There is a tide in the affairs of reading . . .

Or so it seems sometimes. But a mighty peculiar tide. In the past few months I seem to keep coming across sayings from an ancient Greek philosopher, Solon. I have for years been aware of him as one of those other names behind the headliners Aristotle, Socrates, etc. Is he somehow suddenly more topical, is it simply a random pattern? I don't know but perhaps I better brush up on him. The latest sighting:

If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart. - Solon

There are reasons for optimism

McKinsey & Company have recently released a new report, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools. McKinsey is one of those organizations that generally invests a good deal of time, money and intellectual effort into producing insightful reports (for example, see Education Knowledge Highlights.) In this instance their primary conclusions are not particularly controversial: there is large variation in performance between schools and between school systems across the US, there are large variations in performance based on demographics, that the US education system is inefficient in terms of resources consumed for results produced compared to other countries, and that there is a high economic cost to the nation based on scholastic underperformance. Heroically, they attempt to quantify that cost (in the hundreds of billions up to the low trillions depending on assumptions and baselines chosen.)

While their numbers are certainly wrong, given the weakness of the underlying data, they at least provide a ballpark estimate. I am also reasonably sceptical of the comparability of the data they use for comparing US versus other countries (Program for International Student Assessment, PISA).

McKinsey's themes are limited, undramatic and straight-forward: better data is required, funding is an issue, minorities are ill-served and schools are important. They properly emphasize that there are reasons for optimism and that there are plenty of avenues to explore that hold out the prospect for material progress.

The weakness of the report, from my perspective, relates to the international comparisons as mentioned above; the disconnect between the supposed comparisons and the economic productivity of the US (if the US has been performing so dismally on education for the past 30 years, how is it that the US economy has performed so comparatively well versus the nominal educational superstars?); and finally, the dearth of recommendations (how do you optimize results within the constraints of the US circumstances?) The report is a worthwhile addition to the overall literacy and education literature. There were a couple of insights that you won't see anywhere else such as:

As a rule, schools in poor neighborhoods spend far less per pupil than schools in their nearby affluent suburbs. Since teacher salaries are one of the biggest components of district cost structures, affluent districts routinely outbid poorer ones for the best teaching talent (in addition to offering typically better working conditions and easier-to-teach children).

Rumour, the swiftest of all evils

Francis Wheen in the January 2010 Literary Review, has a piece, A Wink and A Nudge, of which it would be nice to see more. The book being reviewed is Cass Sunstein's On Rumors. I enjoy the review in part because it is not mealy mouthed as so many reviews are. Wheen slices and dices with a fair amount of relish.

The other reason it is an enjoyable review in its own right (possiby more enjoyable than the book being reviewed) is that Wheen holds the author to at least some minimal level of intellectual rigor and doesn't let him get by with blithe throw-away assertions. The juxtaposition of Sunstein's assertions with Wheen's ripostes demonstrate very clearly which is the more informed thinker.

It's as if rumours never existed before the Internet. In the era of bloggers and Google, according to Sunstein, 'audiences can be manipulated in order to believe things that, whether or not literally false, are not exactly true'. He is unimpressed by the argument that blogs and Google also make it easier than ever to correct false rumours. 'Often the truth fails to catch up with a lie.' Nothing new there: the complaint that a lie can be halfway round the world before the truth pulls its boots on has been heard for centuries. You'll find it in Virgil (Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius ullum - 'Rumour, the swiftest of all evils') and in the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II: 'Open your ears; for which of you will stop / The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks? / I, from the orient to the drooping west, / Making the wind my post-horse ...' Sunstein cites neither of these, presumably because they would sabotage his ahistorical implication that the bush telegraph is a by-product of YouTube and Facebook.

Define: Haruspex

Haruspex, from an article (The Last Book Party by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Harper's Magazine, March 2009).

There is avid speculation as to whom Rich will be writing about this year; she's seen as some kind of haruspex, and everybody is wondering whose entrails she'll be reading this time around.

Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: ha-rus-pex
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, from haru- (akin to chorde gut, cord) + -spex, from specere to look - more at yarn, spy
Date: 1584

Death on the Ice

Just finished Death on the Ice by Cassie Brown and Harold Horwood. The blurb below from the book says it all. A gripping and moving tale. The image of the father wrapping his arms around his two sons trying to keep them warm as they together died of the cold, frozen together in death, is one that is hard to dislodge among the many displays of heroism, resoluteness, and humanity. Regrettably out of print but good for anyone interested in adventure, disaster stories, or maritime tales. Probably 10th grade and up.

From the blurb:

Each year for generations, poor ill-clad Nefoundland fishermen sailed out "to the ice" to hunt seals in the hope of a few pennies in wages from the prosperous merchants of St. John's. The year 1914 witnessed the worst in the long line of tragedies that were part of their harsh way of life.

For two long, freezing days and nights a party of seal hunters - one hundred thirty-two men - were left stranded on an icefield floating in the North Atlantic in winter. They were thinly dressed, with almost no food, and with no hope of shelter on the ice against the snow or the constant, bitter winds. To survive they had to keep moving, always moving. Those who lay down to rest died.

Heroes emerged - one man froze his lips badly, biting off the icicles that were blinding his comrades. Other men froze in their tracks, or went mad with pain and walked off the edge of the icefield. All the while, ships steamed about nearby, unnoticing. And by the time help arrived, two thirds of the men were dead.

George Orwell on the intelligentsia

From an intriguing essay by George Orwell in May, 1945, Notes on Nationalism.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

It is interesting that, in a completely different set of circumstances and historical context, Orwell was wrestling with a concept with which we are still plagued today. Orwell defines nationalism in such a fashion to cover what he is getting at. Today we call it identity politics. But it still amounts to the same thing, the defining of a peoples on some narrow characteristic or feature and denying them agency as being fully human and subject to all the rich variety of all humans.

Think it out

H.G. Wells:

It is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out.

Quoted by G.k. Chesterton in What I Saw in America.

Montaigne on the dangers of over-interpretation

Montaigne, The Complete Works:

Once you start digging down into a piece of writing, there is simply no slant or meaning ... , which the human mind cannot find there.

Somehow I want to pair this with Karl Popper's quotation:

Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.

G.K. Chesterton in What I Saw in America.

It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.

Trained camels

From Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading. And here I thought I was an enthusiastic reader. Now I realize I am just a piker.

To avoid parting with his collection of 117,000 books while travelling, the avid reader and Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, has them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.