Feb
29
I have been asked to discuss exactly how it is we are educated in the US. I have made my biases about “the system” clear in posting on vouchers and on higher education, but I guess it is time to explain how everything here is supposed to work in case you don’t know anything about US education. Obviously there’s going to be lots of editorializing, because I think it’s best to talk about my experience.
Public schools exist for elementary and secondary levels of schooling. Elementary school I’m going to skip over - all you need to know is that from 6-14, no one is asked to pick a subject they really like, or make giant career decisions, or even take tests that determine whether they are fit for more schooling or not. There’s testing, to be sure - tons of it. But it doesn’t have the weight of determining someone’s status in society forever or not.
You’re probably familiar with secondary school in the US through movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Superbad. Secondary school, or high school, holds people between 14-18. The day is usually organized into periods where different teachers hold different classes, and one can take electives in addition to what is mandated by law. In my old high school, I think 2 years of US history were mandatory, as was 2 years of Math and Science and 2 of Health. There were more requirements, but I forget.
Now the high school I went to was private - it was a Catholic school. I had to pay tuition to go there, and many of the courses I took were required by state law. We had uniforms and religious instruction, and regarding the latter there’s all sorts of “establishment” and “free exercise of religion” jurisprudence explaining how a state can help fund and establish guidelines for a private school without promoting a particular sect.
Per pupil spending for my private high school was probably half that of the public schools in my area around the time I went to school. People in the public school across the street from me got to take these courses called AP courses for which college credit could be obtained. My high school offered 2 of these courses, one in Art, the other in History. The public school across the street probably offered, at that time, a heck of a lot more - I’m pretty sure one could AP in English and History and Calculus and Physics and Biology and Chemistry and a number of other subjects there.
You would think going to a private school is the province of the rich, but the truth is that state and local coffers pump public schools full of cash, and teacher’s unions are notoriously powerful and have been that way for some time. They got Carter back in 1976 to create the Department of Education in order to give their cause more public legitimacy, and for years it was part of the Republican platform to abolish that colossal waste of money. I know, some of you are gasping, but think what universities do when they know Dept. of Education aid is forthcoming to individual students - they simply hike tuition. Hence, Harvard can sit on billions and still charge people 40 grand or whatnot per year to go there.
Our curriculum in the States doesn’t filter people out or force them to be focused until college, and college isn’t mandatory. There are vocational schools, which teach more practical skills, that one can go to instead of a regular high school, but I would really caution those of you reading too much into the diversity of subjects we have during high school. Most high school English classes introduce people to really basic things, like who Mark Twain or who Milton is. The liberal artsy brush I seem to be painting high schools with really doesn’t hold up - everything I learned about poetry and close reading I learned from one class in college.
I’m not saying high schools don’t teach anything, it’s just that they’re more all over the place for the most part. The Columbine killers are famous for having skipped a bowling class the day of the attack - yes, their high school offered the game “bowling” as a course. I know some people that came out of high school English prepared to teach college courses on T.S. Eliot, but most I know came out scared of writing or reading anything.
College, as you know, requires nothing. There are “distribution requirements” that one has to take to fulfill any degree and requirements in a major. None of that adds up to a core curriculum unless you’re at the school I’m at right now, because those requirements can be fulfilled by multiple courses usually. Furthermore, in any given major there can be tremendous flexibility - when I was poli sci in undergrad, I wrote on Milton for my major and took a heavy amount of courses in analytic philosophy. The hard sciences, it should be noted, are more demanding. It’s not that they won’t let you take other courses, but that your coursework will usually be so intense that you won’t have time to do anything else.
Also, the quality of our education varies from school to school, both in high school and college, and the quality of departments in any given school varies. So that makes it nearly impossible to talk about American education creating a “product” as a whole. In fact, as you’re probably gathering from this blog, the most notable thing about America is our lack of education as a whole - how some of us can be talking fairly regularly about what is key in Xenophon or Aristotle or Dickinson, and the rest of the country can be obsessed with how two people represent “change” vs. “experience”with no further explanation needed (or possible).
Feb
29
A Very Public Thanks
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A friend and I have now gone over together Xenophon’s Apology, sections of the opening of The Birth of Tragedy (in German, no less!), a very large chunk of Aristotle’s Ethics bk.3 and some key sections of bk 2. He has been kind enough to let me rant, and listen intently, and ask for clarifications when not asking solid questions about interpretation.
Thanks to him, I finally feel like I’m welcome here. I wonder if pride that is confirmed has an especial quality, as if it transcends pride and is actual credibility.
Feb
28
Mmmmm…
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…the one thing I can get in Dallas that I really don’t trust Philly with is sushi, and I had plenty of that tonight.
Will update more later, but y’all are free to e-mail or call (just ask for my number if I haven’t given it already). I’m getting used to being here more, I should be online a lot more.
Feb
26
Rant: If The Liberal Arts Are To Survive, Then People Can’t Be 6 Figures in Debt For An English Degree
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To all budding philanthropists in America:
If you are worried about things like a decline in reading, an inability to express oneself well verbally, a general lack of knowledge about the past or its significance, or the emergence of a thoughtless populist politics, then take note:
You can’t expect people to dedicate themselves fully to being rational if they have to work 2 jobs just to pay tuition and 2 more jobs after school to pay off the debt.
What’s frightening is the cost UD students pay for this sort of education. Yeah, they come out having covered at the least Plato’s Republic and Symposium, Aristotle’s Ethics, the Federalist, Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, the Bible, Augustine’s Confessions, in addition to 2 semesters of American and 2 of World History. By way of comparison with Rutgers, where I went to undergrad: none of the above was required, except an American history requirement, and if any of the above were covered in any way, it was in a matter of days or a week or two (this was the case with the Republic. People here spend most of the semester on it).
But the cost isn’t just the immediate financial cost, which can be 6 figures over 4 years if no aid from the school is forthcoming (meeting someone in this situation yesterday pushed me to write this post). The cost is also that to study so intensely, one’s energies can’t really be devoted to anything else.
We have this ridiculous idea that if something is really worth a lot, we have to work independent of that thing for it. For example: if we really want to study Latin, what we have to do is work every other single job for years until we have a ton of cash, or take out massive loans which will require us to work the next 20 years of our lives to pay off, and then go study.
I can safely tell you that if you want to complain about why it looks like the world is getting dumber as we get more and more technology, look no further than the enormous incentives we place on practical learning. Mass media is a form of practical learning: as much as I love reading the paper and keeping up with the news, the idea that I can be an expert on a topic by keeping up with a news flow on it is pretty preposterous. Principles, methods of analysis and the ability to work with arguments need to be formed and experienced at a far deeper level: the news is only good if people know how to be informed.
What’s remarkable, of course, is that plenty of people do go to school, do take on these burdens, and do come out knowing more while having tons of debt. For all the complaining about how English majors know nothing or how philosophy is useless, there are plenty of people in schools all over the US who try, despite how problematic everything is. Some of those people, of course, are being forced to get a degree. They’re being told a degree of any sort is good by people that could probably use a formal education themselves.
Our modes of learning are utter chaos right now: we’re imposing on intellectual virtues what is left of the moral virtues (hard work and frugality aren’t strictly speaking virtues. Criminals can have both). Until this changes, we will continue to do a massive injustice to the life of the mind, our own heritage, and our future.
Feb
25
An Introduction to Xenophon: Is Deliberation Possible In Politics?
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Passages cited are from Xenophon: The Education of Cyrus, trans. Wayne Ambler. Ithaca: Cornell, 2001.
So we know that democracies are brought down by any random set of people with a grievance, and that monarchies and oligarchies collapse because of the desire for democracy (1.1.1). What we also know is that tyrants who can preserve their rule are admired.
You might be thinking right now that you do not admire any tyrants. After all, you know Hitler was bad and Stalin was bad too and Che was mean. You probably also subscribe to a notion of politics which places emphasis on education and awareness for the sake of making as many as possible independent. - I’m not putting anyone down here, I believe this stuff too. -
But wait a second - was there ever a time you dreamed that it might be cool to live in a house with servants that did your bidding willingly? Or that when all is said and done, there’s some notion of the afterlife where all wants are fulfilled?
Even trying to eliminate wants ultimately - i.e. asserting that selfishness is transcended through harmony with the universe - does not solve this problem. Politics is about the here and now: if people have one want that cannot be fulfilled entirely, we have a political problem. Moderation is an aid to politics, and in Aristotle and Plato it is a central task of politics (it certainly helps the gods are known through the city’s laws in both those thinkers).
For now, though, we are starting with the idea that acquisition more than moderation defines politics of all sorts. And we’re going to start by contemplating one who saw that human beings could be managed as herds:
…all those called keepers of animals could plausibly be believed to be the rulers of the animals in their charge. We thought we saw all these herds more willing to obey their keepers than are human beings their rulers; for the herds go wherever their keepers direct them, they feed on whatever land their keepers drive them to, and they abstain from whatever lands their keepers turn them from. And as for such profits as arise from them, these they allow their keepers to use in whatever way they themselves wish. Nor have we ever perceived a herd uniting against its keeper, either so as not to obey or so as not to allow him to use the profits, but herds are more harsh toward all others than they are toward those who both rule over and benefit from them; on the other hand, human beings unite against none more than against those whom they perceive attempting to rule them (1.1.2).
Xenophon hones right in on the fact that the practical logic of politics, that things need to get done, means that there is always an element of ruling people like herds. If we sit and deliberate about everything, and treat each other like equals all the time as opposed to insisting on obedience, the result is chaos.
Is politics purely ruling people like herds? The tyrant, not so charitably, can be described this way. But so can any practical, effective politician.
So what do we make of Cyrus of Persia? According to Xenophon, he was born and initially raised in a Persia that was a republic (none of the following is historically accurate). Eventually he was educated in Medea, where his mother’s father was a despot. The Persian republic has two classes of citizens - “peers,” who did the tasks of governing after receiving an education in continence, obedience to the law, shamefulness and courage. Then there’s everyone else, who works the land and provides food for the peers. The peers, of course, are the only people who are armed.
If this republic sounds like a tyranny, it actually isn’t - it’s just awful to live in. The truth is that Persia isn’t interested in expanding beyond its borders, wants to preserve the institutions it has via rule of law, and their laws do aim at equality. Techincally, anyone can be a peer, and education is open to all if one can afford it. There isn’t much money to go around, either - the main difference between the peers and the rest of the people is in their training, not in their possessions. Both the peers and citizens are taught to live with less.
But Cyrus goes on to conquer great amounts of land and establish a resplendent court with the Persian peers and Median cavalry. And it is Cyrus’ education in Medea that is the key for us. No one would want to live in Persia: the only reason why the peers put up with living there is that they are raised to be obedient. The second Cyrus brings up the possibility of getting material rewards for their training, nearly all leap at the opportunity.
The Medes are ruled by a king whose pomp makes him look ridiculous - fancy clothes and makeup and perfume are a sharp contrast to the training of the Persian peers, as is the luxuriance of the food.
What Cyrus learns from the Medes isn’t simply to love wealth: the first thing he does when given something elaborate from the Median king is distribute it to everyone else at the table. Nadon points out how Machiavellian this is, how Cyrus is being “generous” with the wealth of others and thus losing nothing as he secures his reputation/ability to rule.
But independent of the “Machiavellian” overtones, we can see a more fundamental principle of ruling and ruled that acquistion seems to solve. If one is devoted entirely to gain, and actually gains, then neither ruling nor ruled ever have to be in conflict (as Montesquieu and Machiavelli point out, the Romans found a way of messing this up. Demagogues would assert that the upper classes took more of wealth gained during conflict than they should have).
What is ironic is how this very practical, sensible principle unleashes some of our worst tendencies. It doesn’t seem like asking for more - just one little thing more - should push us into the realm of empire.
And yet, the reason why I wrote this post is because it is the Persian and the Median modes combined which gives us a complete picture of politics. The Persian gives us order for the sake of security and sustinence, but not happiness. The Median gives us no “order,” just one ruling over all, but that one is happy with all the junk he’s collected. A means finds an end, and what is shocking is how our common opinions about politics are reflected in the combination. In fact, many necessary calculations we make about politics are in that combination.
Deliberation may have to come from conceiving politics a whole other way. The trouble with making that move is that we do move further from the actual practice of politics. Men like Cyrus are effective in how they think and act, and will always rule in the largest sense. The question of moderating them probably has to do with how political we want to be.