Education

The Passwords and the Barbarians

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I’ve previously cited a passage from the novel of ideas Citadelle (aka Wisdom of the Sands) by the French writer-aviator Antoine de St Exupery.  Citadelle represents the musings of a fictional desert prince: on society, on government, and on humanity.  Here are some excerpts from the passage I want to discuss:

“Nevertheless,” I mused, “these men live not by things but by the meaning of things, and thus it is needful that they should transmit the passwords to each other, generation by generation.  That is why I see them, no sooner a child is born, making haste to inure him in the usage of their language; for truly it is the key to their treasure.  So as to be able to transport him into this harvest of golden wonders they have reaped, they spare no toil in opening up within him the ways of portage.  For hard to put into words, weighty yet subtle, are the harvests it behooves us to transmit from one generation to another.

“..But if the new generation lives in houses about which it knows nothing save their utility, what will it find to do in such a desert of a world?  For even as your children must first be taught the art of music, if they are to take pleasure in playing a stringed instrument; even so, if you would have them, when they come to man’s estate, capable of the emotions worthiest of man, you must teach them to discern, behind the diversity of things, the true lineaments of your house, your domain, your empire.

“Else that new generation will but pitch camp therein, like a horde of savages in a town they have captured. And what joy would such barbarians get of your treasures?  Lacking the key of your language, they would know not how to turn them to account….(the barbarian) throws down your walls and scatters your possessions to the winds.  This he does to revenge himself on the instrument which he knows not how to play, and presently he sets the village on fire–which at least rewards him with a little light!  But soon he loses interest, and yawns. For you must know what you are burning, if you are to find beauty in its light.  Thus with the candle you burn before your god. But to the barbarian the flames of your house will say nothing, for they are not a sacrificial fire.

“..This, too, is why I bid you bring up your children to be like you.  It is not the function of some petty officer to hand down to him their inheritance, for this is something not comprised in his manual of Regulations..You shall build your children in your image, lest in late days they come to drag their lives out joyously in a land which will seem to them but an empty camping place, and whose treasures they will allow to rot away uncared-for, because they have not been given its keys.”

Doesn’t this passage go a long way toward explaining what has been going on at places like Columbia University?  We see a confluence of two categories of barbarians:  American natives who never learned the passwords, having either never heard of them or been told to actively despise them…and foreign students / immigrants who come from cultures with entirely different passwords and, unlike previous generations of immigrants, have no interest in learning the American ones.

I’m also remembering something Hilaire Belloc wrote:

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.

The Barbarian wonders what strange meaning may lurk in that ancient and solemn truth, “Sine Auctoritate nulla vita.” In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid.

We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

My previous post referencing St-Exupery’s Citadelle are Transmitting the Passwords–or Not,  When Sleep the Sentinels, and Of Springs and Cables.

Your thoughts?

Thinking, Memorizing, and AI

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A remark by @autumnpard on Memorization reminded me of an analogy I came up with some time back: A song by Jakob Dylan includes the following lines: Cupid, don’t draw back your bow Sam Cooke didn’t know what I know …note that in order to understand these two simple lines, you’d have to know several things:

1) You need to know that, in mythology, Cupid symbolizes love 

2) And that Cupid’s chosen instrument is the bow and arrow

3) Also that there was a singer/songwriter named Sam Cooke

4) And that he had a song called “Cupid, draw back your bow.”

“Progressive” educators insist that students should be taught “thinking skills” as opposed to memorization, and the advent of LLMs has further driven such thinking But consider: If it’s not possible to understand a couple of lines from a popular song without knowing by heart the references to which it alludes–without memorizing them–what chance is there for understanding medieval history, or modern physics, without having a ready grasp of the topics which these disciplines reference?

And also consider: what’s important is not just what you need to know to appreciate the song. It’s what Dylan needed to know to create it in the first place. At least in theory someone who heard the song and didn’t understand the allusions could have spent 5 minutes googling and figured them out, although this approach wouldn’t be exactly conducive to aesthetic appreciation. But had Dylan not already had the reference points–Cupid, the bow and arrow, the Sam Cooke song–in his head, there’s no way he would have been able to create his own lines. The idea that he could have just “looked them up,” which educators often suggest is the way to deal with factual knowledge, would be ludicrous in this context. And it would also be ludicrous in the context of creating new ideas about history or physics.

 To use a computer analogy, the things you know aren’t just data–they’re part of the program.  I’ve seen no evidence that there exists a known body of “thinking skills” so powerful that they bypass the need for detailed, substantive knowledge within specific disciplines. And if such meta-level thinking skills were to be developed, I suspect that the last place to find them would be in university Education departments.

There are skills which facilitate thinking across a wide range of disciplines: such things as formal logic, probability & statistics, and an understanding of the scientific method–and, most importantly, excellent reading skills. But things like these certainly don’t seem to be what the educators are referring to when they talk about “thinking skills.” What many of them seem to have in mind is more of a kind of verbal mush that leaves the student with nothing to build on.

There’s no substitute for actual knowledge. The flip response “he can always look it up” is irresponsible and ignores the way that human intellectual activity actually works.

None of which is to say that traditional teaching practices were all good. There was probably too much emphasis on rote memorization devoid of context–in history, dates soon to be forgotten, in physics, formulae without proper understanding of their meaning and applicability. (Dylan needed to know about Sam Cooke’s song; he didn’t need to know the precise date on which it was written or first sung.) But the cure is to provide the context, not to throw out facts and knowledge altogether–which is what all too many educators seem eager to do.

There really does seem to be a deep-seated hostility toward knowledge itself among many who define themselves as “educators.”  And a lot of students today are all too eager to use LLMs to do all of the work…or as much of it as they can get away with…to guard themselves against either learning anything at all or developing the ability to do focused and concentrated work.

See my earlier Thinking and Memorizing post, also Classics and the Public Sphere.

Your thoughts?

“Service Industries”

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Phil Gramm and Don Boudreaux, in today’s WSJ:

Yet workers aren’t eager to do that (work in manufacturing plants), and for the past 60 years Americans have educated their children to enable them to work in the services industries where wages are higher and opportunities greater.

I wonder what Gramm and Boudreaux visualize when they use the term “service industries.”  It is a very, very broad category, ranging from Uber Eats delivery drivers to shelf stockers at Home Depot to plumbers and handymen to trash collectors to warehouse workers at Amazon to local CPAs and high-level management consultants. Also rock bands, software development companies, and used-car salesmen.

True also of jobs in manufacturing, ranging from assembly worker to skilled machinist or toolmaker to shelf-stocker to dispatcher/expeditor to industrial engineer to PLC programmer to plant manager and VP of manufacturing.

Note that both the factory and the service business will employ janitors doing very similar work, and he will be categorized as a manufacturing or service employee accordingly…unless the job of ‘janitor’ is outsource to another firm, in which case he will fall under ‘services’.

Note also that the work of a distribution warehouse worker and the work of a stocker/picker in a factory will likely be very similar, despite the fact that the latter is considered ‘manufacturing’ and the former is considered ‘services.’  It would appear that Gramm and Boudreaux would regard the job of the warehouse worker as somehow higher-value and more in tune with technological progress.

Also, that part about Americans having educated their children to enable them to work in the services industries where wages are higher and opportunities greater…are they really unaware with the problems with so much American education over past decades, resulting in a lot of people who having limited written communication and even more limited basic math abilities? A lot of people are in dead-end service jobs specifically because of their lack of these skills, and indeed in many cases can function in those jobs at all only because of the computer-based deskilling that has been applied to the work.

Your thoughts?

Worthwhile Reading

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Attacks on Churchill…from the Right.  This sort of thing feeds the same “aren’t we just awful” mindset that we see so much of from the Left.

Student expectations for careers versus actual outcomes.

Trump, Peggy Noonan, and the Old Guard.

How the Past envisaged our Present.

Martin Gurri on the importance of free speech: The Great American Debate Begins Again. Indeed, a lot of people seem to reject the whole idea of debate and of adversary proceedings in courts: they want an Authority to tell them what is true.

Related: Obama’s messaging machine.

Do graphic design and aesthetics affect the credibility of political communications?

Propellers versus paddle wheels: a case study in the introduction of a disruptive technology.

Jet engine turbine blades and single-crystal casting. Interesting that this sort of thing is rarely referred to as ‘tech’ by the media.

What are the health effects of replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs?

Formalism and Credentialism: Reversing the Trend?

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The Trump victory represents in significant part a popular reaction against the excesses of credentialism.  I’m remembering a 2018 post at the Federalist:  Our Culture War Is Between People Who Get Results And Empty Suits With Pristine Credentials….Donald Trump declines the authority of the cultural sectors that most assertively claim it. That’s  the real conflict going on.

The post reminded me of an interchange that took place between Picasso and Matisse as the German Army advanced through France in 1940.  Matisse was shocked to learn that the enemy had already reached Reims.  “But what about our generals?” asked Matisse. “What are they doing?”

Picasso’s response: “Well, there you have it, my friend. It’s the Ecole des Beaux-Arts”…ie, formalists who had learned one set of rules and were not interested in considering deviations from same.

It was an astute remark, and it fits very well with the observations of Andre Beaufre, who before the invasion had been a young captain on the French General Staff. Although he had initially been thrilled to be placed among this elevated circle…

I saw very quickly that our seniors were primarily concerned with forms of drafting. Every memorandum had to be perfect, written in a concise, impersonal style, and conforming to a logical and faultless plan but so abstract that it had to be read several times before one could find out what it was about… “I have the honour to inform you that I have decided…I envisage…I attach some importance to the fact that…” Actually no one decided more than the barest minimum, and what indeed was decided was pretty trivial.

The consequences of that approach became clear in May 1940.

In addition to the formalism that Picasso hypothesized (and Beaufre observed) on the French General Staff, the civilian side of the French government was highly credential-oriented.  From the linked article:

In the first days of July, 1940, the American diplomat Robert Murphy took up his duties as the  charge d’affaires at the new U.S. embassy in Vichy, France. Coming from his recent post in Paris, he was as impressed as he expected to be by the quality of the Vichy mandarinate, a highly credentialed class of sophisticated officials who were “products of the most rigorous education and curricula in any public administration in the world.”

As the historian Robert Paxton would write, French officials were “the elite of the elite, selected through a daunting series of relentless examinations for which one prepared at expensive private schools.” In July 1940, the elite of the elite governed the remains of their broken nation, a few days after Adolf Hitler toured Paris as its conqueror.  Credentials were the key to holding public office, but not the key to success at the country’s business.

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