How Wikipedia Fosters Reason and Objectivity

Last Wednesday, April 1st, I was the guest of Jimmy Wales at a MacArthur Foundation monthly President's Luncheon. This foundation, which gives out $1 million "genius awards," often to unsuspecting recipients, had invited Jimmy to tell them about Wikipedia.

As a result of that luncheon speech, I believe Wikipedia is the largest project in the world to foster rationality and objectivity, indirectly teaching people everywhere how to think better.

My friendship with Jimmy goes back to the '90's when he lived here in Chicago and belonged to my discussion club, the New Intellectual Forum. Money he earned on the Chicago options and futures exchanges enabled him to start Wikipedia.

Before the luncheon, MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton commented that it was the most well-attended President's luncheon he'd ever held - just about every staff member of MacArthur wanted to hear what Jimmy had to say. And it's not hard to understand why since just about everyone with a computer uses Wikipedia. Founded a mere 8 years ago, it is now the largest encyclopedia in history. According to a Nature study, it has a very high rate of accuracy.

Jimmy explained how Wikipedia works as a world-wide collaborative project, which can be edited by anybody able to access the Internet. Wikipedia's enormous reach so far includes over 2.8 million content pages in 253 languages. It's administered by a small paid staff of 25 people, and a large group of self-organized volunteers. You can read more about it here.

The organization's goal is to bring the sum of all human knowledge to every person on the planet with Internet access.

The results of this worldwide collaboration are astonishing and fascinating. For example:

• Slum children in Delhi learn from it to pass their 11th grade exams.
  
• The Dutch, a relatively small language group, have a high number of pages. Jimmy commented that he thinks it's because the Dutch love to argue - and that's why they have to be so tolerant!
  
• Rather than reduce the need for travel, Jimmy has to go all over the world to understand Wikipedia's collaborators and their contexts. And they love meeting each other in person.
  

Wikipedia's writers are encouraged to be exact and factual. When opposing sides edit the pages of a contentious issue, the result tends to be an objective account of the subject, not wild opinion or flaming commentary.

That's because of the structure which Jimmy and his executive collaborators incorporated into the system. He said "There could have been a different outcome if I hadn't insisted on a certain structure of reasonable, fact-based, civil interchange instead of anything goes."

He'd seen plenty of "anything goes" in the early days of the Internet on Usenet groups. Flaming arguers tended to take over discussions, pushing the reasonable people out. For some years, he hosted the Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy, precisely to encourage civil interchange.

These experiences seem to have informed his judgment in developing Wikipedia. The result now is engagement of millions of people across the planet in rational and objective discourse. Through Wikipedia, Jimmy is spreading the habits of Enlightenment thinking to people and places which may never of heard of Aristotle's logic.

In addition, Wikipedia empowers the individual rather than authority, and encourages peaceful collaboration and trade (of information). The requirements of their engagement with Wikipedia is guiding millions to habits of mind and interaction which are the bedrock foundation of civil, free societies.

What a way to go Jimmy!

Hyper-Empirical Language and Thinking

Linguistics researcher Daniel Everett talks about the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people's hyper-empirical language. Their grammar would likely be cumbersome when trying to express something complex, but, surely, it would reduce any tendency to think in floating abstractions!

The fate of art under capitalism

 The hilarious cartoon in this post by Stephen Hicks is quite educational!

Shaky finances catch up with colleges

"In Shifting Era of Admissions, Colleges Struggle," writes the New York Times.

After decades of rising admissions made possible by the free flow of federal money, shaky U.S. financials finally catch up with colleges.

(Hat tip to Don Hauptman)

How education can foster creativity

We cannot change what nature gives students in terms of basic intelligence. However, we can use methods of education that nurture the abilities and habits of mind known to foster creativity and productivity such as:

- Objective reasoning skills, not just in science and math, but all domains of knowledge, including such areas as art, history, and literature.

- Connecting information and ideas from one domain of knowledge to another (the way highly creative people do) by:

• Studying works that are cross-domain, such as Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, a work of moral philosophy that founded the study of economics
• Raising awareness of cross-disciplinary connections by pointing out the relationships between material from different domains, for example, how the development of banking influenced the development of art during the Renaissance in Florence.

- Modeling careful observation of the facts and encouraging student's careful, first-hand observations 

- Modeling enthusiasm and curiosity in what is being studied and encouraging student's questions

- Modeling the search for the relationship of any idea to the facts on which it rests, for example in discussing climate change, ask students to think about questions such as "is climate change bad or good? On what facts and ideas are you determining that it is good or bad?" 

- Studying works infused with deep questions about meaning and purpose, which connects knowledge to living by:

• Always asking what any given fact or idea means to human life
• Asking of any knowledge: to whom is this information valuable and how will it be used?

- Presenting a broad array of information, ancient and modern, as Matthew Arnold put it, "the best that has been thought or said," in the works of the classics and extraordinary works of contemporary times. 

Through these works, students wrestle with timeless ideas, useful in any era or place. They engage their minds with those of the best thinkers in civilization, and with ideas that are extremely influential even today. The classics include works from philosophy to economics, mathematics to literature, history to science and are often cross-disciplinary within themselves. Simultaneously, the skill of their authors serves as examples of the highest in creative thinking.

Properly schooled to think deeply about these works, a person economically recognizes the patterns, trends, and influences of these ideas everywhere in our culture, from art to business, from job trends to medical discoveries. 

Studying the classics, students can come to an appreciation for the creative individuals who made our great civilization possible. Further, reflecting on concepts that we take for granted will raise students’ analytic thinking skills. 

One small example: Did you know that there was a time when people were confused about how something could be one thing now and another thing in the future? How could something be an acorn now and yet the very same thing is an oak tree later? They could not figure out how that worked. I’m sure you all take for granted the idea that something can actually be one thing yet potentially another—like a baby is potentially an adult human.

However, it took the genius of ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to resolve this problem with the identification of the concepts of “actual” and “potential.” Try to imagine our world without these ideas—it would be hard enough to think about the growth of a plant, how could we think about science and technology or civilizations? 

 

College reading ability and comprehension

"But people with average reading ability do not understand much of the text in the assigned readings. They take away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion they know something they do not."

The consequence of which I think we see every day.

From Charles Murray's latest book Real Education, a book filled, by turns, with excellent insights and questionable reasoning.

Innovation in Education

Socratic Practice master, Michael Strong, on innovation in education. (See his video link on this blog, for a wonderful discussion of Socratic Practice).

Characteristics of Creativity

Here, I posted creativity researcher Ken Robinson's views on traditional school and creativity, and here, I linked to a video about a remarkable artist who overcame bad schooling.

What kind of mind enables the creative? 

Integration of knowledge across broad ranges of subjects is a characteristic of creativity - and versatility.  Research consistently finds that highly creative people tend to have very broad, as well as deep, interests and knowledge.  They apply unconventional information and ideas to problems, integrating information in unusual ways across conventional subject areas.

Famed physicist Richard Feynman and his simple demonstration of the space shuttle Challenger's O-Ring disaster is a case in point. By dropping an O-ring into an ordinary glass of ice water, he simply and directly proved it could not stand up to low temperatures. His demonstration integrated an esoteric, bedeviling engineering problem with the mundane.

Feynman was famous for his wide-ranging interests, which included samba bands and experiments on ants. He put no limits on his curiosity about the world. 

His measured IQ was in the high range - 124 - but not what IQ test-makers consider genius (135+). Contrary to traditional thought, but consistent with research findings, most people recognized as geniuses through their work do not have IQ's in the 135+ range. No one knows how past geniuses such as DaVinci or Newton would have scored on the IQ test. Given the current findings on IQ creativity, we might be surprised! Research findings show that geniuses need an IQ of at least 116 or better, but after that, all bets are off. (see the research of Csikszentmihalyi on creativity).

Unfortunately, these tests - and most tests - cannot measure working creativity and intelligence. In other words, they don't adequately measure how intelligence is put into life's service by creatively solving problems.

The number of highly creative and successful business people who score average to low on SAT tests, for example, in indicative of the test's inadequacy in measuring working intelligence.

Besides IQ and natural interest across domains, other conditions seem to be equally important to the development of creativity, conditions which we can create in educational settings, thereby enabling education to make a significant difference.

For example, the tendency to amass information from close, first-hand observation is very important. Michael Faraday, pictured at left, exhibited this tendency par excellence. As a young man, he had no formal education and kne only arithmetic, but discovered the laws of electromagnetism through fascinated observation of and experiments on nature.

In a future post, I'll examine how schools can nurture this, and other characteristics of creativity.

 

 

The Great Books Online

Inside Higher Ed's article "The Information Super-Library" looks at an online Great Books program at Monterey Peninsula Community College, which got its start due to student enthusiasm.

"I just keep running into students who are hungry for something they feel is substantial," says program coordinator David Clemens.

The article discusses the pros and cons of teaching the Great Books online as well as their value for gaining employment.

(Hat tip to RJO)

Why ban the classics?

The British upper class kept the knowledge of the Classics from the lower classes, to control them.

American slave owners banned slave education, especially in reading, to control them.

Many contemporary professors, under the guise of modern, multi-culturalist and feminist ideology, keep the Classics out of university classrooms...to control their students? 

Proof that the classics speak to everyone

RJO's comment reminded me about this article, "Proof That the Classics Speak to Everyone." 

"In the 1500s, English law barred common people from reading even the Bible. England's rigid class system was grounded in the conviction that commoners were incompetent to think for themselves. The upper classes maintained a closely guarded monopoly on the knowledge required to interpret law, politics and religion for the lower orders...But as literacy grew, many working people began to yearn for intellectual independence. To guide their quest, they chose the very books that the elite had appropriated as their own: Homer, Virgil, Plutarch and Bacon.

"In the 1800s, weavers often read Shakespeare as they worked at their looms...shepherds "maintained a kind of circulating library, leaving books they had read in designated crannies in boundary walls." In mines and factory towns, informal discussion groups sprang up....

"What did England's common people find in the classics? ...the tools they needed to begin to answer...life's most basic question: "What is it that's going on here?"

"Less-than-great books can't perform this function. Ordinary works of fiction, for example, tend to follow stereotyped formulas that limit their value. But the classics... "offer a hundred ways of understanding the world, and a hundred plans for changing it." Over time, British workers who read Milton and Locke began to grasp that they deserved educational and political equality. Eventually, they demanded -- and got -- both. "

Professionalization and the Liberal Arts

I frequently listen to Chicago classical music station WFMT. And frequently I hear ads for the Masters of Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. It must make them beaucoup bucks - especially because these classes are filled with wealthy, retired or professional people.

The rush to professionalize in college leaves many wealthy, but dissatisfied at middle age. Others quit their profession in disgust, distraught that they had wasted so many years on work they disliked.  

Instead - why not take the time to learn about your possibilities when young, with your whole life ahead of you, and no debt or responsibilities? Study the liberal arts in college!

The End of the Humanities?

On March 1st, I commented on Stanley Fish's review of The Last Professor. In his review, Fish remarked that philosophy, literature, art and the other subjects of the humanities are not generally perceived as having practical use. Fish and others argue that they shouldn't.

But I think the view that study of the humanities is uplifting, but impractical, contains a false dichotomy between the spiritual and the practical.

Most students are not wealthy enough to go to college without a concern for a consequent career. This has been true in the U.S. since its inception. Before the G.I. bill and more recent, massive federal loans and grants, in the main, only the wealthy could afford to spend four adult years studying and not working.

Consequently, most college students need to learn knowledge and skills that will enable them to find lucrative work. They need to learn knowledge and skills that are immediately applicable in the workforce. 

But they also need to learn knowledge and skills (cognitive, emotional and social) that will enable them to make effective and excellent professional and personal decisions.

What those who push quick professionalization in college miss is the power of the humanities to affect professional life. 

Philosophy and art, to take two of the humanities, are of immense importance in human life -every life. Everyone lives with some kind of philosophy, whether they've identified it to themselves or not. And art, through literature, music, and the visual arts, embodies many different ways of approaching life. As such, art can be a powerful influence in shaping a person's approach. As Aristotle argued, music can teach the young the habit of how to feel.  The visual arts can embody ways of carrying oneself, and of looking at the world. Literature can show ways of living, and what men of different characters do.

An education including these studies makes the student more aware and knowledgeable about what choices and values are open to them. It provides a much higher level of consciousness about oneself, one's culture, and human possibilities.  It empowers the student to make better decisions in the long run. Better personal and professional decisions.

Thus, the spiritual and the practical integrate.

Child Begging Obama for School Choice

Hat tip to Lisa Miller.

"A Week of Revelation"

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson hits the nail on the head about the Obama agenda:

"But governments do not "invest," they spend. Such spending can be justified or unjustified. It is wealthy individuals, however, who actually invest their capital in job creation. Most have much less capital than they used to. Under the Obama budget, they would have less still. This does not seem to matter in the economic worldview of the Obama budget. Equality is the goal instead of opportunity or economic mobility. And government, in this approach, is more capable of investing national wealth than America's discredited plutocrats -- meaning successful two-income families, entrepreneurs and professionals.

"This is not merely the rejection of "trickle-down economics," it is a weaening of the theoretical basis for capitalism -- that free individuals are generally more rational and efficient in making investment decisions than are government planners." (Emphasis added)

The putsch of egalitarianism.

Hat tip to John Enright.)

Eliminating Political Science

Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed reports that Wisconsin Lutheran College is eliminating political science as a major due to budgetary constraints. Wisconsin Lutheran has been ranked a top liberal arts college by U.S. News & World Reports for six years.

A spokeswoman says: "the college determined it wasn't necessary to its liberal arts mission to offer political science. 'We have interdisciplinary majors and other majors that can get you where you are going with your career aspirations...""

Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges remarked that "programs based on a core curriculum or interdisciplinary offerings designed to cover various disciplines require careful planning. 'If this period of cutting is going to continue for a while, there will need to be fresh thought on how to do that...'"

A Great Books program, which is naturally interdisciplinary, can educate students extensively and intensively in political science without requiring a separate department.  And studying the Great Books can be a breath of fresh air, given the often-slanted and politicized approach in academe today.

The Last Professor

Stanley Fish, brash post-modernist and self-proclaimed "anti-foundationalist," now dean at Florida International University, recently wrote in his NY Times blog about the death of the humanities. 

The blog entry was a partial review of a new book, The Last Professor, by one of his former students, Frank Donoghue.

Fish and Donoghue, like so many, claim the humanities' downfall is a function of the free market. They argue that with increased pressure to produce students who can graduate into a profession - be "useful" - and financial difficulties, universities are pulling resources from the humanities.

Never mind that:

1. In recent years universities have been "under increasing financial pressure" due to their competition for the large number of college students available as a result of the massive federal grant and loan programs.

2. Most humanities departments - e.g. philosophy, literature, art - have made themselves increasingly irrelevant to students' personal, long-term goals and of expanding the reaches of the mind, by politicizing most everything they teach.

The problem is the free market?

(Hat tip to Dario Fernandez-Morera)

Bill Ayers in his own words

Jordan Zimmerman nails it on the head in his post-with-video-interview about '60's-terrorist-now-feted-professor-of-education Bill Ayers - Ayers' self-importance shines. This is the guy teaching our teachers at the University of Illinois at Chicago!

Enlightenment in California

Thanks to everyone for making our inaugural event of The Enlightenment Society for the College of the United States a wonderful success!

Integration (and I don't mean the neighborhood type)

What college graduates do with the information they've learned is crucial for their competitive edge, because there is so much world-wide competition. Just one example: tax accountants in the U.S. are competing with highly trained accountants in India, who work for thousands and thousands less, and can now do U.S. tax returns on-line at secure websites.

Contrary to the current protectionist mood, this is a good development, in the long run. More work, done less expensively leaves the customer with money to invest or spend on something else. Ultimately, more jobs and wealth can be created, and everyone becomes richer, even the poorest person in the country. Even the poorest in the U.S. have running water, TV's and telephones.

But it means U.S. workers must become ever more creative and adaptable to keep high-paying jobs.

Broad knowledge and the capability to learn, combined with the ability to deftly integrate new material into one's repertoire, enables a person to be professionaly versatile. Recruiters now even use the word "Versatilist" to describe those who can easily move from one job and field to another, and master them. 

Consequently, it is imperative that education must be about how to think, create, and integrate knowledge in new ways. An excellent liberal arts program develops these qualities in students, even after a lifetime of lectures. This is the factor that many fail to grasp when they rush to specialize at college.

In the 19th and early 20th century, lower schools used classic texts as their standard works. Young students were reading Aristotle, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Darwin. These profound works open the mind to the great questions of life, excellent reasoning, important ideas that influence contemporary culture, and superior thinking and writing. 

Further, they tend to span subject matter, often examining philosophical, ethical, scientific, and artistic issues in one work. They represent excellent examples of integrated thinking.

Developing broad knowledge aids integration. Before valuable information and ideas can be stored in the mind's subconscious, they have to pass through the conscious mind, which usually can handle only about seven discreet items at any one time (see George A. Miller's 1956 psychological classic "The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information"). If you've ever wondered why you need a list to remember what you have to do, here's the reason, and it's on of the reasons for our limited attentional resources.

Ideas--abstractions--are the primordial human inventions that circumvent this limitation, because ideas incorporate myriad data into a singel audio-visual concrete, a word or symbol. All instances of babies are integrated into the idea of "baby," and you can apply what you know about babies to any individual baby you encounter. Voila! You've saved a lot of time and energy.

Ultimately, the integration of simple ideas like those of colors or types of animals, into more abstract groupings like "mammal" makes the human mind extremely powerful. Imagination and integration work together to produce the torrent that is human creativity. Integration of information into ideas, and actions into skills, is the psychologically economical way to use our limited conscious resources when thinking and solving problems.

The person who is a master of the careful, fact-based integration of knowledge is a highly effective thinker. And integrating facts and ideas from one field of study to another, highly disparate field, is the essence of creativity. More on that in my next post.

Education and Liberty

Check out this new blog, Education and Liberty, written by some Socratic Practice and free market economic fans.

Acton MBA

I was recently reminded about this program, the motto of which is "Learn how to learn. Learn how to make money. Learn how to live a life of meaning." 

The more I read about this innovative MBA program in Entrepreneurship, the more impressed I am. It fuses philosophical reflection with real-world action to help individuals create their purpose in life. That's what I think education should be about. 

And, even better, they see business as a creative, productive activity that can have lofty ends.

Children Beaten in Chicago Public Schools

A CBS Chicago investigative report found these horrors. Not a surprise to me, given what I've heard from people who volunteered or worked at various Chicago public schools.

I'm sure it's one of the reasons why a large number of the students at my Council Oak Montessori School have parents who are Chicago Public School teachers - they don't want this happening to their children.

(Hat tip to John Enright.)

Lectures in Their Proper Place

In my previous post, I reported that MIT was getting rid of lectures in their physics classes.

In the New York Times article about this change, Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who directs a science education initiative at the University of British Columbia is quoted as saying that the human brain “can hold a maximum of about seven different items in its short-term working memory and can process no more than about four ideas at once.”

“But the number of new items that students are expected to remember and process in the typical hourlong science lecture is vastly greater,” he continued. “So we should not be surprised to find that students are able to take away only a small fraction of what is presented to them in that format.”

This relates to the problem of attentional resources I discussed on November 21st.

If organized well, lectures can distill a vast amount of information down to a few principles and key examples. A lecture can be an economical introduction to a subject. The best lectures essentialize the subject matter conveyed by the lecture.

However, as a method, lectures are designed to be easy for the teacher, not the student. They allow the teacher to recount his or her knowledge without feedback or interrupting questions and side issues from the listener. Although sometimes necessary, lectures are usually a difficult way to learn because they frequently run counter to human learning tendencies.

For several reasons, students must exert an enormous amount of effort to stay focused on what the speaker says during lectures. A lecture requires the learner to mostly listen and look a little. Unlike learning methods that make learning easy, the lecture does not engage the whole mind, including vivid perceptions and imagination, or the body of the student. Listening and looking during a lecture involves little sensory-motor work, which normally helps cement learning in memory.

One of the reasons visual aids such as Microsoft^® Office PowerPoint^® are preferred for lectures is because they offer sensory stimulations, providing at least some perceptual imagery to associate with the ideas being conveyed. Although, like books, lectures can have illustrations, the student cannot study the illustrations in a lecture as long as he or she wants.

Human interaction usually helps to increase interest as well as physically engage the student, but during a lecture, there is very little interaction between student and teacher. Often the lecture is aimed at a large or general audience and thus cannot address individual student goals, interests and comprehension difficulties.

A student cannot stop the lecture to ask a question or request a further, clarifying explanation. Once confused, the student finds the rest of the lecture very difficult if not impossible to follow. Consequently, students often miss the important points and substantial content of the lecture.

In a lecture format, the best teachers attempt to address human learning needs by weaving their information into a story, incorporating drama, character, values, passion, meaning, purpose, a climax and resolution. Winston Churchill was a master at this. This method utilizes human tendencies to search for meaning and purpose, to connect knowledge acquired to personal circumstances, and to remember people, places and things more easily than abstract ideas.

Excellent lecturers use plenty of concretes to make the information vivid and connected to real experience and, at least in imagination, to stir perceptual memory and bodily feelings of the student. Imaginative work and bodily feelings help the student feel much more engaged in the material. Exceptional lecturer MIT physics professor Walter Lewin spends 30 hours and three practice trials developing each of the lectures for his remarkable class.

The best learners can gain from almost any lecture; they come to a lecture motivated to learn for their own reasons. They expend extra effort in imagining their own examples in order to concretize the ideas they’re hearing. As they listen, they maintain an internal dialogue of questions with the lecturer, noting what they don’t understand and with what they take issue. They also tend to seek answers to their questions after the lecture.

Many teachers recognize that this kind of student is rare and usually has high intelligence, strong intellectual ambition, and great self-motivation. For the most part, traditional education methods do not nurture internal motivation and inherent interest in acquiring knowledge—qualities essential in the new global economy.

A long school career of lectures, drills, memorization, and teaching methods out of tune with learning needs usually turns most students away from enthusiastic learning at school. They are only too often motivated mainly by external rewards of grades, adult approval, superior social position and the acquisition of credentials.

Unfortunately, lectures are so difficult to pay attention to, and psychologically painful for most students, that students work hard to avoid them. During lectures, any younger students merely goof around; consequently, they learn that they are “bad” and “undisciplined.” They are expected to know how to force their attention on boring material.

Students attempting to pass their courses seek low-energy ways to fulfill requirements while maximizing grades, such as the use of tape recordings, buying others’ lecture notes, or passing multiple choice tests without attending lectures.

These students aren’t inherently bad, they are responding to the high psychological costs of traditional education in a psychologically economical way. They more profitably spend their limited attentional resources elsewhere.

Sadly, they often feel guilt, frustration and anger for failing to live up to the traditional classroom’s expectations, with a nagging disappointment for what they’ve missed—or should have gotten—from education. Many students desperately need help to become active learners, interested in the material and in charge of their own education.

Liberating Lectures

"At MIT, Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard" - and it's a good thing.

"The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent."

Physics professors from MIT and around the country initiated this change because students weren't learning.

(Hat tip to Don Hauptman.)

What does education have to do with Bush hatred and Obama euphoria?

In Friday's Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz argued that Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are two sides of the same coin - the triumph of passion over reason. He laments the current, deformed thinking of our intellectual classes.

"As Hamilton would have supposed, the susceptibility of political judgment to corruption by interest and ambition is as operative in our time as it was in his. What has changed is that those who, by virtue of their education and professional training, would have once been the first to grasp Hamilton's lesson of moderation are today the leading fomenters of immoderation.

"Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are particularly toxic because they thrive in and have been promoted by the news media, whose professional responsibility, it has long been thought, is to gather the facts and analyze their significance, and by the academy, whose scholarly training, it is commonly assumed, reflects an aptitude for and dedication to systematic study and impartial inquiry.

Unfortunately, Mr. Berkowitz comes close, but misses the mark, in identifying the defining factors which led to our current, sorry State.

Philosophers from Kant to Marcuse and later spent years gutting reason of its power to arrive at objective judgments, and promulgating this view through the Academy. Without this ability, what individual can stand, with certainty, against the crowd? What's left but emotionally based alliances?

Reason becomes rationalization, justifying intellectual passion-stoking - and making collectivist purposes so much easier to advance. This view of reason is what what separates our current thinking from that of the Founders, and why so few intellectuals today reflect the “education and professional training” of Hamilton’s times.

Are you controlled by irrational behavior?

See a fascinating lecture by behavioral economist Daniel Ariely from Duke University, on "irrational" behavior. (He means, irrational in the sense of economic self-interest maximizing; I know this a popular meaning among economists, but I'm not happy with it, which is why I've put it in quotes.)

To me, it's one long argument for teaching people how to have a higher level of awareness and thinking about everything they do.Check your premises!

(Hat tip to Anja Hartleb-Parson.)

A Method Rooted in Independence

Encouraging a child's independence is deeply rooted in the Montessori Method - one of the reasons I love it.

Beginning with the very young children (3-6 year olds), students work individually on materials which develop their senses and motor abilities and their independent powers of observation, analysis, and integration - the essence of reasoning. Group work is not encouraged for the very young, who are just forming their minds, as it is in Progressive schools. However, children can work together if they want to.

Furthermore, well-trained Montessori directresses are very respectful of individuals, their styles of learning and living, their interests, and their ideas.

(We call Montessori teachers "directresses" or "directors" because they more guide the children than instruct them, the materials do the instruction).

Group work become a bigger component of the curriculum as the children get close to adolescence; as students develop, they need to learn how to work with other people to prepare them for adult life.

However, the children are encouraged to work at their individual best: not compete with each other. Human beings are naturally competitive, but it is very distracting to develop self-motivated learning habits when competition is emphasized, especially for the very young.

The ugly head of social pressure rears up to tear the young mind and heart away from the inherent joy of learning.

All these elements serve to encourage even the most timid child to be independent in their thoughts and actions, a welcome respite from the kind of social pressure I talked about in my previous post.

That's not to say that Montessori schools are immune to social pressure - I've seen plenty of teachers promoting their scientifically unsubstantiated or unexamined views on the environment and nutrition, among other topics, through special projects and lessons.

Fortunately, the many aspects of Montessori which encourage factual observation and reasoning mitigate against this.

Los Comprachicos - Parents Indoctrinating Children

My friend, Donald, received this disturbing story from a friend of his:

"On Monday 01/19/09 my daughter baby sat at the neighbors', right next door…

It was an Obama victory party for children. All the participants live nearby.

As reported:

Daughter had to help the kids decorate Obama cookies and muffins.

There were "find Obama" games (?!!!) and, quizzes with questions like:

What is: Obama favorite food?, Favorite music? .......

Then a photo sessions with a full size cutoff of the "ONE". Everyone took turns posing, hugging and kissing the cardboard likeness.

They gathered all the children in the living room and sang some previously rehearsed Obama praising tunes, such as:

♫I've a crush ♬ on Obama♪....

Then the adults took turn for the children.

It seems that they did not perform, this song.

Finally, a joyous Obama conga line through the house.

A just off-the-plane Italian au pair stood by beffudled. Muttering "we not do that in my country!".

[My daughter] came back shaking her head.

She mused about similar events with McCain or Bush songs.

Interestingly, [she] wondered why she was needed as she mostly stood watching around along with the au pair. She concluded that the "mom" just wanted to give her some "business." ...

...Quote of the day:

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But under the name of Liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without knowing how it happened.”

- Norman Thomas, Socialist Party presidential candidate, 1940, 1944 and 1948 explaining why he quit running for president. "

That's the end of Donald's friend's commentary.

It seems that parents and teachers all over the country were organizing children to participate in Obama adulation. It puts me in mind of an article by Ayn Rand called "The Comprachicos."

"Los Comprachicos" were evil people who monstrously disfigured children to become performers and beggars - as in the recent movie "Slum Dog Millionaire." In the article, she compares what the Comprachicos did to the social pressure to conform put on toddlers and very young children in Progressive school classrooms.

She argues that such pressure is cognitively maiming, making it difficult for all but the strongest to maintain their independence. Unlike the original Comprachicos, however, the scars from this "operation" are invisible, all on the inside.

Today, this "operation" goes on at all levels of education. The videos of organized presidential adulation are a testament to what's happening.

"To preserve one's mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason," Ayn Rand.

(Hat tip to Donald and his friend.)

Intolerance on Inauguration Day

At Mason district schools near Dayton, Ohio, criticisms and caricatures of the incoming or outgoing Presidents will not be allowed today, based on whether they make others feel “unwelcome or uncomfortable,” reports the Dayton Daily News.

So much for free speech in the public schools. Political correctness deep-sixes tolerance once again. (Hat tip to John Welsh.)

Text Book Bias

Fox News interviews Larry Schweikart from the University of Dayton on bias in textbooks, with some hairy examples! Enlightening info on the building of American railroads.

'Virtual Drug Testing' versus Education

Bob Sechler in today's Wall Street Journal reports that GE Global Research, Simcyp Ltd. and Pfizer, among others, have "developed software that simulates the complex chemistry of living organisms" in order to run virtual tests of new drugs.

At first, I could hardly believed this worked, because the human body is so complex, but, apparently, they're able to use this technology to weed out "sure-fire losers." "...high speed processors and other technological advancements are enabling relatively small-scale simulations--of particular organs, for instance--to be integrated into increasingly complete software-based 'virtual humans'..." It's saving the companies millions and reducing human risk.

What an amazing application of reason and creativity!

But it made me sad to think of the field of education, in contrast, which mainly uses the same methods it did 100 years ago.

Sure, schools continue to adopt new material technologies, like the Internet, web-casting, and white boards, all well and good. Hopefully, the new Prado Museum Google Earth project will be tapped, also. But in terms of method - lectures, tests, memorization of data - are centuries old!

We're just damn lucky that the researchers who graduate from mostly traditional schools are able to develop such a high level of creativity.

(I'm terribly sorry, after 20 minutes of searching on the Journal's website, I was not able to find the article - saw it in hardcopy only.)

First Hand Observation of Prado Museum Details

Today, the Wall Street Journal reports another Google innovation:

"Spain's Prado Museum has teamed up with Google Earth for a project that allows people to zoom in on the gallery's main works, even on details not immediately discernible to the human eye.

Getty Images
Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas.""

What a fabulous new way to learn!! Here's some more info:

"The initiative, announced Tuesday, is the first of its kind involving an art museum. It involves 14 of the Prado's paintings, including Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas," Francisco de Goya's "Third of May" and Peter Paul Rubens's "The Three Graces."

"There is no better way to pay tribute to the great masters of the history of art than to universalize knowledge of their works using optimum conditions," Prado director Miguel Zugaza said.

Google Spain director Javier Rodriguez Zapatero said the images now available on the Internet were 1,400 times as clear as what would be rendered with a 10-megapixel camera.

"With Google Earth technology it is possible to enjoy these magnificent works in a way never previously possible, obtaining details impossible to appreciate through first-hand observation," he said."

A New College for Bureaucrats

This New York Times article reports that former teacher Chris Asch is tapping Michelle Obama to build a new college for bureaucrats.

“The Public Service Academy can be Barack Obama’s Peace Corps,” Mr. Asch said. “He needs to take advantage of this moment when people are recognizing the importance of government and build institutions that will last.”

We're starting to sound more and more like France! (Hat tip to Don Hauptman.)

The Oddity of College Admissions

Imagine you're shopping for a car and you're considering a Toyota or a Ford SUV.

But most of the information you can get about them is:

1. What executives at other car companies think about these vehicles,
2. The average driving skills test score of those who bought them.

You decide on a Toyota, you fill out the paperwork to buy one - but then you have to HOPE that the Toyota company will let you!

Sounds nuts, doesn't it?

That's the apt way that Diane Auer Jones summed up the college admissions process for selective colleges during a speech at at the National Association of Scholars conference yesterday.

Schooling and creativity

Creativity researcher Ken Robinson gives an incisive - and funny - talk about how current education kills creativity, which is crucial in today's world. (Hat tip to Gennady Shenker.)

How a Creative Artist Coped with Bad Schooling

You've got to see this video of Willard Wigan and his microscopic sculptures. His comments about schooling are heart-wrenching, but inspiring. (Hat tip to Karen Minto.)

Risk-Averse Parenting and Entrepreneurialism

Interesting post at The Austrian Economists blog. (Hat-tip to Pat Peterson at the Jefferson Club.)

Author Steve Horowitz said:

"How important is it to a classical liberal order that children be raised in ways that encourage entrepreneur-like independence?  Aside from the more narrow questions of policy, can a liberal order function with risk-averse citizens who are less likely to sieze entrepreneurial opportunities?  Is this part of the broader role that the family has in transmitting the rules and values of the Great Society?  What, if anything, can we do if parents are failing in that task?"

To the first question: the history of culture makes it clear that the way children are raised deeply affects their entrepreneurial independence. Tom Sowell makes this case in Ethnic America, tracing the values and practices of Jewish and Chinese immigrants which so often enable their entrepreneurship. 

Further, 100 years of experience with Montessori education demonstrates that children can learn the skills for a creative, independent, and professionally and socially successful life, if they are educated in the right environment. 

Aside from all the individual children I've seen blossom enormously (often, after extremely inauspicious beginnings), it's interesting to note the honor role of unusually creative, independent people who were Montessori students:

Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google

Julia Child, chef, author, and TV personality

Anne Frank, author

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia

Will Wright, Sim City

These are but a few. 

Writers and thinkers like Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, are recognizing the superiority of Montessori education to preparing children for today's global economy. (Hat tip to Mark Berger of Corvallis Montessori.)

Now that the holiday whirlwind is over, I'll take up the discussion I left off in my November 21st post, and report more on why that is the case.

Universal Grade Change Form

I just discovered this hilarious Universal Grade Change Form on Stephen Hicks' website

Of course, the sad thing about the form is the obsession with grades, rather than what the students actually learned. Why this happens is a topic for another time.

Cannonading the Great Books

A few weeks ago, a new book came out on the history of the Great Books, with a rather snide view of the project. Today in the Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz' article "Lessons from the Great Books Generation" reports on the public's huge interest in this collection of classics during the '40's, '50's, and early '60's, and their relation to "today's more fleeting culture."

Ironically, in the late '20's, one of the Great Books founders, Robert Hutchins, was worried about information overload. "The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propoganda that beats upon the citizen 24 hours a day all his life," means "that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves." He had good reason to worry--the Soviets, Nazis, and Fascists were rising to power during this era.

Attacked in the late '60's by "radicals" (see my take on conservative they truly are here) who now dominate academia with their New Left views, these books have been hounded out of most curricula as the works of "dead white males." Sadly, even the University of Chicago where Hutchins was president at the tender age of 29, has eliminated most of the core curriculum of classics which he introduced in the '30's.

I only wish the minions of today's sorry educational institutions would take to heart Hutchins statement "The best education for the best is the best education for all. I am not saying that reading and discussing the Great Books will save humanity from itself, but I don't know anything else that will."

Harvard loses 1/4 of its endowment

"The Harvard endowment, the biggest of any university, stood at $36.9 billion as of June 30, meaning the loss amounts to about $8 billion. That's more than the entire endowments of all but six colleges, according to the latest official tally." reports the Wall Street Journal.