You can’t fight performatively when the other side is fighting to win

In a column in 2018, I wrote that a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) should worry us all. The report noted that our schools are not dealing with the “hard history” of slavery. In its research, the SPLC found that “high school seniors struggle on even the most basic questions.”

What we teach children is also an easy way in which we can (re)write history.  For instance, if children are not taught about the evil that slavery was, and the beyond-imagination hellish lives that the enslaved lived, then it is only a matter of a couple of generations before when that dark history is pretty much forgotten.  By whitewashing away the horrors, we essentially brainwashed people!

We laughed when President Orange Fascist did not know anything about Frederick Douglass.  But, I am willing to bet that even many good-hearted Americans did not know Frederick Douglass, nor do they know even now how he is different from Stephen Douglas.  To a large extent, this is always the case--most of us carry on with our lives without knowing much, and usually it is not a problem.  But, when "leaders" begin to spin alternative facts as history, we would not know fact from fiction unless we knew any better.

It is not any surprise that our collective ignorance has been revealed.  Turned out that the brainwashing in schools had worked out perfectly.

As the country grapples with a racial reckoning following the killing of George Floyd in police custody, educators said that what has and what has not been taught in school have been part of erasing the history of systemic racism in America and the contributions of Black people and other minority groups.  

It is even worse in the old country where we were taught the British history of India.  Here's a classic example: In school we were not taught about the First War of Independence, but about the "Sepoy mutiny," as the bastards referred to them!  Despite the fact that I was schooled in an independent Republic of India!!!  Whatever I know now was possible only because, as Mark Twain put it, I didn't let schooling get in the way of my education!

Here in my adopted country, the history in schools is pretty much a white supremacist take on the past:

“The curriculum was never designed to be anything other than white supremacist," Julian Hayter, a historian and an associate professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said, "and it has been very difficult to convince people that other versions of history are not only worth telling. They’re absolutely essential for us as a country to move closer to something that might reflect reconciliation but even more importantly, the truth."
LaGarrett King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri, said the history curriculums in schools are meant to tell a story and, in the U.S., that has been one of a “progressive history of the country.”
“Really the overarching theme is, ‘Yes, we made mistakes, but we overcame because we are the United States of America,'” said King

The Disneyfication of history!

The New York Times offered an awesome corrective and an education through its 1619 Project.  But, of course, tRump and his toadies believe that the NY Times is fake news and is a propaganda publication, which means that they perhaps never bothered to read even a word in that fantastic report.  Is it any surprise that they continue to defend "their" history and heritage!

If you want a recommendation, well, Jill Lepore's These Truths is a wonderful place to start learning about American history.  You need to know the correct history in your preparation to fight:

If Lepore is right and the nation is indeed the fight, liberals must understand what a fight involves. That is, you can’t fight performatively when the other side is fighting to win: that kind of fight simply won’t go on for very long. You have no option but to fight to win, too. You want to win because you are right and they are wrong; because you have a moral right to power and they don’t; because you are real Americans and they’re not.

Fight on!

Drawing a few lessons about life and education

Way back in school in the old country, my friends Vijay and Srikumar were very good with pencil drawing.  Animals, nature, and even people, you name it and they easily could.  I, on the other hand, couldn't even draw a line!

How on earth do some people--even without any formal training--draw and sing and dance and write poems and more?

I have forever wondered about this, and have even blogged in plenty about creativity.  I get pissed off when education systematically marginalizes all these, and then write something like this, which I did a year ago:

Creativity is something that has always intrigued me; I have always felt that formal education the way we offer it simply kills any creativity. Only the fortunate ones survive with their creative skills in tact.
All these add to my frustration with the mantras of STEM and coding. If I could, I would tell educators to "fuck off."  But, alas, in the academic and professional worlds, we cannot ;)

Which is why when I read about one of the MacArthur "genius" Award winners, I was easily bowled over.

Lynda Barry, whose class at Wisconsin helps college students tap innate creativity, is one of the honorees.    Barry was tapped for the award for "Inspiring creative engagement through original graphic works and a teaching practice centered on the role of image making in communication."

I followed the link and listened to a 30-minute interview with her from six years ago.  Yep, there is no doubt about her genius.

Barry says there:

I find so interesting is there's that longing to make things stays with us our whole lives, and there is a lot of sadness about it, and a lot of, a lot of terror about drawing. I mean, that's the - that's the part, when I'm working with the people at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, I'm around geneticists and mathematicians and physicists, all these people who are also - and they do their big formulas on the board, you know, delta epsilon minus two and whatever they're doing. But if they have to draw like even a stick figure, they freak out. So that's interesting to me.

Count me as one those sad people!

Maybe some day we will think beyond how to prepare young children as coders and programmers and worker bees, and encourage them to explore their inner creativity.  Further, it is not as if creativity and imagination are "wastes" in the scientific and analytical thinking; remember this quote from a week ago?

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

On my part, later this evening I will go watch and support some creative people.  That's something "creative" that I could do.

Imagine!

Read the following:

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Who do you think said that?

Even if you can't name the person, any guesses on what that person--a famous one--was known for?

The keyword there is "imagination," right?  And this imagination is linked to knowledge. And the quote begins with "artist."

We might be tempted to think that it was a famous person in the arts.  That's what I would have thought.

Think again.

It was Einstein!

Aha, you say, because we are immediately reminded of Einstein's famous thought-experiment approach to big questions.

It is not only Einstein.  Science itself requires imagination.

[It] doesn’t take an Albert Einstein to observe that, without the essential first step, without a creative reimagining of nature, a conceiving of hypotheses for what might be going on behind the perceived surface of phenomena, there can be no science at all.

Now think about your own science classes.  Did you ever get a feel that science called for imagination?  To the contrary, chances are great that the classes came across as one boring thing to memorize after another boring thing, right?  I tell ya, every day I am amazed that we humans have progressed this much despite our best attempts to kill curiosity, learning, and imagination.  As Picasso--another imaginative mind, though a thoroughly flawed human--said, through schooling we make sure that students do not become artists!

Science education favours the presentation of results, and a focus on knowledge, rather than the human stories of wonder, imagination, failed ideas and those glorious and uninvited moments of illumination that thread through the lives of all who actually do science.

The older I get, the more I am frustrated by our screwed up approach to education.

I have blogged before on the role of imagination in science.  Like here, in which I quote Freeman Dyson:

Science is a creative interaction of observation with imagination. ... Imagination by itself can still enlarge our vision when observation fails. 

Of course, the imagination is cross-checked by experiments and evidence, which is why string theory, for example, hasn't broken through--great imagination, but no proof. At least, not yet.

I have always known that I lack that kind of imagination.  But, as I noted here:

Education and learning are perhaps also about stretching one's imaginations.  It is easy to walk around with a limited view of the world, but is a challenge to expand that view.

I try my best to get that view across to students and colleagues alike, even though I know fully well that I am not winning.

"True joy is a serious thing"

I came across "true joy is a serious thing" in this wonderful essay on higher education.  On redeeming the liberal arts.

I became a huge fan of the author, Leon Botstein, after reading an essay in The New Yorker that was about him and Bard College that he presides over.  Quite a force he is!

In this recent essay, Botstein writes:

Students entering college ask basic questions about life. They are in search of ways to define their place in the world. They are concerned about their own lives and are curious about large problems in the world—matters of justice, the nature and possibilities of work and employment, the future of the planet, the construction of meaning, the nature of knowledge and belief, and the understanding of nature. These grand, wide-ranging concerns are not mirrored by the professional or disciplinary divisions of a university. The proper response is not old-fashioned survey courses; rather, courses on issues and problems that probe deeply and draw from more than one discipline are needed. So too are curricular structures that develop, from the first year, a common ground for all students that can enable serious conversation and debate among them. Finally, the sense of excitement and satisfaction derived from the active life of the mind must be nurtured. As Seneca put it, “True joy is a serious thing.” Cultivating that recognition ought to be a basic goal of the liberal arts.

And this exactly what we do not do.  In fact, we do everything possible to kill any innate student interest into inquiring about their place in this world and how to make meaning of their lives.

Higher education has been reduced to a glorified trade school. 

Now, there is nothing wrong with trade schools.  There is a place for trade schools that teach skills, and there is a place for universities that go beyond trade skills.  Trade schools, to their credit, do not suffer from any mission drift and stay focused on the trade.  Universities, on the other hand, have completely lost sight of their mission.  Increasingly, universities even go one step more and systematically transform themselves into becoming glorified trade schools.

Earlier this week, as we engaged in discussions in the classroom, I told students that I want them to  consider learning as personal.  It is not about something in the abstract; instead, it is about them, their lives, their communities, and their country.  I was telling them, without telling them, that education helps them with what Botstein refers to: Find their own answers to in their "search of ways to define their place in the world. They are concerned about their own lives and are curious about large problems in the world—matters of justice, the nature and possibilities of work and employment, the future of the planet, the construction of meaning, the nature of knowledge and belief, and the understanding of nature."

But then ... yes, you have heard me say this before, nobody listens to me!  When even Botstein has very little influence over all these issues, what chance do I have of being heard!

I could be wrong, ... but ...

To a large extent, I felt  smacked around into being intellectually humble when I started graduate school. I was amazed at how much had already been said and written about, and I became convinced that I had nothing to offer.  What the heck could I think about that the great minds had not already thought about?

I was an easy convert to "I don't know a damn thing!"

I became convinced, very easily, that my work would not be about uncovering anything dramatic.  No patent or copyrights.  My intellectual ego was quickly deflated.

In addition, I also became suspicious of people who came across as intellectually arrogant, as if they knew it all.  I started staying away from them.

When I started teaching, this understanding that we know very little is one that I have tried to get across to students without making that explicit all the time.  The subversive that I am, it has been mostly an implicit message.  Sometimes, through humor--like joking that the genius Einstein had no idea how to communicate in Tamil when even a three-year old kid in Tamil Nadu can do that ;)

Intellectual humility has always fascinated me.  I have even blogged about that here.  Like this one in 2012.  Or, like when I quoted Montaigne: Que sais-je?

A couple of years ago, I decided to offer a seminar on this subject.  I titled the course as "Intellectual boldness through intellectual humility."  In that, I essentially channeled my philosophy on education and life--to admit that I don't know.  The key, however, is to rise beyond that "I don't know."

Had I known about Benjamin Franklin's approach, I would have adopted that too: "whenever he was about to make an argument, he would open with something along the lines of, “I could be wrong, but…”

I offered that seminar in 2016 and, therefore, had no idea about this systematic attempt to understand intellectual humility:

in 2016, professors from Pepperdine University broke the concept of intellectual humility down into four components and published an assessment to measure them:

1. Having respect for other viewpoints
2. Not being intellectually overconfident
3. Separating one’s ego from one’s intellect
4. Willingness to revise one’s own viewpoint

An intellectually humble person will score high on all of these counts.

I am not sure whether boasting that I will score highly on these will be intellectually humble ;)

The author notes that "certain activities generally correlate with higher intellectual humility across the board":

Traveling a lot — or, even better, living for extended periods in foreign cultures — tends to make us more willing to revise our viewpoints. After all, if we know that it is perfectly valid to live a different way than we do, it makes sense that our brains would be better at accepting new approaches to problems at work. This aligns with recent research on the neuroscience of how storytelling helps us build empathy for other people. (Read neuroeconomist Paul Zak’s HBR article on this fascinating subject here.) Fiction readers tend to score higher in intellectual humility, perhaps because their brains are a little bit better trained to seek out stories that vary from their own, and see characters’ experiences and opinions as potentially valid. Preliminary research is also showing us that practicing mindfulness meditation, learning about the ins and outs of your own ego using a framework like the Enneagram, and learning about Moral Foundations Theory through programs like Open Mind Platform can each help us operate with more intellectual humility.

Readers of this blog, or the rare person who has paid attention to my remarks in the classes, will notice that these activities are also the activities that I talk up and practice.

I cannot understand how one could be anything but intellectually humble.  But then, to use Franklin's wise words, I could be wrong ;)

We are the elite!

Different sets of people.  Different dining table settings and food.  Different conversations.  But, one commonality stands out: We are globalists, and among the economic elite.

We might think of ourselves as "middle class."  But, middle class we ain't. In fact, halfway through one dinner, I proclaimed that we might not think about ourselves as elites but we are.

Of course, me admitting to the world that I am one of the upper-economic-crust is not anything new in this blog.  (Here are two samples: One and Two.)

Any which way we slice the data, well, as long as we don't deal with alternative facts, we cannot escape the reality.  "The families at our end of the spectrum wouldn’t know what to do with a pitchfork."

This elite in the US is mostly white or Asian (yes, including me.)

The Institute for Policy Studies calculated that, setting aside money invested in “durable goods” such as furniture and a family car, the median black family had net wealth of $1,700 in 2013, and the median Latino family had $2,000, compared with $116,800 for the median white family. A 2015 study in Boston found that the wealth of the median white family there was $247,500, while the wealth of the median African American family was $8. That is not a typo. That’s two grande cappuccinos.

Ah, yes, but we are middle class!

The other day, a sales agent told me my credit rating is a "you can buy whatever you want rating."  It is, indeed.  But that rating by itself is a piece of evidence that I ain't middle class, which struggles to keep itself afloat, which is why their credit rating is not one they will be proud about.

We then turn around and tell the real middle class, and the lower class, that they too can do this.  If only!  "In America, the game is half over once you’ve selected your parents."  If you are a regular reader, then you know you have read this before ... and you are right.  It has been one of my favorite ways to summarize the inequality: Choose your parents well!

Recall the old adage that health is wealth?  The two are increasingly tied together:

Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and liver disease are all two to three times more common in individuals who have a family income of less than $35,000 than in those who have a family income greater than $100,000. Among low-educated, middle-aged whites, the death rate in the United States—alone in the developed world—increased in the first decade and a half of the 21st century. Driving the trend is the rapid growth in what the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair”—suicides and alcohol- and drug-related deaths.

Yet, despite all such evidence, because of political ideologies, and implicit supremacist views because they know better than to voice them explicitly, many shrug their shoulders and prefer to interpret the other people's relative poverty as vice: "Why can’t they get their act together?"

You see, when educated people with excellent credentials band together to advance their collective interest, it’s all part of serving the public good by ensuring a high quality of service, establishing fair working conditions, and giving merit its due. That’s why we do it through “associations,” and with the assistance of fellow professionals wearing white shoes. When working-class people do it—through unions—it’s a violation of the sacred principles of the free market. It’s thuggish and anti-modern. Imagine if workers hired consultants and “compensation committees,” consisting of their peers at other companies, to recommend how much they should be paid. The result would be—well, we know what it would be, because that’s what CEOs do.

I have no idea how this story will end.  All I know is that this story is not unfolding well.

I did it my way?

Over the years, I have had quite a few students exclaim in classes that they are visual learners or auditory learners. Using these justifications, students have attempted to explain to me why some of the learning materials, or my approach to teaching, did not work for them.

I have always politely nodded my head and moved on.

Left to me, I would have engaged them about where they got such notions that they were visual or auditory or whatever.

Until today, I had no idea such sorting was being done on a large scale in K-12!

Experts aren’t sure how the concept spread, but it might have had something to do with the self-esteem movement of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Everyone was special—so everyone must have a special learning style, too. Teachers told students about it in grade school. “Teachers like to think that they can reach every student, even struggling students, just by tailoring their instruction to match each student’s preferred learning format,” said Central Michigan University’s Abby Knoll, a PhD student who has studied learning styles. (Students, meanwhile, like to blame their scholastic failures on their teacher’s failure to align their teaching style with their learning style.)
Either way, “by the time we get students at college,” said Indiana University professor Polly Husmann, “they’ve already been told ‘You’re a visual learner.’” Or aural, or what have you.

Oh my!  I certainly understand that there are different ways in which we present information and convey advanced knowledge.  We read ideas that were written down. We listen to lectures. We watch videos, even of lectures.  But, does such multiplicity does not mean there are different learning styles; "a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another."

Unfortunately, such crap has rapidly diffused all over:

The "learning styles" idea has snowballed—as late as 2014, more than 90 percent of teachers in various countries believed it. The concept is intuitively appealing, promising to reveal secret brain processes with just a few questions. Strangely, most research on learning styles starts out with a positive portrayal of the theory—before showing it doesn’t work.

As I often remind students, almost always what appeals to our gut feeling is wrong.

What do successful learners do? "really focus on the material."  Yep, there is only one formula--focus on the damn learning materials instead of blaming the materials that do not match with "my learning style."

Oh, btw, if you really want to remember what you learnt, stop binge-reading, and give your brain time to process what you just read.  Take a break after reading this blog-post ;)

Stayin' Alive in The Wall

I have forever blogged about creativity in the time of advanced computing.  Routine tasks can be translated into algorithms--even facial recognition, yes.  But, creativity?

There is no formula for creativity.  After all, if there is one, then that can be written up as an algorithm, right?

Creativity is something that has always intrigued me; I have always felt that formal education the way we offer it simply kills any creativity. Only the fortunate ones survive with their creative skills in tact.

All these add to my frustration with the mantras of STEM and coding. If I could, I would tell educators to "fuck off."  But, alas, in the academic and professional worlds, we cannot ;)

Which is why I fully resonate with the following:

Machines are already superintelligent on many axes, including memory and processing speed. Unfortunately, those are the attributes our education system currently rewards, with an emphasis on learning by rote.
It doesn’t make sense to me. Part of my job as an investor is to attempt to predict the future – I need to make bets on the way we’ll be behaving in the next two, five, ten and 20 years. Computers already store facts faster and better than we do, but struggle to perfect things we learn as toddlers, such as dexterity and walking.
We need to rethink the way we teach our children and the things we teach them. Creativity will be increasingly be the defining human talent. Our education system should emphasise the use of human imagination to spark original ideas and create new meaning. It’s the one thing machines won’t be able to do.
We should aim to teach our kids about the power of creativity in every area.

The system in K-12 and in higher ed increasingly make no sense to me.

As an example, think about how music comes about.  And then think about such remixing:




Of course, there is a lot more to creativity than to music alone.

We need to rethink the way we teach our children and the things we teach them. Creativity will be increasingly be the defining human talent. Our education system should emphasise the use of human imagination to spark original ideas and create new meaning. It’s the one thing machines won’t be able to do.
We should aim to teach our kids about the power of creativity in every area. Science and maths, which are often considered uncreative, have shaped human history with huge creative leaps. It was creativity that allowed Newton to discover gravity while observing a falling apple as he was thinking about the forces of nature.

Tell me something that I have not been yelling about!

Oh well ... nobody cares :(

Here is Sir Ken Robinson, whom I have quoted a lot when it comes to creativity:

Jane Austen in 2018

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

A wonderful opening line from Pride and Prejudice.

Whether or not it is an universal truth, for a while now I have been worried about the changing fortunes of single men--many do not seem to be capable of possessing "a good fortune," which then makes it less likely that they will find a wife.

Tyler Cowen provides me with more to worry about when he asks, "Why are marriage rates rising for educated Americans but falling for the less educated?"

At this point, it is tempting to rewrite Jane Austen's opener as:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good education, must be in want of a wife.

But, let's not race ahead.

It is not really about the education alone; "more jobs demand good social skills."  Women are more skilled in this than men are.

How about the polarization of marriage rates across the well-educated (almost steady) and the less well-educated (drastically falling)? Well, if you are an educated, high-earning man with a good white-collar job, you will meet more women at work than before. You are facing less competition from other men with comparable workplace status, and so your marriage prospects may be quite attractive. But lower-status men don't have it nearly as good in the marriage market, and many women may prefer to stay single.

I have been saying all these for years!

Why do women prefer to be single?

You don’t want to marry a man who is in all likelihood not economically viable, because it’s not a free lunch.

Ouch!

Like "Olivia Alfano, a 29-year-old single mother living in Evansville, Indiana":

 The money is pretty good, she told me: She drives a BMW and was able to buy a house last year. Alfano now wants to go into management, which she thinks will give her more security in the long run. When I asked her why she hadn’t married, she told me, “I haven’t run into someone I would consider doing that with.”

The times are changing. Many men have yet to even understand the changes, leave alone respond constructively.  The better educated and prepared women population “creates a surplus of men” at the low end who are not going to get married."  And, therefore, "millions of these less well educated men are not going to get the benefits of marriage":

Married men live longer, are less likely to become alcoholic, take drugs, commit suicide, etc.

The less educated men will, also, kill many in mass shootings, beat up foreigners, and vote for trump!

Thus, the modified Jane Austen opener:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a good fortune, is not in want of a husband.

Smart fools and confident idiots

Way back in November 2014, well before trump even announced his candidacy, I blogged about a Cornell professor's research on "confident idiots":

What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

As much as this alone goes a long way towards explaining trump and his enablers, in the big picture and in specifics like coal, this post is not about those assholes.

We are quite a few people, other than those assholes, who should be able to do something, right?  Furthermore, with a claim to the intellectual and cultural high ground--which is why trump constantly snarls at us "elites"--we should be able to do better, right?

Not only do we lack the ability, we are further contributing to the education of young people who will lack the ability to make the world a better place:

Our overemphasis on narrow academic skills—the kinds that get you high grades in school—can be a bad thing for several reasons. You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place.

My high scores and ability to do math and science did not impress me one bit.  I was not sure how I could make the world a better place through that route.  I quit engineering--mentally even during my final year of high school itself, and for good when I came to the US for graduate studies--with a hope that I would get on to the path that would help me become a better person and also help the world a tiiiiiiiiny bit better.

A few terms ago, a student--Bill--remarked something similar when he argued that, for instance, scientists and technologists working in various government and university research that was aimed at destruction to life and property are not engaged in any value-neutral effort.  His hypothesis was that maybe these experts were not asking themselves whether they were using their smarts to make the world a better place.  "I wonder if they take courses in the humanities" he asked.

The older I get, the more I am discouraged by expertise that is devoid of an understanding of humanity.  I care less and less about the SAT and GRE scores and fancy degrees, if the person cannot seem to understand and empathize with the human condition.

What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense. We may not just be selecting the wrong people, we may be developing an incomplete set of skills—and we need to look at things that will make the world a better place.

I am not sure about the "other people’s expense"; otherwise, I am in agreement there.

You know, it’s easy to think of smart people but it’s really hard to think of wise people. I think a reason is that we don’t try to develop wisdom in our schools. And we don’t test for it, so there’s no incentive for schools to pay attention.

And we now have a president who is the antithesis of wisdom!

Not only do we not encourage creativity, common sense and wisdom, I think a lot of us don’t even value them anymore.

Therein lies the problem--a lot of us don't even care about these anymore.  We have met the enemy and ... it is us :(

From ENIAC and EMERAC to ... HAL and Siri

There were three questions in this quiz. Ahem, I scored three out of three!

Go ahead, take that quiz, and come back for the rest of this post.  OK?

Alright, you are back.  Well, you never left, did you? ;)

Consider the statistics in the following image:

Source

Yes, even Kenya.  Wherever one is, the bottom-line is no different:

For all the differences between countries, many of automation’s challenges are universal. For business, the performance benefits are relatively clear, but the issues are more complicated for policy makers. They will need to find ways to embrace the opportunity for their economies to benefit from the productivity growth potential that automation offers, putting in place policies to encourage investment and market incentives to encourage innovation. At the same time, all countries will need to evolve and create policies that help workers and institutions adapt to the impact on employment.

For regular readers of this blog, this is all same-old, same-old, right?

Unfortunately, such stuff is not discussed on Fox & Friends, which is where the current president learns about what is happening around the world and in the US!

On the other hand, news programs like this one that the president and his 63 million fucking minions do not care for, remind him:

President Trump has very specific talking points when it comes to jobs in the U.S. They go kind of like this: China — bad. Mexico — bad. Outsourcing — bad. Made in America — great. Hiring American — even better.
Trump and his supporters have spent a lot of time focusing on trade policies and how to bring back jobs lost to globalization, but experts say most of those jobs are not coming back. The key issue facing the American workforce — and therefore America’s prosperity and stability moving forward — is not trade, but technology.

Ah, those supporters of his are soon going to figure out that they are nothing but 63 million suckers!

So, what can be done?

“The jobs that we’re preparing them for haven’t even been created yet, and really, that’s a hurdle that we need to figure out how to get over, because how do you prepare them for the unknown?”

Ahem, I have written plenty about this.  Even as op-eds.  Like this one in which I wrote about educating for a world of unscripted problems.  

Unscripted because we do not know what the future holds. But, we do have a sense of how we might be able to reasonably prepare for that future, by developing skills that will help people to constructively engage with the unscripted problems.
Yet, contemporary public policy discussions on higher education and workforce preparation rarely ever go into serious and sustained thinking about the “world of unscripted problems."

Some day, after I am gone, maybe a couple of people will remark that people should have listened to me ;)

What comes next? Am I ready for it?

It might come across as strange that I spend a lot of time thinking about death, given how convinced I am that there is nothing after I die.  (Note: it is death. Not "resting peacefully" or any other crappy euphemism!!!)  To be so convinced that there is neither hell nor heaven nor any limbo-state pending resolution of my status is liberating.  I am not at all worried about the after.  I am only worried about the here and the now.  I am, therefore, worried about whether or not I am doing things that I won't have to regret about as I lay dying.

I have always believed that everybody wonders at the last stages whether they did alright and whether it was worth it.  Even if it was a sudden end to life, that fraction of a second, the dying person might contemplate that.  Death can strike us any second, which means that I better have my answer ready at all times.

The immanence of human finitude — the fact that we’re dying right now and not in some distant future — should create the impetus for philosophical reflection. Most philosophers know this in some abstract sense. The Platonic dialogues are set against the backdrop of the trial and death of Socrates for a reason: The difficulty of facing death is that it comes with the sudden challenge of giving a good account of your life, what Plato called an apologia.
When dying finally delivers us to our inevitable end, we would like to think that we’ve endured this arduous trial for a reason.

How can this not be a question that people try to answer every day?  Maybe we are arrogant, and we believe that death is far, far, away.  Or, maybe we are in extreme denial about death.  I cannot imagine either one to be a good approach to living one's short time on this planet.

When an old man asks, "What is the meaning of life?" he simultaneously queries the infinitely more particular question: "What is the meaning of my life?" Which is also the question: "What might be the meaning of my death?"
Any satisfying answers would have to address what this meaning might be from the inside, in terms that could be subjectively felt.

Nothing to disagree there.  The meaning is inside.  Indeed.  That is why I focus on death.  Not because I want to die--my posts make it very clear that I love life.  I love living.  The life that I love ends with death.  The end point of death is the destination. For me, and for you too.

In a wonderful essay, from where I had excerpted those quotes above, the authors ask, “Are we teaching students everything without teaching them anything regarding the big questions that matter most?”

It must be part of our jobs, as college teachers, to launch our students on the search for something larger than their immediate concerns, to confront them with the challenges that are presented by such intractable questions as the meaning of suffering, life, and death. "One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going," Goethe wrote elsewhere, and that’s a big hint. The elusiveness of knowing about life and death might be the point. Like falling in love, or even like remembering riding a bike, thinking about death might be the willingness to embrace what is unknown, what is unknowable. The cheerfulness displayed by that old skeptic Socrates in the face of death is apt for one wise enough to admit that he’s never known anything about the most important matters.

I don't think so.  Not because it is not our jobs.  In fact, I am convinced that it is.  One of the biggest reasons that I am offering a seminar course this term is precisely because I want students to be able to think above and beyond merely coursework and their immediate concerns.  However, we will be fooling ourselves if we think that students will truly latch on to understanding the importance of examining one's life.  As much as the larger population does not care, students too do not care.

There in lies the tragedy.  We all know we will all die.  But, we do not want to spend a good chunk of our time and energy into understanding our own existence.  Our "education" is about anything but this fundamental existential question.

Yes, in the face of life and death, all that knowledge amounts to nothing. Of course it does. The meaning of life and death is not something we will ever know. They are rather places we are willing or unwilling to go. To feel them, moment by moment, to the end, authentically, thoughtfully, passionately — that is an answer in itself.

Yes.

Where have all the young men gone?

I went to listen to the president give his annual state-of-the-college address.  He, like most educators these days, talked about how student enrollment growth is critical for the fiscal future of the university.  He used phrases that one would hear from a factory owner: production, products, pipeline, and--of course--how more students mean more money.  There was no detailed presentation, however, on how well the products (graduates) are selling!

Despite repeating the flat--or even a negative growth--enrollment scenario, the president talked in plenty about the new building construction that has been completed, and another that will soon begin.  How is it that people with PhDs do not see the contradiction in massively increasing capacity even when knowing well that the demand won't be there?  Was there a KoolAid drink that I missed sipping?

Was I also the only one who thought it was yet another profound evidence when the president said that female students accounted for 65 percent of the incoming freshman class?  From 55-45, to 60-40, we have now reached 65-35.  Amazing.  Simply astounding.  What is this evidence for?  It adds more to the 'save the males" that I have been talking and writing about for almost two decades now.

Teenage boys and young men are simply not understanding that the world has changed rapidly in the past two decades.

For low-skilled men in their 20s, employment rates have fallen by about 10 percentage points over the last 15 years—from 82 percent in 2000 to only 72 percent in 2015. This decline is staggering. You might think it’s matched by a rise in school attendance for this age group. That is not the case.
The following may be the most shocking number I give you today: in 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men aged 21–30 had not worked at all during the prior 12 months. Think about that for a second.

Yes, think about all that data. Take more than a second.  Take ten minutes.  In fact, you should ponder those data for a long, long time.  One in five young men between the ages of 21 and 30 had not worked (for wages) over the 12 months.  One in five!

If you are a thinker--and you are; after all, you are here reading this--your immediate question is: "If they are not working, where do these young, low-skilled men live?"

You have an answer, right?  And you are correct about that:

In 2014, 70 percent of lower-skilled men in their 20s without a job lived with a parent or close relative.

Are you now beginning to have a little bit of an anxiety? Perhaps a tinge of panic?  If so, hold on to something, and get a brown-bag if you are beginning to hyperventilate.

If they are not working, how do these young men eat? We—the parents and relatives—feed them. When they are in our basements, they come up for food from time to time and raid our refrigerators. I have no information on whether or not they are showering.
Are these young, nonworking, lower-skilled men who are living in their parents’ basements married? You may be surprised to hear this: they are not. The age of marriage is increasing for this group. In summary, these younger, lower-skilled men are now less likely to work, less likely to marry, and more likely to live with parents or close relatives.

There is an interesting twist to all this.  You ready for that?

If we go to surveys that track subjective well-being—surveys that ask people to assess their overall level of happiness—lower-skilled young men in 2014 reported being much happier on average than did lower-skilled men in the early 2000s. This increase in happiness is despite their employment rate falling by 10 percentage points and the increased propensity to be living in their parents’ basement.

Those young men are happy.  The parents and close relatives hosting these young men might not be happy, but that is another story!

They are happy now. Yes. But, how about life after 30?

There is some evidence that these young, lower-skilled men who are happy in their 20s become much less happy in their 30s and 40s. They haven’t accumulated on-the-job skills because they spent their 20s idle. Many eventually get married and have kids. When this happens, living in their parents’ basements is no longer a viable option. Playing video games does not put food on their tables. It’s a bad combination: low labor demand plus the accumulated effects of low labor supply makes economic conditions for these aging workers pretty bleak.
These labor-market outcomes affect many facets of society. They affect the take-up rates of government transfer programs. They may explain voting patterns for certain candidates in recent periods. There is rising evidence that lower-skilled workers in their 30s and 40s are increasing their drug use. We have also seen increased suicide rates for lower-skilled workers in middle age. The effects of changing technology on the labor markets of lower-skilled workers will likely have repercussions within the US economy for years to come.

When I yell about the urgency to re-write the social contract, to find alternative outlets for testosterone, to figure out ways in which we can help people be productive if they don't want to, or are not suited for, college, well, all those are not random independent issues.  Nope.  These are all inter-related issues that require a great deal of our time and energy.  Our time and energy as in all of us.  And for that, in a democracy, we need leaders who understand these nuances, help shape the conversations, and work out strategies for collective action.  Ain't gonna happen in the democracy that we have and the one that we will wake up to on November 9th :(

Oh, btw, if you thought all the quotes were excerpted from some left-wing nutcase's rants, ahem, it is from as academically rigorous right-wing economics as you can possibly get--Erik Hurst is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.  So, when a U. of Chicago economics/business professor says all those, well, you ought to be scared shitless by now.

What is higher education for?

I have blogged in plenty about how when I was a high school student, an overwhelming majority of students aimed for engineering or medicine.  Even though I never really had any dreams of engineering, I too went that route because I did not know any better as a seventeen year old.

People in India then, and in many developing countries even now, have this obsession with engineering and medicine for very good reasons--they seem to provide a higher probability of jobs and income compared to other routes.  And,  perhaps even a path out of the country should one choose to leave.

As one who has always been interested in understanding the humanity, I schemed and planned to make my exit from engineering and from the country too.  But, the young and idealistic commie in me could have been easily misled into less constructive paths; thankfully, I have never believed in violence.  

Soon after the events of 9/11, and with incidents thereafter, it was interesting to see that many of the agents of destruction had been well educated and, yes, with a technology background.  That set of issues is the context for this essay, which begins with:

In May 2010, Faisal Shahzad hoped to kill dozens of pedestrians when he parked his Nissan Pathfinder near Times Square, loaded with improvised bombs. Four months earlier, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight carrying 289 passengers by igniting explosives sewn into his underwear. Last year, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez opened fire on two military facilities in Tennessee, killing five soldiers.
Like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Azahari Husin, and Mohamed Atta, these men sought to commit acts of terror in the name of Islam.
But all six also shared something else. They had studied engineering.
Researchers have long noticed that an oddly large number of jihadists have engineering backgrounds. 

To which we need to also add Osama bin Laden, who graduated with a degree in civil engineering.  (His fellow brain, Zawahiri, was a medical graduate--a surgeon.)  It does not mean that engineering breeds terrorists.  It is simply a reflection of the fact that many of the thinking young in developing countries study engineering.    

My interest in this post is not to explore terrorism, but about one of the threads in that essay:

Donna M. Riley, a professor in the department of engineering education at Virginia Tech, thinks that traditional programs not only attract certain kinds of minds but also reinforce positivist patterns of thinking. General-education courses are intended to broaden students’ perspectives, but those requirements are increasingly being narrowed. And she worries that the less exposure that nascent engineers have to the humanities and social sciences, the less they will be able to appreciate other people’s perspectives. As it is, she says, "engineers spend almost all their time with the same set of epistemological rules."
Gambetta and Hertog describe how traditional engineering programs might inadvertently spur the kind of loss of significance that Kruglanski describes. "Engineering curricula anywhere are a giant showcase of Western technological achievements," they write. In developing countries, such triumphalism carries an edge of humiliation: "They throw the economic backwardness of local societies into sharp relief."

The engineering program that I did was no different from programs at other colleges back then (which is the case even now)--we had no contextualization of engineering against the background of the humanities and the social sciences.  There was not even one course that made us think about what we could contribute to society through engineering.  It was simply engineering for the sake of engineering, which then threw "the economic backwardness of local societies into sharp relief."  To most engineering students this backwardness becomes an incentive for their own material progress.  But, for me, this contrast was unbearable.  I had to understand the reasons for the relative backwardness.  I needed to understand the world.

Contemporary engineering education in the United States is also increasingly about engineering for the sake of engineering, which has serious social implications of a different kind:

Engineering curricula in the United States may unintentionally close minds, too, according to a 2014 study by Erin A. Cech, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University. Cech, who earned undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and sociology, analyzed survey responses by 326 students in four engineering programs. Between their freshman year and graduation, their self-reported answers showed drops in measures of public-mindedness, including a commitment to professional and ethical responsibilities and a social consciousness.
The discipline’s culture and curricula emphasize "an ideology of depoliticization," she argues, which treats nontechnical factors as irrelevant to the work of "real" engineering. The notion of meritocracy also runs through the discipline, she writes, but this ideal tends to accept existing social structures and relationships as inherently fair. "Engineering education," Cech writes, "fosters a culture of disengagement that defines public welfare concerns as tangential to what it means to practice engineering."

Meritocracy run amok is the story of contemporary Silicon Valley.  Public welfare?  Social consciousness?

If only higher education could help us think about issues that are much bigger, and more important, than our selves!

Taxing tampons

An awesome feature of this country, which has been home for this argumentative Indian for nearly thirty years, is this--it is one arguing society.  The arguments challenge the status quo, some more revolutionary than others.

Consider this: most states have sales taxes.  But, almost all the states exempt some goods from sales tax.  While the list of exemptions vary across the states, the general idea is that some fundamental necessities will not be taxed.  No tax on bananas, for instance.

Which is when the debate begins. When does a good become a "necessity"?  

It is not easy answering that question, dear reader.  Which means we set ourselves up for a great deal of argument.  It is a fascinating country!

How about female hygiene products?  You know, sanitary napkins, tampons, ... are they necessities or luxuries?

If you are or know women, you know that menstruation is for most not an optional thing. Yet in the vast majority of states in the US, tampons and pads are subject to sales tax.

"Tampons (and similar products) are tax-exempt in only a handful of states"

Source

So, what might be a problem with freeing tampons from sales tax?

[The average] American spends less than half of his or her income on items subject to sales tax. In California, the sales tax is already narrower than the national average, applying to just 27 percent of state residents’ incomes.
Sales tax bases have shrunk over time partly because states have created new exemptions, partly because untaxed online sales have expanded, but most of all because the economy increasingly consists of services.

And when the economy does not do well?

Sales taxes that exclude necessities and services tend to end up relying heavily on restaurant meals and durables like electronics and furniture, which are categories of spending that consumers cut back on when the economy weakens. This makes sales tax receipts more volatile, worsening the budget crises that arise in recessions.

That's a tad convoluted for most people; in plain-speak, please:

That is, one advantage of keeping the sales tax on tampons is that people will buy them whether the economy is good or bad

What a horrible way to address menstruation!

At least in the US women have access to such hygiene products and at low prices.  In many developing countries, girls attending schools becomes a major problem, and providing them with these products does wonders not only for girls' education but for their self-esteem too.

To me, well, there is no argument here: the sales of tampons and sanitary napkins should not be taxed.  But then who listens to me anyway!

All languages are created equal. Some are more equal than others?

I grew up in a Tamil household, in a predominantly Tamil speaking state.  In addition to Tamil being the "mother tongue," as they say in the old country, for the first few years I formally learnt the Tamil language in school.  To use the new country's lingo, Tamil was my second language at school because, like here, English was the language of instruction.  And then from the middle school on, Sanskrit was the second language and Hindi was the third language.

All those worked out well for me.  Knowing Tamil, I read quite a few novels and short stories in the language.  Many of those novels were often in an historic context, which then made me long for the good old days of the glorious Tamil past of the Sangam literature.  Sanskrit gave me a taste of the rich history and literature that was also tied to the religion in which I grew up.

Much later in life, as an adult living in the United States, I attempted to learn Spanish.  It was an epic fail, as much as my attempt to learn German did not work out back in India.

Language is not merely about the language.  It is a portal into a culture that is different from the one in which we breathe a completely different language.  Through the language we get to know a people's history, their values, their ways of thinking about all things trivial and profound.  Thus, even a word like maidan then shows how wonderfully interconnected we are.  We can even chuckle at how an ambassador's name could make a difference enough for a country to reject him.

We get an idea of those differences--and similarities too--between people when we read translated works of literature.  All those Russian novels that I have read were not in the Russian language, of course, but were in English and I can only imagine how much more enriching it would be if I could have read them in the original.

If we truly want to understand our fellow humans, which is a critical piece of understanding the human condition and our own existence, then the more languages we know the better off we will be. Thus, if we want to understand China or the Middle East, then I would think that we would be encouraging more of our students to learn Chinese (even if it means excluding Cantonese!) and Arabic.

Let us suppose you are in agreement with me until now.  (And I hope you are; if not, we are in deep trouble!)  Then, you will be shocked at this news from last spring:

At least four states -- including Washington, home of Microsoft Corp. -- have either passed or considered measures that would delight high school students who have trouble rolling their r's. Rather than taking Spanish to satisfy their foreign language requirement, they could take a computer language.
Chris Reykdal, a Washington state legislator, said many  students are more passionate about learning code than conjugating verbs.

Pause. Think about it.  Is learning a computer language the same as learning a language that humans use to communicate in a different part of the world?  Are you happy with this development?  I hope you are not; else, we are in deep trouble!

You need not have kept up with my rants about the deterioration in education in order to figure out what the rationale is, right?

Proponents say such an approach will help students get jobs and businesses compete internationally.

Yep, who cares about understanding fellow humans.  Who cares whether or not children develop an understanding of how to deal with differences.  As long as they can learn how to communicate with machines and earn money in the process!

A couple of days ago, a friend from the old school days had posted on his Facebook wall this news item about a survey in the island that is increasingly irrelevant in the world:

Six out of ten parents said they want their primary school age children to learn the coding language over French. And 75% of primary school children said they would rather learn how to programme a robot than learn a modern foreign language.

It is not merely an American madness but a global mania!

That news item there included the following image:

What is so special about this image?  Perhaps the editors did not realize the irony in using such an image to promote teaching a computer language.  The way the numbers keep scrolling down the screen is the motif in The Matrix --it was not a movie that favored a future world of smart computers with humans as the slaves ;)

Source

I suppose if  all we want is for children to interact with machines and not with people, and if we want to design machines that can soon learn to think for themselves, then we should certainly get rid of teaching human languages in schools.  Perhaps soon there will even be a campaign to make Emoji a language!  It is one mad, mad, mad world out there :(

I change my mind. A lot.

I watch out for students have to say not only because it is my job, but also because sometimes students don't appreciate the profoundness in some of the thoughts they express.  Thus, when I bring their own words to their attention, they all the more realize the value-added over the term.

A couple of days ago, a student wrote:

After reading the material what I thought before has changed now. I thought any development in low-income countries is better then [sic] no development. But after watching the video “ The poverty environment;” my thoughts have changed.

I wanted to make sure students paused to take in that remark about changing one's mind.  I wrote:

It reminds of the classic statement by John Maynard Keynes, who said "When the facts change, I change my mind"  Education often has that effect on us--a well-reasoned argument with supporting evidence can make us change our opinions, or at least seriously question what we previously might have considered as the truth.

"An eternal skeptic" is how I recently described myself to the friend.  To me, there is simply no other way.  However, rarely do we view education, and life itself, as challenges to our gut instincts. and even our well-reasoned opinions.  To quote the X-Files, the truth is out there and we have to forever keep searching for it.

In an essay at Slate where the author is promoting his book on Max Planck, I came across this changing one's mind approach:

I just spent three-plus years writing a biography of the German physicist Max Planck, and I was most struck by one of his qualities. Yes, he was incredibly rigorous, mathematically adept, and intellectually fearless. But what stands out is that this rigid Prussian gentleman could and regularly did change his mind.

It is all the more impressive that an intellectual of that caliber did not try to defend his views and theories while keeping the new ones away but always welcomed the challenges and then even changed his mind.  How wonderful!

As the author notes,

We live in an age—perhaps the age—of confirmation bias. And given a turbulent sea of information, who can blame us for latching onto the familiar while looking away from anything jarring or mismatched? We yearn for the comforts of our main tribe, be that tribe political, religious, scientific, or economic. If that’s a failing, it is probably a hominid design flaw, far beyond evolutionary recall at this point.

For us regular folks, it is all the more a temptation to stay comfortable with what we know and whatever feels correct.  We click "like" on the memes that our Facebook friends post, watch the programs that reinforce the views that we hold dear.  What's the point of education if that's all we do in life?

Back to the author and the final point he makes in that essay:

Now I try to ask myself as often as possible if I am following his example. Am I nodding my head at a friend’s rant because it’s comfortable? Am I tucking it away (or reposting it) because I just trust her as a member of my tribe and because it saves me the work of reading up on that topic? Can I hear arguments and digest information that challenge my comforts and make me uneasy? Whether it’s a political issue, a favorite scientific assumption, or my preferred way to make coffee, is it not true that a deeper and wider sea of information can only make me a better member of the species? Changing one’s mind is a beautiful thing. It requires the hardest work between the increasingly common and more comfortable extremes of outrage and applause.

Exactly.  It is a lot of hard work to negotiate that vast grey area in between the "comfortable extremes of outrage and applause."  But, an unexamined life is simply not worth living, as comforting to the mind as it might be!

But, what about those who refuse to accept the new truth?

Surprisingly, Planck never requested or expected flexibility from his peers. He famously stated what’s become known as “Planck’s principle”: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, new ideas do not advance by evidence, argument, and persuasion, but rather by older thinkers with older ideas passing away.

How fascinating!

Am now all the more convinced about the eternal skeptic attitude.  And I am not changing my mind about that one ;)

Into each life some rain must fall

I have long believed that education helps me (us) to make sense of the world, the universe, like how we played connect the dots as kids.  We created shapes out of those dots.  Education--not the one that is measured by the diploma but one that is a never ending activity in life--helps us connect the dots that we observe around us.

As we connect the dots, we make order out of the chaos out there.  After all, the cosmos is.  It is up to each and every one of us to make sense of it.  Of course, we can always be lazy and "outsource" connecting the dots to religious leaders, to thinkers, and even to charlatans and believe what they describe as the real thing.  But, a long time ago, I chose to make those connections myself.  The way you connect the dots might be different from mine, as apparently will be the case even on issues like this one, which makes life that much more interesting too.

In such an exploration, aha moments abound.  We think the aha moments always have to be on important breakthroughs, like Archimedes running naked out of the bath after figuring out why and how things float or sink.  But, aha moments happen all the time--if we are consciously connecting the dots, that is.

My aha moment today is why I have "Into each life some rain must fall" in the title of this post.

This is the second post with that exact title; when I blogged about it earlier, a few months ago, I had simply borrowed that from the Ella Fitzgerald classic.  Today, I found out there is more about that line.

But, that aha breakthrough didn't happen because I was reading about the singer or the song.  No, sir. No, ma'am.  There I was reading an essay on students in higher education who are the first from their families to ever go on to college. While discussing the situations those students face, the author, who teaches at the University of Michigan, writes:

They remind me of the Longfellow poem "The Rainy Day," which includes this line made famous by the Ink Spots in the 1940s: "Into each life some rain must fall."

Aha!  "Into each life some rain must fall" was a line in a Longfellow poem?

Google then helped me connect the dots, instead of making me stupid, and I tracked down the poem by H.W. Longfellow:

The Rainy Day
The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

The cosmos makes that much more sense now.

Ditch the testing mania if we really want students to learn

It is time for midterms.

No, not that one in which the two parties will once again come together in order to choke the lives out of us regular people.

I am referring to midterm exams in the academic quarter system in which I work.  The students in my classes know all too well that I hate "tests."  Instead, what I provide them are structured opportunities for them to demonstrate their understanding of the materials.  This is no semantics here.  After all, the whole point of education is for students to learn and show us how much and how well they have learnt?

But, we focus on testing.  And that too via standardized tests.  Why?  Because that is easy.  Way easier than to systematically find out what every individual student has understood, and why they have not understood something.

Any half-brained politician--ok, there are very few fully-brained ones!--loves talking about more testing as if that is the panacea.  And then the idiotic demagogues look across the seas at a Japan or a China or a Russia and then jingoistically beat their chests and yell out that more testing is what we need in order to beat the crap out of the countries that threaten our number one status in the world.

Seriously, is that what we really want from education?

As Diane Ravitch puts it in this NYRB essay:

There was no educational problem, it seemed, that could not be cured by more testing.

Yep. Every few years, the Geriatrics Only Party and the Democrooks take turns arguing in favor of more testing.  First it was the patriotic alarm over the Soviets. Then the economic alarm against the Japanese.  And now the economic and patriotic alarms that the Chinese are taking over the world.

There is only one word that is appropriate to describe these: chickenshit!

Back to Ravitch:

It is worth noting that American students have never received high scores on international tests. On the first such test, a test of mathematics in 1964, senior year students in the US scored last of twelve nations, and eighth-grade students scored next to last. But in the following fifty years, the US outperformed the other eleven nations by every measure, whether economic productivity, military might, technological innovation, or democratic institutions. This raises the question of whether the scores of fifteen-year-old students on international tests predict anything of importance or whether they reflect that our students lack motivation to do their best when taking a test that doesn’t count toward their grade or graduation.

The typical fifteen year old is immensely smarter than the chickenshit demagogues!

Tell us more, Ravitch:

Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, members of Congress, and the nation’s governors and legislators need to read: Yong Zhao’s Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. Zhao, born and educated in China, now holds a presidential chair and a professorship at the University of Oregon. He tells us that China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But, he says, it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism. The imposition of standardized tests by central authorities, he argues, is a victory for authoritarianism.

Yes, indeed.  A victory for authoritarianism.

So, how were things in China?  Yes, "were":

A system called keju lasted for thirteen hundred years, until 1905, when it was abolished by the emperor of the Qing dynasty. This system maintained Chinese civilization by requiring knowledge of the Confucian classics, based on memorization and writing about current affairs. There were local, provincial, and national examinations, each conferring privileges on the lucky or brilliant few who passed. Exam scores determined one’s rank in society. The keju was a means of social mobility, but for the ruling elite, it produced the most capable individuals for governing the country.

And what did it achieve for the culture that was ever so dominant?

keju diverted scholars, geniuses, and thinkers away from the study or exploration of modern science. The examination system, Zhao holds, was designed to reward obedience, conformity, compliance, respect for order, and homogeneous thinking; for this reason, it purposefully supported Confucian orthodoxy and imperial order. It was an efficient means of authoritarian social control. Everyone wanted to succeed on the highly competitive exams, but few did. Success on the keju enforced orthodoxy, not innovation or dissent. As Zhao writes, emperors came and went, but China had “no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution.”

And, for the most part, this system continues in China, South Korea, Japan, India, ... On top of that, the focus on testing means that students, teachers, parents, and everybody else tries to then figure out ways in which they can game the system. Cheating and fraud follows.

Is it any surprise then to read something like this?

The announcement by administrators of the SAT college entrance test that scores are being withheld for students from China and South Korea who took the exam earlier this month has infuriated many and raised anxiety about what for a number of them is a high-stakes college application process.
The Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the test worldwide, said Wednesday that it was withholding the scores of those who took the test on Oct. 11, at least temporarily, because of suspicions of cheating “based on specific, reliable information.” The company referred in a statement to “organizations that seek to illegally obtain test materials for their own profit, to the ultimate detriment of all students.

Ahem, isn't SAT one heck of a standardized test?  ;)

In 2007, administrators voided 900 SAT scores from South Korea. Last year, administrators canceled an exam in South Korea scheduled for May 2013 after accusations of attempts at widespread cheating were reported in the domestic news media. That forced some of the 1,500 South Korean students who had signed up for the exam to scramble to apply to take the exam elsewhere.
In November 2013, South Korean prosecutors said they had indicted eight “SAT brokers” who had hired students to memorize questions of exams taken abroad or posed as test-takers themselves, using secret cameras to take pictures of questions. Prosecutors also indicted 22 managers and teachers at test preparation companies in South Korea for buying the illegally acquired SAT data.
In both South Korea and China, academic cheating has been a long-running problem. Professors, officials and celebrities have been exposed for having plagiarized dissertations or even faked degrees.

I am worried that the Baptists and the Bootleggers will end up with a lot more of the standardized tests.  I suppose I should simply give up, shrug my shoulders, collect my paycheck, and participate in the enterprise called education whose mission is to screw the students.

Americans lack "civic scientific literacy." Take that from us Indian-Americans!

It is not an every day happening when the New York Review of Books features a piece by an author with an Indian name.
And that too a South Indian name.
And, a Tamil name at that.

So, even before I got to reading that piece, I clicked on the author byline, which was darn impressive:

Priyamvada Natarajan is a Professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale. She is the author of a forthcoming book on the acceptance of radical scientific ideas.
 (October 2014)

Naturally, to this curious guy, the next step was to do a Google search, which pulled up her Wikipedia page.  She has to be somebody, right, to have Wiki page?  I mean, do you have a Wiki page? ;)

There it was on Wikipedia:

Priya Natarajan was born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in India to academic parents. She is one of three children. Natarajan grew up in Delhi, India and studied at Delhi Public School, R. K. Puram. 

From Coimbatore to Yale! A female scientist.  Awesome!  You read her bio at the Yale page and, if you are like me, you will wonder how people like her and Atul Gawande do all those things they do when I think it is a big achievement when I boil eggs!

Her photo at the Wiki page made me do a double-take, because she looks so much like the comedian/actress Mindy Kaling:

This is not Mindy Kaling ;)

More material to support my "the Indians are coming! the Indians are coming!!!" joke ;)

Anyway, back to the original point of departure: the NYRB piece itself.  What is it about?  On science, scientific method, and why the public, especially Americans, don't seem to understand what science is and what scientists do.  Natarajan writes that the public seems to have a problem with the "provisionality" that accompanies scientific findings.

the general public has trouble understanding the provisionality of science. Provisionality refers to the state of knowledge at a given time. 

Natarajan defines provisionality as:

a slow and gradual honing and growing sophistication of our understanding, driven by accumulating data enabled by the invention of ever-newer instruments.

I suppose it can be difficult to grasp the idea that what is held as "scientific" today could be thrown out a few years from now if it is found to be incorrect or an incomplete explanation.  So, what can be done?  Anything in the education process itself?

The biologist Jon D. Miller of the University of Michigan has been advocating a new standard of “civic scientific literacy,” by which he means a basic level of scientific understanding that would be necessary to make sense of public policy issues involving science or technology. He proposes the teaching of scientific concepts rather than the retention of information. Since the old model is ill-suited to the current pace of scientific and technological progress, the public needs to learn how to reason in the evidence-based manner that is central to science.

Did you catch that? "the teaching of scientific concepts rather than the retention of information."

Isn't that what I have been harping on all the time?  I repeatedly tell students, blog here, that teaching is not about factoids, and that tests and exams should not be focused on the ability of students to recall information from memory within that defined time.  Instead, education ought to be about concepts and how to think with them.  Feels great to find validation for my approach in an essay by a fellow Tamil-Indian-American!