Rational Philosophy

On the various uses (valuable or not) of the human (and primate) mind.

Scientists at Duke University have shown that it’s possible for a primate to control a machine using brain signals. The scientists trained a monkey to make a robot walk on a treadmill using its mind. The feat is impressive and the ramifications of the work could be enormous.

Cosmologists have shown (among other odd things) that the world around us is likely to be just a fleeting figment of our imagination. Since it computes to be cheaper (from a probability perspective) for a free-floating, fully populated brain to pop into existence than an entire universe (think The Matrix on acid), the cosmologists calculations indicate that it’s far more likely that I’m just imagining that I’m writing this blog entry than that I’m actually writing it… Very disheartening. With complex calculations and intense debate, theoretical cosmologists seem as fiercely certain of their predictions as they are of their ridiculousness.

There’s no accounting for the efforts of the human brain.

Meanwhile Allison Arieff, in a promising new monthly column for the NY Times, bemoans the endless torrent of flashier gadgets and electronic gizmos that replace one another in such quick succession. (Allison defends her own gadgetization “The culture of my workplace necessitates me having mobile e-mail and a calendar.” As far as I know columnists for the NY Times from 1851 until, ooh, probably around 2003 or 2004 accomplished their work without mobile e-mail and calendars.) Nevertheless, Allison strikes a resonant chord. Let the designers put their creative efforts into reducing the waste involved in new technology, or creating nifty new designs for lifesaving devices rather than snazzier cellphones. Good call, Allison.

One can easily imagine that the efforts of scientists researching the capacity for brains to control machinery will lead to both incredibly valuable innovations, as well as incredibly purile and perhaps dangerous innovations. The most obviously valuable use would be for those who currently have no control or limited control over their bodies. Being able to control machinery would give them the ability to move and act in ways that they currently cannot. Any catalog of purile uses I might devise can, I’m sure, easily be bettered. But how about cell phones that we can dial with our minds, or a TV channel changer that surfs without us lifting a finger..? As for dangerous innovations, the Pentagon is already trying to append robotics to people to make them stronger and more lethal. The success of the recent machine-mind research at Duke is a big step in that direction.

The world of innovation and thought must remain, by definition, a democratic place. Ideas don’t ask for permission to occur to us. Cosmologists will continue to follow their calculations into a fizzling fantasy-land until someone goes to the chalkboard to erase an invalid assumption and send them all tumbling. Designers of gadgets will keep designing flashier funkier gadgets until and unless, as Arieff points out, market forces direct them toward greener, leaner, less useless inventions. And mind-machine innovators will take the robot and run with it in as many directions as they can. Only demand, necessity and regulation can steer them in the right direction.

(As to wacky cosmology, I’ll cross-reference here my own thoughts on the philosophy of the universe and time.)

On ideas that don’t meet at the ends: Catching up with the slippery Fish, and digging into Farmer’s flawed reasoning.

Last week I thought I had refuted Stanley Fish’s doubts about the value of the humanities. But it seems that I wasn’t alone in misunderstanding Fish’s point. Fish explains today that he was talking about the academic field of “the humanties” not about art, literature, philosophy, etc. themselves. Fish clarifies his argument: Do humanities courses change lives and start movements or have any other measurable value? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be realized? He admits that teaching humanties can be one way for people to learn critical thinking, and that it provides people with a better range of subjects for conversation. But he then dismisses these values as being far from the exclusive realm of humanties courses. Now that Fish has made himself clear, I still disagree with him.

Another educator, John Farmer, who teaches at Rutger’s Law School, argues that the criminal justice system isn’t necessarily the right place to pursue the war on terror. Farmer argues that the prosecutions of Jose Padilla and Hemant Lakhani take criminal justice into dangerous territory, toward endorsing the pursuit and prosecution of terror conspirators who have not yet done more than pursue. So far so good. Farmer’s making sense. But then he argues that this situation should be remedied by taking terror law enforcement out of the criminal justice system, permitting the government some mechanism for “preventive detention.” “Considering norms of criminal law and the paucity of evidence the government had at the time,” Farmer says, “its only alternative was to leave him free. Law enforcement should have had another choice.” Hmmm. So to prevent the erosion of our civil liberties we should permit indefinite detention without charges of those we have doubts about.

Stanley Fish puts forth a subtle brand of sophistry in his twin salvos against the usefulness of the humanities. And this sophistry seems to indicate an ulterior motive. Fish’s true motive isn’t relevant to proving him wrong, but I would guess that he likes the idea that his academic pursuit rises above the demands of demonstrating value. He reaches a passionate pitch when he states “the refusal of the humanities to acknowledge or bow to an end they do not contemplate is, I argue, their salvation and their value.” Fish prides his field of study on its “refusal to bow” to pragmatic ends, and, rhetorically, argues that this refusal supports the justification for its worth.

My short rebuttal (”bullshit”) still stands.

Fish’s sophistry is this: He starts with three questions about the humanities “what is the value of such work, why should anyone fund it, and why (for what reasons) does anyone do it?” to which he appends, without drawing a logical connection, the following tests — that if it has value, the value must be measurable, that unless the value is measurable it cannot claim funding, and that those who do it must have consistent, valid and measurable reasons for doing it. Fish then flops around quite happily having avoided answering his own questions.

1. A value need not be measurable for it to be a value. Heat was a value before mssrs Farenheit and Celcius devised their scales and methods of measurement. Or, to take an example more closely related, “justice” is a value that cannot be measured (can we count how many people are rightly convicted? Of course not.) Pleasure and cleverness are not measurable values, neither is academic interest.

2. Funding for academic study always involves some element of uncertainty. There is no logical connection between whether a field of study has a measurable value or not and its appropriateness for investment.

3. People do all kinds of things for the oddest reasons. Fish’s assertion that humanities professors don’t do what they do to impart value is, even if it is correct, entirely irrelevant. Perhaps the best reason that any educator can have for being in the teaching business is that they relish their subject area. Who wants a teacher focused on the value that the course is imparting, rather than the knowledge and enthusiasm for the material?

Fish is carefully stepping over the real reasons that the humanities have value. They have value in the same way that any academic field of study has value, in exploring the world we live in. Humanities studies the world of art and literature. I can thing of few things more intrinsically valuable than studying the way that the creative world lives within, alongside and outside the real world. To say that such study has no intrinsic value makes me want to plea for Fish to take a sabbatical.

John Farmer makes a less subtle blunder. The current administration has been stretching, bypassing and thwarting the criminal justice system to meet its own ends. Farmer is right in saying that we shouldn’t allow this. But to claim that instead we need a whole new arm to the judiciary so that the government can continue to confine, hold and interrogate people who perhaps intend to do harm, seems about as wrongheaded as you can get.

�

On nature’s mysteries; the difficulties of environmental protection, IVF, and global warming.

A NY Times article today reports on an odd ecological phenomenon; protected trees that ail and die. The trees suffer, apparently, because cordoning them off disrupts a delicate balance of mutualism between species. The acacias house ants, the ants repel giraffes and elephants, thereby protecting the thorn nectar they feed on. But, when cordoned off from large herbivores, the trees become less ingratiating to the ants, who in turn become less well-disposed to protecting the trees, allowing deadly attack by wood-boring beetles…

In England, a member of the House of Lords (David Alton) has used the spectre of twins separated at birth who later married, not knowing they were brother and sister, to argue against maintaining the anonymity of the biological father for children born by in vitro fertilization. The twins in question were born normally. But Alton argues that withholding the name of the biological father for those born of IVF would make such cases more common. Alton’s choice to disclose information about the case during debate seems distressingly melodramatic and I suspect that he has other reasons to dislike the proposed law change. But it also made me wonder whether and how many people stop to think just why we have laws against siblings marrying.

Unless I’m mistaken, the prohibition (religious, moral, and legal) against marrying close family members derives from the increased likelihood of destructive genetic mutation; society has codified nature’s preference for mixing dissimilar gene pools. It is normal now in the US that prospective parents with a high likelihood of passing on a genetic health problem to their children get genetic counseling, along with testing for the fetus to determine whether the mutations in question have been passed on. Would it be natural then or unnatural to suggest that another approach to resolving Alton’s concern would be to recommend genetic counseling and testing for specific mutations to those born of IVF so that they can be better prepared before beginning a family? (Not to determine familial ties to their spouse, but simply to watch out for shared mutations.)

And lastly to global warming. It appears that glaciers were formed during a so-called “super greenhouse” period about 91 million years ago. Even as surface ocean temperatures at the equator rose several degrees higher than they are today, sheets of ice appeared in Antarctica. Hmmm. Throw that one into your current climate model.

Evidence shows we’ve messed with the earth’s natural climate by burning large quantities of fossil fuels and cutting down trees, causing global warming. And now we have to live with the consequences. Logic seems to indicate that we should try to slow down global warming. Wishful thinking would indicate that we would like to fix things and return the planet to a more natural equilibirium. (Some scientists have covered large swaths of glacial ice with aluminum foil in the hopes of preventing the ice from melting. Which seems pragmatic, touching and utterly futile.)

But, when the relatively innocuous seeming act of cordoning off trees to protect them leads to their death, how can we hope to know what is natural when dealing with things on a much vaster scale? After making so many terrible mistakes by ignoring the consequences to the planet we live on, our philosophy in living as modern human beings, it seems, should be to do as little as possible to mess with nature, and to stop doing things that we know are invasive.

Where does this leave us with IVF? Well – and I hesitate long and hard before writing this, since it seems heretical to me as a self-professed liberal, and insensitive to those who seek to have children but can’t — since IVF isn’t natural, and since messing with nature tends to have unforseen and undesired consequences, shouldn’t we consider this before we consider IVF?

�

On systems that respond to feedback; home energy, Google, balance, and depression.

I woke up this morning at 4:30am and spent the best part of an hour awake before falling back to sleep. I’ve been groggy and tired all day, and feeling less productive than usual. My body is telling me to rest. But I’m telling it to keep going.

I’ve come across several stories today that refer to the value of monitoring a system in order to optimize it. The Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, for instance, conducted a research study in which it equipped over 100 homes with power montoring and control systems, allowing the home-owners to trade off their energy use and expense with their habits and comfort (e.g., choosing to maintain the house at a slightly less comfortable temperature during periods of peak energy demand). The study found that people typically reduced their energy bills, and thereby the demand on the local power grid, by around 10%.

Another story tells about Google’s experiment on its own employees, letting them engage in speculative trading for modest prize money in order to derive information about its office culture and communication patterns. Google found that people who sit close together speculate similarly, showing that they communicate better than friends or coworkers. Google is using this information to help it plan its seating arrangements to foster valuable communication.

In the NY Times Health section, we read about one of the human body’s built-in feedback mechanisms — our sense of balance — and how it tends to deteriorate with age. Fortunately we can exercize it, improving our balance as we age, and reducing our risk of falling (the article tells us how).

All living organisms represent complex, complementary feedback systems. The organism responds to external and internal stimuli and adjusts accordingly, aiming to balance the system. Hungry? Eat. Full? Stop eating. Tired? Rest.

As human beings, being conscious, we can override or undermine our feedback mechanisms. Sometimes we don’t eat because we don’t want to get fat. Or we jump out of a plane, despite our fear, because we want to experience the thrill of sky-diving. Or we push on through tiredness because we don’t have the time or opportunity to rest.

All of which is getting me somewhere. Our mood is another feedback mechanism; whether or not we feel happy or depressed feeds back into our thoughts, actions and feelings. But it’s a confusing and sometimes dysfunctional mechanism.

I didn’t figure this out until my life-coach / therapist helped me see the pattern. Over several years of working with him I would go through periods of depression. He would help me root out the cause of the depression and, inevitably, coming to grips with the cause would leave me feeling happier and with more self-insight. The pattern showed that depression provided much needed downtime for introspection and gave me a sign that I was grappling with something.

And I’m writing about therapy because… of the debate about a NY Times “PsychCentral” posting. The comments, and their passion, made me realize just what a difficult subject therapy can be. I felt the need to add my own feedback on the subject.

�

On sexism, racism and any other ism: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Gloria Steinem; the importance of drawing distinctions, and the unfortunate side-effect of bigotry.

Gloria Steinem’s Op-Ed yesterday — “Women Are Never Front-Runners” — shows that even a fervent anti-ismist can get tangled up in her own knitting. Ms. Steinem laments that Hillary Clinton faces an uphill struggle convincing voters that she’s a viable leader just because she’s a woman. Steinem contrasts Clinton’s task with Obama’s, arguing that Clinton has it harder. Although Steinem presents no evidence, I wouldn’t try to argue that she’s wrong. Unfortunately though, her thesis swells with the rhetoric of bias, ending with what’s supposed to be a rallying cry against isms ‘We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”’ And this would demonstrate lack of bias how?

Human beings have developed an extraordinary ability to draw distinctions and categorize the world around them. Consciousness requires that we do so. The first glimmer of consciousness rests on the awareness that there is a self and a non-self. From this primary and fundamental distinction we begin to separate the world into up and down, in and out, hot and cold, blue and pink, soft and hard… This ability has been honed to a fine point because it has provided an evolutionary benefit. The better able we were to draw distinctions, the more skilled we became at identifying safe foods to eat, suitable materials for clothes and tools and shelter, etc.

In another story today, brewers pursuit of ever hoppier beers and consumers pursuit of ever more gratifying flavor, gives an example of just how far we’re prepared to go along the road of differentiation and distinction. The whole enterprise of humankind rests to a large degree on the striving for new distinctions.

But the faculty to draw distinctions, while it can be trained or enhanced, is fundamentally indifferent to the nature of those distinctions. In other words, although some of us can’t distingush Bach from Hayden we can all distinguish a jackhammer from a songbird, a pen from a pencil, and our own cell-phone ring tone from everyone else’s. We draw distinctions so naturally that they become easy pegs for our murkier judgments.

This is where isms come in. When we derive arbitrary judgments from a characteristic, no matter how well distinguished that characteristic may be, we fall into the trap of the ism.

By all accounts, Hillary Clinton is a woman. Identifiying her as a woman is not an ism. Saying she’ll make a better or worse leader because she’s a woman is an ism. There’s no rational basis for making such a connection. (We can easily find many examples of both men and women leaders who are wonderful and many who are awful.)

To get to an ism from a distinction we have to apply flawed logic and reasoning, or blind ourselves to logic and reason. Racism in all its forms, for example, requires the racist to suspend his or her faculty of reason. But why do we do that?

Isms are born of ignorance or fear. Either we are too ignorant to understand that our judgments are flawed, or we are afraid of some group that’s different from us, or of losing our power over them, or of being forced to recognize their equality.

The antidote to isms is reason and logic, persistenly, patiently, blindly, and tirelessly applied.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

PS. Of the IPAs I’ve tasted, my personal favorite is Smuttynose IPA. Highly recommended.

On the philosophy of accountability in our schools, government, banks, and life in general…

I love this quote from George Bush, speaking yesterday at an elementary school in Chicago. “Look, I recognize some people don’t like accountability, [...] accountability says if you’re failing, we’re going to expose that and expect you to change. Accountability also says that when you’re succeeding you’ll get plenty of praise.” Ah, and they said he’d never learn.

Bush was talking about the grandly ill-conceived free-market assault on education — the “No Child Left Behind” act. Again in Bush’s words: “The philosophy behind No Child Left Behind was in return for money there ought to be results.”

Bush seems to have a very personal feeling for this philosophy. It speaks to him. After all, he came to power under the same diktat from big business and wealthy donors. ‘We’ll fund your campaign and support you in your bid for the presidency, but we expect results.’ And he delivered by cutting taxes, protecting and facilitating industry and big business interests, and handing down spectacularly rewarding contracts in the defense and reconstruction industries.

Unfortunately, the presidency shouldn’t be founded on that kind of accountability. Bush should have felt accountable to the people of the country before big business, because they invested their trust in him, not because they invested money in him. When we conceive of Bush’s presidency in this way it is no surprise that he has seemed to feel no real accountability for his most grievous failures as president — taking us into a war under false pretenses, endorsing illegal and cruel detention and torture, carrying out secret surveillance programs, reacting with lamentable indifference to the flooding after Katrina, and denying, deriding and tampering with the scientific evidence for global warming.

Likewise, the most important thing we invest in our schools is our trust in them to educate our children as well as they can and as well as we wish. When they fail, we should hold them accountable by finding ways to improve their performance. In some schools this will demand smaller classrooms, in others, new teachers, or a different school leader, in others perhaps a different teaching method or catchment approach. But when does it ever make sense to hold them accountable by removing funds? How does that help the children?

Which brings me to think that accountability and trust may be inextricably related from a philosophical perspective. We might test this theory with an example from the world of finance. Bear Stearns CEO, James Cayne stepped down today, the latest in a string of departures from the top spots of financial institutions embattled by the sub-prime loan crisis. My question is this: Have these corporate leaders felt compelled to step down because they squandered investors’ money or because they betrayed their trust?

The answer seems to be that whether Cayne and others felt a sense of personal and direct responsibility for the losses (some didn’t), they all felt a responsibility for the lost trust as evidenced by that financial mismanagement.

Similarly, we want our teaching establishments to feel responsible for educating our children, not for investing education funds. And we want our government to feel responsible for serving our common interests, not repaying campaign contributions.

On Stanley Fish’s views on the humanties, and congress’s obsession with baseball.

Stanely Fish has this to say about whether studying the humanties can change us for the better: “Do the humanities ennoble? And for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any other area of academic study, to save us? The answer in both cases, I think, is no.” Fish argues that the humanities serve no purpose whatsoever, but that this is OK, since “an activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good.”

To which feel moved to give a short rebuttal (”bullshit”) but feel a sense of duty to respond with something longer and more thoughtful. Back to that in a minute.

The other matter that has me scratching my head again today is all the fuss in congress over baseball drug use. Perhaps this is one of those cultural or political gaps that comes from being born and raised elsewhere, but why on earth does the government feel it should spend taxpayers’ money investigating drug use in baseball? Roger Clemens has been desperately defending himself against the allegations in the recent report. And he should be held accountable if he’s sullied the name of baseball, but by the government?

How does this relate to Stanley Fish and his misapprehension of the value of the humanities? Well, you can find echoes of Kafka and Beckett and Heller in the congress’s pursuit of the baseball players abuses, just as you can find echoes of Kafka and Vonnegut and, yes, Heller again in the Bush administration’s press to invade Iraq and chronic abuse of human rights.

Over the weekend I saw “Charlie Wilson’s War.” Granted not a film of any great artistic merit, although effectively done, but it helps illustrate the point. I came out of the theater with a renewed sense of urgency about the value and hidden dangers of the political process, with a new sense of outrage at the current administration’s deliberate mishandling of the current war and manhandling of our rights. Could I have reached the same sense of outrage without the movie? Sure, but that’s not the point.

The humanities, along with news media, word of mouth, personal observation, government and independent reports, etc., give us a picture of the world we live in. In some cases, the humanities give us a picture that we couldn’t get in any other way (because it’s purely imaginitive or impressionistic or surreal). I would pose the reverse question to Fish. If humanities don’t serve a purpose, why do they exist?

We strive to create art because we want to represent something — an emotion, an impression, an urge, a feeling – that seems important to us. Art is the tangible manifestation of our humanity. Without art we have no tangible manifestation of our humanity. Some can live in such a world, perhaps, but most of us cannot.

�

On the philosophy of newness.

When I turned on my radio at the start of the new year and listened to the litany of tragic news from around the world (most notably in Kenya and Pakistan), it crossed my mind to wonder whether things ever really change. Even a relatively tame story about the desire of some Scots to separate from England saddened me because it struck me as the undoing of a unifying force. Countries merge and split. People war and feud. The world over we repeat our mistakes from one generation to the next. Or do we?

That Barak Obama won Iowa’s Democratic primary yesterday is in itself momentous. That he won it with a unifying, hopeful message is inspirational. Barak believes in change. When I read Paul Krugman’s recent opinion that Obama was naiive in thinking that he could bring together the opposing voices in the country to achieve valuable progress, it gave me pause. Maybe Krugman was right, I thought, maybe Obama is naiive. But last night when I checked in and saw that Obama had won in Iowa, and this morning as I thought about what he’d done to win, I began to believe that Krugman is mistaken. From a position of weakness, the optimist can do little to sway cynical and self-interested entities (like drug companies). But from a position of power, with a strength of conviction and a willingness to exert influence, the optimist can achieve more than the pessimist could ever dream of.

It is only by looking at the way things shift over time that we can discern whether change and progress is really possible. That the radio reports attacks and riots doesn’t mean we’re living in a world of irretrievable conflict and violence. It means that there is still conflict and violence, for sure. But we need to compare this period to past periods to understand whether things are now worse, better or the same.

To take a small example: My daughter is fourteen. I could not imagine sending her out to work. But a hundred years ago (and even still in some parts of the world) children much younger were sent out to work.

Slavery, racial discrimination, sexual discrimination, bloody crusades, religious intolerance, capital punishment (in all states except Texas)… These things aren’t gone but they’re diminished, more globally deplored.

What we need to guard against is pessimism and relapse. David Brooks tells us not to be afraid that Huckabee won the Republican race in Iowa. Why should we not be afraid, I ask? Here is a man who doesn’t believe in evolution. This is a relapse that should make us not just afraid but determined to do whatever we can to stop him from prevailing in his quest to lead the country.

On voting in Iowa (and elsewhere).

As has been vividly demonstrated in Kenya in recent days, and as we experienced directly here in the US at the closing stages of the last presidential election, voting often produces more losers than winners. Today is caucus and primary day in Iowa. The presidential voting process begins. But what are we voting for, and why?

In some democratic systems, such as in the UK, people vote for a party rather than a person. Of course, a strong, popular and capable party leader can make a great deal of difference in which party people vote for, but it’s not quite the same as throwing the choice of party leader out to the popular vote. I focus on this difference to help illustrate the point that in a democracy our vote counts toward a particular result — the future government of the nation — and that rationally we should use our vote to try to help bring about the future government that we believe we prefer.

This may seem obvious, but I think it’s not.

Political pundits, the media, political campaign managers and even candidates get confused during the voting process. They become obsessed by the process itself, on what needs to be done to get elected. But getting elected and running a successful government require two very different sets of skills.

The particular skills required to govern the country don’t change much over time: Without integrity, effectiveness and vision things will go awry.

Whether a candidate (or party) claims to have the answer to fixing health care, or saving social security, or countering terrorism really makes no difference if they can’t demonstrate a track record of integrity, effectiveness and vision. Conversely, if a candidate honestly admits that they don’t currently have definite and convincing answers to such issues (how could any one candidate possibly have all the answers?) this demonstrates integrity without necessarily proving them ineffective and lacking in vision.

The pundits, the media, the campaign machine and the candidate make the voter’s task inordinately more difficult by masking the candidate’s key qualities behind a screen of distracting and tear-inducing smoke.

The other part of the voter’s task is to ask himself or herself what kind of government he or she prefers. Again, this seems obvious, but again I would claim it isn’t. If we focus on particular issues we risk losing sight of the big picture. Issues shift. New issues arise. The kind of government we prefer really doesn’t change much over time. That’s why political systems the world over tend to polarize to a greater or lesser degree into the opposing camps of conservative and liberal, republican and democrat, right wing and left wing, fascist and socialist.

The kind of government we prefer tends to fall somewhere along this spectrum. If the party we would normally vote for has swung too far one way, perhaps we feel a swing back in the other direction is called for. But fundamentally we tend to prefer a government that aligns better with our ideological bent.

To those in Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and across the country I say, forget the hoopla, look past the mud that’s been slung, dig into the record of the candidates on matters of integrity, effectiveness and vision, and vote for a leader who lacks none of these and for a government whose ideology promises to set the country on a course that you will feel happy about four years from now.

I make no apology for belaboring the point that George Bush, who so clearly lacks integrity and effectiveness and who’s vision has been so muddled and ill-founded that it’s mired the country in a dire war, set back international relations thirty years, hobbled the country’s finances, and introduced a deplorable set of incursions on basic human rights, was elected to the highest office in the country not once but twice. We can only hope that this year’s voting process turns the tide.

�

On the purpose and principles of education, and the perils of ignoring them.

Living in New York, it’s hard to avoid the whirlpool of anxiety around schools and education. What’s the right school, what’s the best school, how are we going to get our kid in there? Even before a child turns three parents are fretting and fussing over plans for his or her education. And while the particular circumstances may vary from place to place, concern over educational standards seems global.

In Japan, parents have begun to worry about the slip in educational standards relative to India and China. Once leading the world in math skills, Japan has fallen to 10th place. In the NY Times report, Japanese parents concerned over test scores and competitive educational achievements, and envious of India’s surge, sound just like New York City parents. Another current report focuses on concerted efforts to improve the organizational skills of schoolboys, thereby improving their grades.

When we have a child in school, the emphasis on testing and grades can overwhelm us. We forget the true purpose of education. If we’ve grown up through a competitive system ourselves we may never even pause to consider whether there may be anything wrong with it. But since we submit our children typically to more than a dozen years of school with the stated goal of giving them a good start in life, it seems to make sense for us to actively question whether and why those years should be spent chasing grades.

Education should serve the fundamental purpose of teaching a body of knowledge and thinking skills; it should only secondarily serve the subordinate purpose of furnishing qualifications. In modern times these primary and secondary purposes have been flipped. But why?

Ironically perhaps, one reason may be the relative democratization of education in developed countries. When all children have access to school, the focus for many shifts from acquiring knowledge and skills to getting or giving our children the upper hand. We start to want our children to succeed in school by achieving quantifiable, bankable grades, rather than by absorbing useful, valuable brain food.

When I think about my own time in the educational system, I tend to be impressed by how much I’ve forgotten rather than by how much I learned. The process of learning remains with me, even when the product of learning fades. Put another way, I doubt I’d score very well now on high school tests, but I have a clearer sense these days of how to approach a set of educational material in order to appreciate and learn from it (I watch myself doing just that with my high school age daughter). The boy in the NY Times story improved his grade with some intense focus and help from a tutor. But did he learn more, do his improved grades equate with a person who thinks better?

This nation faces a critical time in its history. It is no coincidence that these eight years of democratic dismantling have been presided over by a man who is so famously lax in speech and thought, who brazenly values faith over reason, victory over right, ends over means. Bush and his entourage have taken us down a perilous and irrational path. Yet though the current administration has eroded the principles of freedom and democracy in insidious and worrying ways, the country as a whole hangs back and takes it on the chin. Where is the outcry? Where are the howls of protest? They are few and faint.

When we teach our children not how to think but how to achieve social and economic success we bankrupt the foundation of a democratic society. If we cannot think for ourselves, if we cannot question and criticize, we cannot participate effectively in our democracy. As parents and citizens I believe we have an obligation to encourage our children to pursue knowledge, reason, and truth, not grades.

�