Liberty benefits from asking practical questions. When someone wants to save the world, or at least a piece of it, a free man or woman ought to ask just how that goal is going to be achieved. That is often as important as the goal itself. Everywhere I look, I see colored ribbons symbolizing something that should be eliminated from modern life. What never gets discussed is the amount of acceptable bad behavior or acceptable cost or acceptable loss, and the balance of the level of enforcement or investment required to eliminate a behavior, disease or what-have-you, versus the amount of fungible resources or freedom lost per incremental advance for the social cause. The people in the cause often say things such as “one life lost is one too many”. Really? Every activity has a risk / benefit calculation. We know that more people die in highway accidents at higher speeds than at lower ones, but the speed limit is 65 in most states (still too low in my opinion). If we were really serious about eliminating highway deaths, we’d drop the speed limit to 20 mph and make all our cars out of PVC and Styrofoam. But the level of highway death at 65 mph is acceptable to pretty much the majority of people*.
Education
I’ve Got Your Methane Right Here, Pal
A couple of observations on Global Warming brought on by a new-to-me blog Pseudo Polymath. First, he cites a Taipei Times article that reminds me of a journal article that I have in my office. It seems that when Mickey Ds changed over from the styrofoam shells to paper shells for their greaseball hamburgers, they negelected to account for the production energy costs of paper (high) versus styrofoam (low). The net result of the change was either a wash, or a net loss for the environment, depending upon which end of the error bar you take your figures from. Yet the eco-weenies hailed this as a victory.
Educated Beyond our Intelligence
In my post about Perkin many moons ago, I alluded to the tremendous waste of resources that I feel is endemic to our educational system. Since then, a certain blog post from my favorite collection of bean counters and Marines has goaded me into putting my thoughts into a new rant. Not only do we hold precocious 15 year olds (such as Perkin) back in the primary system, we waste their personal and our societal resources on useless crap once those students hit college.
Fine Tuning the Rabbit Ears
We aren’t a research school & so the visiting speaker or two a semester are usually anticipated with some pleasure; we try to look up their work, read a book or two of theirs. The list has included Louis Menard & Dinesh D’Souza. When I heard this one was going to be about “education” I was surprised; the social studies group usually does the inviting and their general attitude is that most education departments would be improved by a little carpet bombing.
So, I dutifully ordered Paul A. Zoch’s Doomed to Fail: The Built-In Defects of American Education & started reading. At first it seemed like coffee room grousing: he describes an interview with a student who suggested helpfully that if Zoch would “sing and dance, we’d learn this stuff” (xviii). Given the quality of students that take Latin at a public high school, I wondered if he was ironic – but, then, the student was already failing the class.
Partial to the The Partial Critics
Last week, to wean myself of my television habit, I sat down to read a Howells biography, but glanced at the books piled beside my chair, waiting to be reshelved. Some I’ve ignored for decades, packing them in box after box in move after move. The one on top, by one of my old teachers, was published in 1965.
I’d never been much interested in theory; in those days, the study of literature was not yet dominated by meta-criticism. Then, I confess, literature seemed primarily a way to objectify and understand my own inner chaos. The level of abstraction required to think in terms of literary theories was just not the way I thought. But, that last spring at Nebraska, I enjoyed Lee Lemon’s critical theory seminar & the play of those conversations. Sometimes books wait for us; last week, I found myself lost in his. The Partial Critics