between the instructor and the pupil.

The author proceeds to describe how new technology might help to give means of salvaging some of the benefits of college given the problems of the present time.  But I'm more fascinated with the description of the problem: the author is eloquent in describing the benefits of higher education, and just as insightful in seeing how these benefits cannot be understood by present-day students and their parents. Modern society makes it impossible to obtain a good education, and even if one is put through the education machine, to appreciate what one has experienced, and to capitalize on it.

What follows are my own thoughts.

What is frustrating about the life we lead today is the boredom we feel all the time, on the one hand, and the lack of time for doing anything interesting on the other.

How can this be? Doesn't boredom imply that we have time on our hands? If we don't have time to do anything interesting, how can we be bored? But ask any kid, and they will tell you that they are both exhausted and bored.

One of our primary challenges in this millennium, is to plan for ourselves, and for our society, how to increase the amount of leisure each citizen enjoys, and to provide each member of society as far as possible the wherewithal to use that leisure time wisely. If great things are to come from anyone in the next several centuries, I predict it will come from our leisure time, and not from work. We must separate the drudgery that pays the bills from the work that we do that creates new and useful and wonderful things. Education must equip us for this leisure time activity.

More importantly, I think education in the new century must be a leisure time activity. I don't think it is practical to force all our education into a few desperate years in which we have to learn it all, and then expect us to lead forty years of pure work. Our learning will be just as useless as the years of education were desperate, and our years of labor will be hardly worth living; we may as well kill ourselves, and get it over with. We must find ways of making the years of our maturity satisfying and productive, and that means less work, and more play.

Arch

The Musical Motifs of Wagner's Ring Cycle

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In the post about Star Wars, I referred in passing to Wagner's great Ring cycle, and have blogged about it before:  Der Ring des Nibelungen.  The most detailed —and accessible, I must add— analysis of the musical themes of the opera cycle is by Deryck Cooke, who has not only written a respected book on the subject, but made a double-CD set containing all the musical examples.  I recommend Sir Georg Solti's complete opera sets for the operas, and the companion Deryck Cooke analysis.  (Do please first try to get your small hometown bookstore to order the items for you, before you add your mite to Amazon's profits!!  Amazon will doubtless agree with my plea.)

I have just discovered, a few seconds ago, that Cooke had begun a book on the subject, but died before it was completed:  I Saw the World End.  More appropriately, it should have been called "I heard the world end!"

Arch

The Musical Themes of Star Wars

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When John Williams —already a greatly admired composer— was asked to write the music for Star Wars (subsequently called Star Wars Episode 1: A New Hope), and, by implication, for the sequels and the prequels, he approached the job seriously.

His great model for this undertaking was Richard Wagner, who had conceived and created a great cycle of 4 three-hour operas, a total of 12 hours of almost continuous music, and had thought long and hard about the compositional problem it presented.  The bottom line —for any extended piece of music, really— is that you just can't throw new tunes at the listener all the time.  Later in the musical work, you have to repeat musical material you've used earlier in the piece, if not as is, at least in a modified form.

In addition, a composer for a dramatic work (which Wagner was) had to use the music to underscore the plot.  One way, of course, was to have the Hero's Theme every time the hero rode in, such as one did in the Lone Ranger movies.  But a more subtle technique was possible: you could remind the audience of broken promises, or past events that foreshadowed what was going on on stage, or earlier events that caused what was transpiring on stage, or characters offstage whose existence was critical to the dynamics of what was happening.

So Wagner invented the idea of the Leitmotif, or leading motif, which was essentially a melodic fragment, terse and memorable, that the listener would quickly catch at its first introduction, and associate with something to do with that occasion.  Subsequently, when the leitmotif was reintroduced, the listener could not help but recall the earlier occasion when that very tunelet was heard.  You could slightly alter the melodic fragment, to represent distortions of ideas.  You could re-orchestrate it, to reflect the same idea being carried by a different character, for instance.

In the original album sleeve of the Star Wars movie (1977) soundtrack album, John Williams explained in detail what each track represented.  For various reasons (that might be obvious to other people, but not to me at this moment), each track really consisted of a continuous piece of music that used multiple motifs, but generally just a few.

In addition, it did not make sense to place individual motifs in a soundtrack album.  Each track had to be a complete piece of music, while a motif was a mere musical idea, a tune fragment.  The tunes John Williams used as themes were extended, memorable pieces of music, out of which he could extract a unique phrase which he could use as a motif.  Many of these tunes are well known to us.

First of all, of course, there is the Star Wars Theme itself, usually called the Main Title theme:

 


Note: after the main tune ends, there is some busy music that has to do with mood music and the Rebel ship that is conveying Princess Leia.  It is running the blockade of some planet, possibly Tatooine, and we hear the little fanfare that is really a second theme, the Rebel's Blockade Running Theme.

The Rebel's Blockade Running Theme is a jaunty tune which you invariably hear when the Rebel Alliance (or one of its ships) is trying to outrun the evil Empire ships, as happens repeatedly in Empire Strikes Back (Episode V, 1981).  It is a true motif, because it so short, not an extended piece of music.  (You can easily see how hard it was to make an extended track of this little tune.)  It comes in at around 0:09 in the clip below.  After its initial announcement, it is repeated with different instrumentation, interspersed with busy "Let's go!" type music.

One of the most important themes is The Force theme.  It starts out rather a nostalgic tune, recalling past things almost with regret, but it gathers itself after a few bars, and sounds determined and hopeful:

Every movie must have a love theme, of course.  A more unlikely pair of lovers was never seen than Han Solo and Leia Organa.  Their Han and Leia Love Theme, though is utterly romantic:

Those are the themes that approach the importance of motifs.  There are lots of other pieces used in the movie that perform important functions, such as the music in the Mos Eisley bar, for instance, and the closing scene, which has a great march, which John Williams admitted was inspired by Elgar's Pomp and Circumstances march (or perhaps Walton's Crown Imperial; I forget!)

There is a theme for Princess Leia:



(It is awfully difficult to keep a straight face listening to this theme!  It must have been written long before John Williams got to see Princess Leia, because the theme is soft and wistful, whereas a badder heroine that Leia was hard to imagine.  She was irascible, impatient and demanding, but of course we Star Wars fans see her through rose-tinted contacts, and we imagine her to be the very personification of femininity.  Well, a model of The New Woman, at the very least.)  But because of the wistful mood of the theme, you could not imagine it sounding in the background when Leia was out gunning down an adversary, or chasing someone on a "speeder", as they called the motor-bike - like personal vehicles that figured prominently in all the movies, most notably in The Return of the Jedi (Episode 6).  So this is not a very important theme in the development (John Williams did not use very sophisticated development most of the time.)

When Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back was released in ... wait a minute; let me look it up ... 1980, there were at least two really important new themes that hit the audiences: the first of these was the fabulous Darth Vader theme / Imperial March.  This is interesting; in Star Wars 4 (New Hope, 1977), Darth Vader was essentially the face of the Empire, a minor character.  In the next episode, we are given an inkling that he will emerge as an important protagonist, when he claims that Luke is his son.

The second of these is Yoda's Theme:

I must confess that I never associated this theme specifically with Yoda, but with Luke's successes in training, especially the jaunty high phrase in the winds, harmonized in sixths, with pizzicato strings and harp.  This kind of instrumentation is conventionally associated with fairy folk and magic, a sort of instrumental "Bippity boppity boo!"  Perhaps it was intended to remind us of the playful aspects of the force.

By the way, "OST" is evidently an abbreviation for 'original sound track.'  Young people who contribute videoclips to YouTube are far too busy to spell things out, and rely on acronyms for a quarter of all that they write.  TIA, ttyl.




[To be continued.]

Note:  See here for an article comparing Star Wars and Wagner's Ring cycle.

Sitting, apparently, is killing you.

I don't have direct evidence for this, but I'm fairly certain that interrupting your sitting time with 2-minute spells of walking around should make significant reductions in the detrimental effects.  (The observation about cessation of electrical activity in the legs is very plausible, and worrisome.)

Arch

Ice Cream!

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I recently decided to make what we called a fruit salad ice cream in our house when we were growing up.  It’s really simple; here’s the recipe:

•    ripe mangoes (1 or 2).  Remove the skin with an apple-peeler (or a paring knife).  Slice off the two cheeks, then down the two remaining sides, and cube the pieces into half-inch cubes and set aside.
•    a ripe papaya.  Half a big papaya will do.  Cut in half, remove the seeds (it’s not easy, but keep at it, even if you feel sorry to see the guts of the fruit get removed), scoop out the flesh carefully, and cube into half-inch pieces;
•    a barely ripe tomato.  Cube into pieces of about the same size as the other fruits.
•    a handful of seedless grapes.  Cut each grape in half.
•    5 strawberries, just ripe.  Cut lengthwise into quarters, removing the green stem and end.
•    a ripe kiwi or two.  Clean off the hard stem and core, and slice.
•    A pint of softened vanilla ice cream.

A fruit salad salsa, similar in inspiration to mine.

Mix it all together just before serving.  You can vary the amount of ice cream; a little is good, but too much ice cream obscures the fruit flavor.

I’m embarrassed to admit that if the ice cream has just a tiny bit of salt in it, it will taste more buttery and creamy.  If you add your own salt, you’ll probably add too much.  If the ice cream is too sweet, it ruins the taste.

As you can see, just the perfect ice cream is important to have for this recipe.  First of all, it mustn't be too sweet.  Most people I know don't like ice cream that is too sweet, though they like ice cream too much to not eat it just because of excessive sweetness.

Secondly, the ice cream must have just the right degree of salt, to make it taste right.  Many recipes have too much salt, and that's not good.  Some folks just leave out the salt as a matter of principle either for reasons of health, or because they don't like the salt.  I don't want to get into a huge controversy about the matter; I figure if a tiny bit of salt improves the taste, that overrides the health consideration.

I have to avoid sugar for health reasons, so for my own recipe, I'm going to use an artificial sweetener.  Many purists would rather die than do this, and all I can say is, do what you think is best for you.

Well, I've been going through recipes for ice cream on the Internet, and I've been appalled.  I figured that home-made ice cream should be healthier and tastier than store-bought ice cream.  The best-tasting commercial ice cream I have eaten so far is Wegman's Vanilla Ice Cream.  Less sugar per serving [7 grams, I believe] ---actually 16 grams (corrected 2012/2/23) than another brand we often buy, but a little more fat.  But to my horror, I'm reading recipes that call for pudding mix and other means of making the mix creamier.

Commercial ice creams contain a certain amount of thickener, that is gelatine-like additives made of sea-weed and plant matter called cellulose gum and so on.  I recently read on the Internet some indignant questions about why the FDA allows these derivatives of cellulose (which is often derived from wood, actually) in common foods.

The traditional recipes for ice cream often contain things like egg yolks and so on, which, though perfectly natural, have been known to raise cholesterol levels.  I suppose it is a matter of personal taste, but I like to eat my eggs face to face, and not hidden away in ice cream, for heaven's sake.  I mean, how would you feel if processed bacon bits was a part of your ice cream recipe, say?  What a terrible waste of some perfectly good bacon, right?  So, in a nutshell, if cellulose gum makes my ice cream creamy and less full of cholesterol, I'm all for it.  Yes, you heard right.  Now where can I find some cellulose gum?

I have also recently discovered lactose-free milk.  The first time I had some lactose-free milk with my morning coffee, I though I remembered that it didn't taste right.  But I like it so much now that I don't think I'll go back to regular milk.  So I'm wondering: can I find an ice-cream recipe that uses lactose-free milk?

So don't fear; if like me, you too crave vanilla ice cream that's not too sweet, has no pudding in the mix, no eggs, but does have lactose-free milk and cellulose thickeners in it, and a tiny bit of salt, I'm on the job.  I shall find a recipe.

Arch

Kathleen Ferrier

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In October 2008 I blogged about the late Kathleen Ferrier, the wonderful British contralto, who died in 1952 of throat cancer.  I posted a few cuts from her albums on YouTube (in violation of their policies, no doubt), and I occasionally get notified about comments to those posts, almost invariably happy to have found the link, and lamenting the death of Ms Ferrier.  She was universally loved in her time, by all accounts.

In addition to the clips I provide in that post (linked above), here are some more video clips of Kathleen Ferrier on YouTube that I like:

• "Father of Heaven" from Judas Maccabaeus
• "Erbarme dich" from the Matthew Passion
• Blow the wind Southerly (unaccompanied)
  
• "O Thou that Tellest good tiding to Zion (Handel), possibly one of the most joyful arias ever written:
  
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  "Nun will die Sonn", from Mahler's Kindertotenlieder; dirges for a dead child.
  
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  "Silent Night", the arrangement I hear in my dreams! (Francis (Franz) Grueber):
  
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  "Agnus Dei" from the St John Passion (J. S. Bach):
  
• Qui Sedes ad dextram patris, uploaded by me
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  "Du bist die Ruh", Franz Schubert
  
• "An die Musik", Franz Schubert
  
  

"Deconstructing Academe": Do we need an entire FIELD for this?

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Well.

I think this will be the last post I make on this topic.

Read the article.  Lots of people have been worried about higher education, evidently starting in the 1990's (though you have to realize that people have been worrying about this as long as there has been higher education, and people to worry about it).  Let me make a list of things that worry me, personally, about this whole business.

• I too worry about labor conditions in universities.
• The main question is: does a university education truly work?
• A related question is: does a freshman know what he is going to get in a university?
• Academics are famously jealous of academic freedom.  This principle attempts to ensure that a professor is able to express views that differ from those of the home institution, without risking his employment.  But doesn't the institution have a right to control the curriculum?  Doesn't the instructor have a responsibility to coordinate his teaching with his colleagues, in such a way that it makes sense in a holistic point of view?  Is it right that the professor be the sole arbiter of the extent to which this obligation violates academic freedom?
• In practice, (or so at least many professors will claim,) professors work harmoniously with their colleagues so that students do receive a beautifully coordinated education, from the academic point of view.  However, in hard times, schools compete with each other to offer sexier programs that appeal to students and their gullible parents, such as Web Design, and Video Game Programming, and High Fashion Marketing, in other words, occupations related to the myriad ways in which students have wasted their time in high school.  (One can imagine a college major in Vampire Fiction for Teen Audiences, With A View to Getting A Movie Deal.)  Doesn't the interest of the institution in attracting students with such programs war with the interest of the faculty in providing a well-rounded education, and the interests of the government in supporting higher education that will create an educated and employable workforce and a knowledgeable citizenry?  (Conservatives have an easy answer to this: lower taxes, so that those who can afford it can get any education they damn well want, and just stop worrying about the citizenry, ok?  We're going to take our business overseas, anyway, and we're more worried that kids overseas have the education we need for our labor force.)
• Universities need young faculty, who can be underpaid and overworked.  Other universities are perfectly happy to provide these, but these people need PhD's.  But it is difficult to provide on-demand PhD's, because they have got to do what is called research.  Yet other universities are perfectly happy to provide graduates who have already done research in college.  This often means Googling a lot of stuff, and then verifying via library books a certain proportion of the information you have Googled.  For a PhD, however, every discipline makes its own rules; Googling is completely out (except for some young fields, where Googling is totally in, and which shall remain nameless).  All your research has to be original.  This means books are not much use, either, but research journals are ok.  But the best idea is to create a whole new field, such as Criticism of Higher Education.  A lot of these modern fields would seem to fulfill the need for providing a topic that someone can earn a PhD in, so that some school has one more young PhD that they can chain to the oars for a few years.

To summarize, I do believe that it is good to study education; there are huge problems with it.  Though it is possible that universities know the problems with higher education, but it is also possible that they are powerless to change matters from within the system.

University accrediting agencies are in somewhat a better position for steering the entire education industry (even though these agencies consist of members of universities).  At the moment they are more concerned with being a sort of Better Business Bureau for colleges and universities, which is certainly one important service they can provide the education consumer.  This document outlines their concerns for the last few years.  It does reveal some preoccupation with the minutiae of college governance, and less concern with some of the bigger questions that they presumably feel inadequate to address, or consider to be outside their mandate.

Kids have to learn some basic things that will enable them to function beyond the kid level: write grammatically, obtain information efficiently, understand people outside their immediate experience: foreigners, historical figures, people of different political views than themselves, people of different religions and philosophies, members of the opposite sex and/or differing sexual orientation, war veterans.  Kids need to practice complex reasoning, so that they can understand sophisticated arguments, and see through a certain amount of bullshit.  (Kids who can see through all bullshit might actually be dangerous.)  Kids need to know a little science, because they have to make up their minds about climate change, environmental pollution, and things that threaten the safety of their families and their community and themselves.  They need to appreciate art and music at a deeper level, because it helps preserve sanity, and binds one to one's fellow man (if you think that is a good thing).  But how to do this efficiently?  How can we organize education in such a way that it doesn't take up all our resources?  But do we need a new field to tell us what is wrong with what we have?

Arch

Star Wars: A Weird Feeling of Regression II

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Now that you know the story (see previous post), a few remarks about the movies.

The first episode that was released (Episode IV: A New Hope) was a ground-breaking piece of cinema.  The concept of the movie cycle, conceived in multiple parts, was somewhat new for science-fiction-fantasy; the special-effects which, though they depended on miniature models and careful photography, were an enormous improvements over the techniques used in earlier movies (e.g. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey) and Star Trek.  The ever-present pair of robots were a whole new generation of successors to robots that had appeared in earlier films.  The Storm Troopers, the infantry of the Empire, were an anonymous pack of entities whose only sign of humanity were their voices.  But already, their very uniformity paved the way for things to come, such as the clone warriors of Episode II.

[Added later: How did they show what the Millennium falcon saw through its screens as it whizzed past an enormous Star Destroyer?  A camera was conducted past the suspended model of the star destroyer.  But the camera was suspended in such a way that its motion was controlled by a computer, which jinked and banked as the Millennium Falcon was supposed to be doing.  This was a new innovation; in the past, cameras could only be simply dollied past the stationary miniature model. ]

But, beyond special effects, we must talk about style.  The Empire fleet vessels and personnel were sleek and antiseptic in appearance, subtly signifying robotic entities, entirely under the control of the Emperor and Darth Vader.  In contrast, the Rebel fighters appeared derived from terrestrial models, essentially updated versions of Allied troops from WWII.

In Episodes V and VI, the special-effects gradually improve, still making use of miniatures (and stop-action animation using poseable figures).  One of the biggest tools in their chest, of course, was the ability to blend the special-effects animation with the live action using computer smoothing.  By the time Episode VI rolled round, more and more was being done on the computers.

All of us fans waited impatiently for the prequels, Episodes I, II and III.  By the time Episode I was released, the computer animation game had progressed far beyond the imagination of anyone in 1977.  The improvements all had to do with computer animation.

In traditional animation, e.g. early Mickey Mouse, the lead artist would rough out a sequence of figures that represented the stages in an action sequence.  They would correspond to points of rest, actually; e.g., a running figure would be represented as each foot hit the ground.  These were called the key frames.  All the slides that were required to depict the figure in between the key frames were assigned to a second animator.  The process of creating these "in-between" slides was called "tweening".

Now, if desired, the chief animator could tweak the "tween" transparencies to make the action jerk in a special way, or just leave the tweening as it is.  Next come special artists, who clean up the artwork, and other artists who ink in the outlines and fill in the colors, etc.

Today, it can be done automatically.  We could even do it in PowerPoint, given infinite patience and time.  For instance, we can create a stick figure, and move the control points slightly, to move the figure, or even change its shape: see at right.

The same technology that is available to PowerPoint is used in animation software.  There, in addition to helping us create the individual figures, the software automatically interpolates the tweening.  A mathematical formula is used to move each part of a figure from one position to the next, along a straight line, if desired, or along any curve.  (This can actually be done in PowerPoint as well!  You can have any slide element move along any desired path--within limits.)

All this innovation meant that, by the time Episode I was ready to hit the screen, they had used pure animation to create the scores of robots who appeared in that movie.  (Decrepit remnants of these military robots (Battle Droids) appeared in Episodes IV, V and VI as cantankerous "civilian" robots, venting their spleen on defenseless fellow-robots.  Their synthesized voices are unmistakable! Added later: I must confess I can't find a single reference to vintage battle droids being used in Episodes IV, V and VI, though there are interesting-looking vintage droids in many scenes, e.g. inside the Jawas' mobile warehouse, and inside the bunker of Jabba the Hut.  By the way, robots are called "droids" throughout the cycle.)

More interestingly, the overall effect of the Prequels is smoother, more stylish, more polished.  The old-style robots couldn't talk as fine as C3PO (built by Darth Vader in his earlier existence, don't forget), but they looked far more modern than did either C3PO or R2D2.  The latter two robots, who were present in every episode, look like model T Fords, compared to the battle robots of Episode I, which look like a Prius, although heavily armored.

But more importantly, Lucas (George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars) seemed to deliberately view the Old Republic as a beautiful civilization in its full flowering, a renaissance time, a cultural zenith.  To help in this effort, he actually used some beautiful buildings in Spain as locations for the Prequels.  An example is the use of the Plaza de España in Seville:

Next we see a depiction of the Mos Eisley town on Tatooine, where a lot of the action of Episodes I and IV and VI takes place:

As we consider the series of movies from Episode I to Episode VI, the incidence of scenes of grandeur such as the Palace of the Naboo become less frequent, and desert outposts such as Mos Eisley, and the Moon of Endor become more common.

To summarize, the style of the Prequels reeks of Baroque beauty, while the style of Episodes IV, V and VI is all military might and resistance fighters and desert camps, and ancient spaceships.  (It is a pretty good trick to make a space-ship look ancient, admittedly.) The point is that the Star Wars cycle starts off in beauty and ends in ruins, even though, plot-wise, we have a hopeful new beginning.

Afterword
George Lucas opened up the development of the post Episode VI Star Wars "universe" to fan writers, i.e. writers who wanted to independently continue to develop the story beyond the end of the movie saga.  I regret to report that though, in essence, it involves the new government led by Leia and Luke and Han Solo, at last look the galaxy is as dangerous a place as it used to be, though the central government is now in friendly hands.

Arch

Star Wars: A Weird Feeling of Regression . . .

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I was recently watching the Star Wars cycle with my wife, starting with the oldest movie (Episode IV), through Episodes V and VI, wrapping round to Episode I, in the order in which the movies were made and released.  First, I will summarize the story, for the benefit of anyone who might have not figured it out.  Bear in mind that the setting is a multi-planet civilization, and we should think of the planets as if they were far-flung countries in the world in which we live.

I
The story opens in the Capital Planet of Coruscant, in a hoary civilization that is so ancient that the planet has evolved into a single enormous city.  (This is amplified in the printed novels that have been released to accompany the movies.)  Coruscant is supposed to be a beautiful city/planet, just beginning to fall into decline.  We see the Senator for Naboo, a minor planet, discussing the fact that his planet is being blockaded by a business conglomerate called The Federation.  It is difficult to notice, but the Senator seems only mildly concerned about the blockade.  Two Jedi Knights eventually set out for Tatooine, to help force an agreement between the Federation and the planetary government.

We see the bridge of the main ship of the blockade, with the Federation bosses talking to the Planetary ruler, young Queen Amidala.  She is angry, because evidently food is in short supply.  Soon afterwards, we see these same Federation bosses talking to someone (long-distance) on the Capital planet, Coruscant.  It is a long while before we learn that the shadowy figure, promising support for the Federation bosses, and issuing orders, is in fact the Senator for the very planet that is being blockaded, Senator Palpatine.

The Jedi arrive, and are captured.  Senator Palpatine (via long-distance hologram) tells the Federation bosses that the Jedi should be no problem.  Eventually, as the Jedi become difficult to control, he asks that they should be killed.  Meanwhile, he is also assuring the Queen that she should make a settlement with the Federation, since Coruscant is too far away to send help from.

To cut a long story short, the Jedi Knights escape, steal a spacecraft, and land on the planet.  They make their way to the planet city of the Naboo, home to the Queen, just as the Federation decides to land and attack the planet.  The Jedi rescue the young Queen and a few members of her entourage, and escape in their small craft.  Among the Queen's ladies-in-waiting is young Padme.

In the uproar surrounding the escape from Naboo, the little spacecraft needs to go to ground, and the Jedi choose the very minor desert planet Tatooine, supposedly in the middle of nowhere.  There they discover that a main component of the engines of the little spacecraft need to be replaced.  They get help from a little slave boy, Anakin, and his mother.  The little boy appears to have a physiological peculiarity that the Jedi look for in youngsters who should be trained as Jedi.  The kid wins a major race, and with the winnings, the Jedi secure the part they need, and the freedom of the little kid.  The mother has to remain behind.  In the course of the action, Padme, a girl of about 15, and the little boy (about 7) become close.

With the repaired ship, our small band goes to Coruscant for help.  There they find that the Senate is in a stalemate.  Palpatine takes them under his wing, oozing charm and assurances, and maneuvers the Queen into calling for a vote of no confidence in the Supreme Chancellor of the Senate.  Amazingly, Palpatine himself is elected Supreme Chancellor a few days later.  He is disappointed when the young Queen decides to depart, in disgust.  Meanwhile, the Jedi organization has met and examined Anakin, and reluctantly decide to train him, even though he is deemed too old.

Responding to desperate pleas from Naboo, the little group leaves for Naboo, and somehow destroy the invaders.  Palpatine arrives afterwards, and congratulates them on overthrowing the invaders.  But the Jedi who led the revolt is killed, and his apprentice, Ben Kenobi, takes Anakin under his wing, to train him.  Surprisingly, "Padme", the young handmaid of the Queen, is revealed to be the Queen, and another young woman has been masquerading as the Queen (at the behest of the Queen).

II, III
In the next two episodes, the friendship between little Anakin Skywalker and Queen Amidala (Padme) ripens into love, as Anakin comes into manhood.  However, as a Jedi, Anakin suffers setbacks and frustrations, since he has an impatient temperament.  All his weaknesses are blamed on Ben Kenobi's ineffective training, supervised by none other than Master Yoda, the diminutive ancient being.  Senator Palpatine has Anakin's mother murdered, deliberately to embitter young Anakin.  Several Jedi defeats at the hand of the Sith, a rival group that gets its strength from the so-called Dark Side, frustrate Anakin further.  Anakin marries the Queen.  But as Anakin's frustrations grow to insurmountable proportions, Palpatine succeeds in persuading him to come over to the winning side: the Sith.  He names himself Darth Vader, and gives up all connections to his former self, including his dead wife.

Palpatine declares himself Emperor, and dissolves the Senate.  With Anakin at his side, he embarks on a rule of repression and terror.  Before Queen Amidala died, she had given birth to twins.  The Emperor sets Anakin to hunt down these infants, but Ben Kenobi has separated them, and hidden them away.

IV
One of Anakin Skywalker and Queen Amidala'sdeath star inside a little robot, R2-D2.  R2-D2, and C3-PO, a robot that Anakin Skywalker had built, and which had come into the possession of Leia, are placed in an escape pod, and fired off to Tatooine.  The Princess is taken on the ship to be interrogated by Darth Vader.  (At this stage, since this is the first of the episodes released, we are unaware that Darth Vader is Leia's father.  Neither of them are aware of it, either.)

The robots land on the planet Tatooine surface.  It is many years after we see the place, and the main city has grown.  It is mainly controlled by the gangsters called Huts, and there is little law and order.  In a remote farm, a young boy called Luke Skywalker lives with his uncle and aunt.  He accidentally comes into possession of the robots, and sees a brief clip from a holographic video the Leia has made, asking for help from one Obi Wan Kenobi.  The only Kenobi Luke knows is Ben Kenobi, who lives some distance away.  Ben manages to get the robot to release the entire message, and Luke is drawn to the holographic image of the Princess.  Returning home, Luke finds his home destroyed.  He decides to go with Ben to rescue the princess.

The Princess is rescued, with the help of a smuggler called Han Solo, who is being sought by the Hutts for being late with a fee.  The plans are delivered to the Rebels, and the death star is destroyed.  But Ben Kenobi is killed in a duel with Darth Vader.

V
Luke narrowly escapes a battle on an icy planet in the Hoth system, and hears Ben Kenobi's voice encouraging him to travel to the swamp planet of Dagobah, where Jedi Master Yoda has retired.  Luke trains with Yoda.  Meanwhile, Leia and Han seek shelter with Lando Kalrissian on a certain gas planet.  When they arrive, they find that Darth Vader has set a trap for them there.  Han is frozen in a block of Carbonite, and shipped off to Tatooine, where his debtors want him.

Luke has a feeling that Leia is in trouble and goes to find them.  He encounters Darth Vader, who has recognized him as his son.  Together, Darth Vader says, we can rule the galaxy.

Lando and Leia evade Darth Vader, rescue Luke, and rejoin the Rebels.

VII
The Empire has built a second death star, near the moon of the planet Endor, home to the Ewoks.  Han, Leia, R2D2 and C3PO end up on the moon, meet the Ewoks, and get ready to attack the power station on the moon which generates the shield that protects the death star, which is in stationary orbit around the moon.  The Rebellion has planned an attack on the death star, and the little advance group has undertaken to disable the shield in time for the attack.

Luke gives himself up, insisting that he can enlist the aid of Darth Vader to neutralize the death star.  But the Emperor, Palpatine, has arrived, and is eager to turn Luke to the Dark Side.  As the Emperor's needling of Luke turns vicious, Darth Vader snaps, and hurls the Emperor into the power shaft of the death star, a sort of well that leads to the central power source of the structure.  The Rebellion, which had emerged from light speed into the space around the death star too early, had been taking a beating.  But the advanced group, belatedly, disable the shield with the aid of the Ewoks, and the death star is destroyed.  Luke escapes just in time, with Darth Vader's body.

There is much rejoicing.

The Future of Education in America

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As we have been discussing over the last several years, what I am seeing in American education is troubling in many ways.  As with any observation about the USA, it is almost impossible to generalize broadly (except for the general statement that generalization is impossible).  A number of connected facts are unarguably true:

• Students are not graduating from either high school or college with as much academic capability as their predecessors from about 20 years ago.

Of course, what makes sense for a young person to know today is a lot different from what made sense 20 years ago.  But today's graduate arguably knows a smaller percentage of what we would expect them to know than the graduate of the nineties knew compared to what we expected back then.

• Students are far more selective about what they engage with in the classroom than in earlier years.  They are more likely to shrug off the fact that they are clearly bored in class.

Students have always been complacent about being bored in class.  Read a book or two in the popular literature, and one gets the impression that the best one can say about a classroom is that people are bored.  This is accepted without remark because it is such a common expectation.

• There is a tendency to blame teachers and professors for the fact that students are uninterested in class work.  There is also a related tendency to glorify websites and videos that feature people teaching material that students would normally expect to see in a classroom.  

It is the same --putatively boring-- material, but some little factor, perhaps the voice of the presenter, or the pace of presentation, or the colors being used in the diagrams, or the time of day at which the video is being watched makes the video far more effective than a live presentation.

What does this mean?  Students are less tolerant of factors that were considered minor in the past: what the instructor was wearing, what colors the instructor uses on the chalkboard, what time of the day it is ...  Students are getting very picky.

I had a friend who was criticized by his students for wearing a green sport coat.  I suppose a green sport coat is not the ideal choice of jacket for an instructor, but to remark on it as a formal criticism of the class goes too far.  I myself have had teachers with annoying adenoidal voices, who dressed like slobs, who taught at that horrible hour right after lunch.  But we compensated in other ways; we studied together, to offset the fact that we couldn't all pay attention every minute during the hour.

• Many students consider themselves "visual learners".  But this characteristic evidently does not extend to being able to make sense of text.  You can write a sentence on the chalkboard and outline it in red, but there are often a few students who miss a significant syntactical or semantic element in the text.

Students cannot grab the sense of something they see, either in a book or on the screen, unless perhaps the subject is something entirely un-academic, such as a piece of gossip, or something of personal interest.  The ability to get something subtle from text is gradually being lost.

It is pointless to blame high-school teachers; they can't fix up a student over a single year.  Reading is truly at least 50% the responsibility of the family.  If the family does not read, it is unlikely that the child will be a wonderful, mature reader.  (What do I mean?  I mean if you take 100 kids whose families do not read, less than 25 of them will end up reading at the inferential level.  There will be a few who transcend the limitations of their backgrounds, to be sure.)  Kids must be convinced of the value of reading (and of books) over the six or seven summers between Kindergarten and 9th grade when they are not totally too busy to read.

Have you ever got one of those jokes on e-mail?  Have you got one which screams that it is the FUNNIEST THING THE SENDER EVER SAW!  PASS IT ON TO EVERYONE IN THE UNIVERSE?  I mean, it's a bunch of jokes, so if they're funny, you'd probably pass them on, right?

But the sender has no confidence in your ability to see the humor in it, so it has to be pointed out in the hugest font the e-mail system will allow.  Does this tell us anything?  Will Mathematics texts have to be printed this way, say, so that kids will actually notice the stuff?

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