The mission of the humanities is to transmit questions about value – and to question values – by testing traditions that build up over centuries and millennia. And within the humanities, it is the discipline of history that provides an antidote to short-termism, by giving pointers to the long future derived from knowledge of the deep past.
.. If we properly engage with it, surely it offers an experience of empathy, and not just any empathy, but a transgenerational empathy, in which we try on human feelings from another era.
.. In his brilliant essay on the impact of television, ‘E Unibus Pluram’, the American novelist David Foster Wallace laments the modern-day scourge of irony: “Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalised irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny.” He fantasises about the emergence of “some weird bunch of anti-rebels … who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles”.
.. Classical music is not always single-entendre (Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has a bruising subtext), but in an era dominated by irony there is something restorative about its sincerity.
.. but for some time the arts have not been an end in themselves; there has only been one end, and that is Growth.
.. there are good pragmatic reasons to invest in music education. Ironically, it might even contribute to Growth. Countless studies reveal that music education will improve our children’s executive function, social ability, literacy, numeracy, concentration, brain function, fine motor skills, creative thinking, working memory, study habits, and even their self-esteem.
.. It is no surprise that classical music becomes elitist, when only the privileged are taught its language.
.. The music that is closest to my heart is chamber music. It is music on a human scale, a single voice to a part: the solo piano repertoire, the lied, the piano trio, the string quartet. A true child of the Enlightenment, the string quartet was described by Goethe as “four reasonable people conversing”.
Schools for Wisdom
Wisdom is a hard-earned intuitive awareness of how things will flow. Wisdom is playful. The wise person loves to share, and cajole and guide and wonder at what she doesn’t know.
.. Literally 50 years ago a classmate in our first year of medical school challenged our professor regarding why we needed to learn so many facts when we could look up information. The reply seems relevant here:
“You only see what you look for, and you only look for what you know.”
.. My gifted high school students HATE project-based group learning. They complain about it constantly. There is a teacher here at our school who does nothing but these gimmicky cooperative group projects that involve the students “discovering” the information themselves (using technology, of course), and my kids are so frustrated by it because they don’t have enough background knowledge to even know how to begin or what to search for online. I’m with Brooks on this – you need a basic framework of information before you can be left to your own devices to direct your own learning. It’s also incredibly inefficient. My students loathe the fact that they’ll spend weeks on something that the teacher could have told them in a single period. Just sayin’
.. Very much in agreement with David Brooks here.
The current worst tendency of educational reformers is the emphasis on skills at the expense of content.
You have to know what you’re talking about before you can talk (or write or think)persuasively. To know what you’re talking about, you have to know a lot: to acquire and then possess a body of knowledge.
The reason why skills are emphasized in education now is not far to seek. Students are referred to as future “workers.” Not citizens, not participants in a civilization that has been going on for quite a while. Education becomes job training, or what’s called the acquisition of “life-skills for the current high-tech economy.”
Are some kids really smarter just because they know more words?
Low-income children are more likely than their higher-income peers to be in factory-like classrooms that allow little interaction and physical movement. As a result, these children spend more time sitting, following directions and listening rather than discussing, debating, solving problems and sharing ideas.
Focusing on the “word gap” further perpetuates these problematic learning opportunities and deprives children of the types of learning experiences required to develop a range of sophisticated capabilities.
The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent
The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.
.. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.
.. The first is to channel the state’s scarce resources in their own direction. This is the absurdity of Mitt Romney’s comment about the “47 percent” who are “dependent upon government.” The reality is that it is those at the top, particularly the tippy-top, of the economic pyramid who have been most effective at capturing government support — and at getting others to pay for it.
Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.
.. “Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-marketin the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.
.. For Jefferson, this equality was at the heart of American exceptionalism: