The more things change, the more they stay the same

 I have been reading a lot but haven't had the blogging bug. Until today, because I read two very different things that clicked together.

I'll start with the Serious Reading: I'm reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a very philosophical novel that I won't attempt to summarize in full. I'm about a third of the way in, in chapter three of Part 3 ("Words Misunderstood") He's describing the experiences of Sabina, a Czech woman who has moved to Switzerland after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Sabina is talking to some other Czech emigres, and one of them starts inquiring into her anti-communist bonafides. Did she engage in sufficiently dissenting activities back in Czechoslovakia? Did she do enough to oppose the Soviet-backed regime?

Sabina's realization is that this guy is the mirror image of the communist functionaries who would scrutinize people's dossiers before they could get jobs or travel visas or official approval for other activities of life. It also reminds me of a point that Vaclav Havel made in his essay "The Power of the Powerless": These modern authoritarian regimes care deeply about appearances. It's not enough to just threaten to kill anyone who tries to thwart the dictator's material interests, they also need to keep up the veneer of ideological uniformity.

Related to the veneer of ideological uniformity, today I learned that in the official Dungeons and Dragons rules they will no longer refer to Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, etc. as "races." They are now "species." It seems that the essentializing of group differences in Dungeons and Dragons comes too close to racism in our real world.

There are two levels on which we could look at this. If we approach it purely on the level of the specific term, well, I don't know what the "right" term is to describe a world of fantasy and magic, with trolls and wizards and lizard-men and gnomes and all sorts of other weird stuff. Surely trolls and humans and lizard-men differ from each other more than, say, humans from different continents differ from each other. On that level, "race" seems an inapt term, and trying to equate the difference between an orc and an elf to the difference between two groups of real humans seems illogical. On the other hand, the existence of half-elves, half-orcs, half-giants (in some stories), etc. suggests that these creatures can mate with humans, and maybe do differ less than most species.

Not to mention that they mix and mingle in many of these fantasy societies, which may be the far more salient reason to say that they are more akin to different human races than to, say, dogs and cats. From a story perspective, Elves and Dwarves and Lizard Men (or Lizard Thems, to be gender-neutral?) are groups that often have their own separate kingdoms but frequently trade and sometimes even mix in bustling trading ports. Their interactions are fantastical, exaggerated stand-ins for conflict and cooperation between human groups, as magical creatures in fairy tales have long been. "Race" captures their story function quite accurately, if sometimes uncomfortably. (And who said fiction is or ought to be uniformly comforting?)

But that's not the real point here. It's not about dogs and cats versus human groups in modern society. It's about moral hygiene. It's about trying to ensure that this fantasy game doesn't corrupt the youth with ideas that run counter to the morality that adults are trying to install. And we've seen this game before, with the 1980's freak-outs about D&D being satanic. Now a new group of prim, proper grown-ups with strict moral codes is trying to parse games of fantasy and imagination for anything that might corrupt the youth, and lo and behold they've found it. How long before Tipper Gore starts bitching about music again?

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Baldwin: "Many Thousands Gone"

"Many Thousands Gone" is about Richard Wright's novel Native Son. Baldwin sees it as a protest novel, which it certainly is, and he hates protest novels. He might indict it for other sins, but I'm pretty sure he just hates protest novels. I'm OK with art having a message as long as the message doesn't get in the way of the art, but everyone will have a different threshold for whether the art has gotten in the way. Baldwin's threshold is pretty sensitive, as is his right. (And given the modern moralizing emphasis on messages when critiquing art, I sympathize with his threshold.)

He also indicts Native Son for having a main character who is largely blank, devoid of much of his own development, and serving largely as a metaphorical or allegorical figure on a journey that will illustrate a critique. That's a stylistic choice which Baldwin hates but I'm more forgiving of. Or, at least, I think I am--I last read Native Son in 1994. Maybe I wouldn't like it if I re-read it. But Baldwin undermines his own indictment by conceding that the main character, Bigger Thomas, represents a primal anger that many black people feel on some level, even if they don't manifest it outwardly. There are traces of Fanon's claim that being black in a white-dominated society produces some deep emotional challenges. Whether it's as common of a feeling as he claims (who'd know without a survey?) the very fact that he sees it as a common theme suggests that there's something to explore, and so I see the artistic justification.

But let's go beyond Baldwin's critique of the novel to some of the wider social commentary in this essay.

Page 26: 

[The black man in America] is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his confining status among us were somehow analogous to disease--cancer, perhaps, or tuberculosis--which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured. In this arena the black man acquires quite another aspect from that which he has in life. We do not know what to do with him in life; if he breaks our sociological and sentimental image of him we are panic-stricken and we feel ourselves betrayed.

First, I like how Baldwin steps back and dares to speak as a generic, detached American observer, pan-racial rather than as one of the black men under that microscope. He doesn't allow himself to be a victim, a pathology, or a Noble Activist. He's just a pan-American observer. It's an admirable conceit. He won't allow white people the sole right to speak as the detached observer on behalf of American Social Analysis.

Second, in American education today, 66 years after the publication of this book, we still cannot bring ourselves to look at black people as simply complicated individuals. The success or failure of a black student is something that requires celebration as social progress or hand-wringing as social failure. John Q. Blackman can't just get a good grade in math and a bad grade in history because he likes math and found his history class boring and hated the early-morning time slot. No, John Q. Blackman succeeded in STEM because we're working so hard on the STEM Pipeline, and he did badly in history because that teacher doesn't know how to Connect With The Black Experience. John Q. Blackman never just gets to be himself, a point that Fanon made.

And it is Bigger Thomas's detachment from any sort of individual personality or cultural richness that bothers Baldwin. Bigger is this alienated observer. Even when real people are alienated, they're more than just alienation. That's Baldwin's critique. I think there's room for effective use of one-dimensional characters, and we'll have to agree to disagree on whether this use was effective, and agree to disagree on whether detaching Bigger from any rich self and experience was making the point or ruining it, but that certainly is the point.

On pages 31-32, Baldwin discusses the discourse around Native Son:

The feeling which prevailed at the time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter, uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very existence, of what strides might be taken in a free democracy; and its indisputable success, proof that Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful facts. Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection, and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. Such a book, we felt with pride, could never have been written before--which was true. Nor could it be written today. It bears already the aspect of a landmark; for Bigger and his brothers have undergone yet another metamorphosis; they have been accepted in baseball leagues and by colleges hitherto exclusive; and they have made a most favorable appearance on the national screen.

It sounds like 2020 and everyone patting themselves on the back for enjoying a good scolding by Ibram Kendi. All of this has happened before and will happen again.

The last sentence is complicated: The events that he describes, the steps of inclusion and acceptance, were real. They were tangible. They mattered. They didn't fix everything but they fixed something, they improved actual lives. I think Baldwin's point is that whether those steps are big or small, however real they are, the euphoria would make it harder for a dour protest novel to be accepted at that moment. Mood is cyclical, and after each time of shame there is progress that's a mix of mere symbol, useful symbol, and tangible improvement, and in that new mood the novel that started it could not be written at that time.

Later in the essay Baldwin notes that the greatest forgiveness of Bigger's crimes came from white liberal characters in the book, not black characters. I think this undermines Baldwin's contention that the book is "just" a protest novel. It strikes me as deeply insightful. Bigger might be, as Baldwin says on page 35, "an incarnation of a myth" but the reality in the people around Bigger is also part of the novel. Maybe it's about them?

On page 38, Baldwin says that the anger in Bigger is a specter in American life, hovering in the hearts of black and white people alike. There's an element of that anger in every black person who has felt injustice and every white person who has felt the associated guilt, but it is just a part of black life, not the whole portion. On page 43 he writes:

If, as I believe, no American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in the skull, then what most significantly fails to be illuminated here is the paradoxical adjustment which is perpetually made, the Negro being compelled to accept the fact that this dark and dangerous and unloved stranger is part of himself forever. Only this recognition sets him in any wise free and it is this, this necessary ability to contain and even, in the most honorable sense of the word, to exploit the [Bigger Thomas] which lends to Negro life its high element of the ironic and which causes the most well-meaning of their American critics to make such exhilarating errors when attempting to understand them. To present Bigger as a warning is simply to reinforce the American guilt and fear concerning him, it is most forcefully to limit him to that previously mentioned social arena in which he has no human validity, it is simply to condemn him to death.

Indeed, on page 40 Baldwin says that black life is so much more than that, and hence he dislikes building a novel around this mythological character.

In other words, he thinks the novel simplifies too much, but isn't all fiction a useful elaboration on a simplified portion of human existence?

Anyway, I will stop here. I tried to read the next essay, concerning a remake of the opera Carmen with black characters, but I couldn't get into it. Let's try the next essay after that, "The Harlem Ghetto."

Latest read: Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe

 The latest read is Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe. Arguably it is pointless to read a critique of liberal guilt after watching MAGA lunatics take over the Capitol. On the other hand, 2020 saw an incredible outpouring of liberal guilt and self-flagellation, and the end result of that liberal guilt and self-flagellation is that the mob was not stopped. Mind you, I'm not placing all of the blame on any particular liberal official or faction, or denying the role of the Trump administration (far from it). Trump and his cult are indeed the bad guys here, and beating ourselves up did exactly nothing to stop them. Say everything that needs saying about the ignorance and bigotry of MAGA and I will agree with the big picture and most details. (I will always reserve the right to dissent from specifics, but I might also assign that dissent a low priority, depending on the detail.) 

But given all of that, what did liberal guilt do to stop them? Did liberal guilt get reinforcements in place sooner? Did liberal guilt erect more barricades or get more police out there? Did liberal guilt speed any evacuations? Did liberal guilt talk any Trumpanzees out of the insane notion that Democrats rigged the election for Biden but forgot to rig enough Senate seats to give themselves a majority prior to the Georgia elections? Did liberal guilt persuade anyone that the ghost of Hugo Chavez isn't dropping off faked ballots in Maine?

Liberal guilt is worth exploring precisely because it is the irrelevant distraction that liberals turn to. And, honestly, what is simultaneously heartening and disheartening about this book is just how little things have changed. All of this has happened before and will happen again. To wit, page 26 quotes a particularly woke passage from a Vogue article. I don't know exactly when it was published, but presumably in or shortly before 1970 (the year that Wolfe's Radical Chic essay was published). There are two salient points here:

1. Vogue was woke even back then. I bring this up because the anti-PC corners of the internet have, in the past few years, taken note of the extreme wokeness of Teen Vogue. They find it strange, and quote excerpts of articles with definitely woke viewpoints. Being a person who has never read fashion magazines, I likewise find it strange. Then again, since I've never read fashion magazines, how would I know what is normal for them? There's the old joke about only reading Playboy for the articles, acknowledging (and protesting!) that Playboy has articles about things other than naked women. I guess it makes sense that a fashion mag would have political articles about things besides the gender politics of skirt lengths or whatever.
2. The Vogue article capitalized Black but put white in lower-case. 2020 saw a lot of this, and a lot of carping about how it was a new and unreasonable stylistic choice. The reasonableness is very much a matter of opinion, but the newness is factually wrong, as I now know.

At this point I don't have a lot else to say about the book. But I'm glad to see that all of this has happened before and will happen again.

Hofstadter, Chapters 10-12

Just a few scattered thoughts.  I don't have it in me to blog chapters 10-11 in detail, and I'm only part-way through chapter 12.

Chapter 10 is "Self-Help and Spiritual Technology", which continues to discuss America's preference for the practical over the theoretical. There's a lot of reverence for "self-made men", never mind that they are extraordinary, and even at their best they are reliant on employees who are decidedly not "self-made." America is a country where everyone believes that they can and should be above average, and so should their kids.

Chapter 11, "Variations on a Theme" talks about a lot of things.  One of them is the labor movement, which was not truly successful until it shed the leftist intellectuals who wanted broad social reform and focused on very specific, tangible goals like wages, working conditions, etc. There's absolutely nothing wrong with favoring the practical over the theoretical. That's not the sort of anti-intellectualism that distresses me in academia.

Chapter 11 also discusses farmers, and the divide between gentlemen farmers, who saw their farms as businesses that could and should adopt new technology, and "dirt farmers", who had a deep resistance to agricultural science.  They saw farming as a cultural matter, a practice handed down in families, not something to be improved via soil science, plant science, etc. Interestingly, when the land grant universities were founded, few children of farmers attended, and those who did often studied things that would get them out of farming.

Chapter 12 notes that as much as Americans distrust intellect, they have deep hopes for schools.  Schools are not to challenge people and push them to ever-greater heights.  Rather, schools are to shape people into (depending on the era) Christians, citizens, assimilated members of an Anglo-dominated culture, workers, or whatever else the era needs. The schools exist to mold us, not to challenge us, build up that which is best in us, or push us to the frontiers of knowledge (unless pushing us to the frontiers of knowledge will help us build weapons to defeat Russia).

It's something of a paradox that a country with such long traditions of racism nonetheless believes that humans are infinitely malleable, fully determined by nurture.  Or, at least, while racists might believe that different groups have different potentials, within those confines they are completely malleable, and so schools should shape each group to fit into some vision of society. It defies the simple dichotomies that people usually bring to "nature vs nurture" discussions.

(Since I've touched on that third rail, I need to make it clear that I don't believe for one moment that there are meaningful differences between races.  We are too similar if you actually get to know people, the boundaries are too fuzzy, and the cognitive and social challenges that our ancestors faced spanned basically the same range on every continent. For a hundred thousand years we were mostly hunters and gatherers, then agriculture and herding commenced virtually everywhere, and everyone started specializing and trading. Finally, however meaningless racial boundaries and comparisons might be on a global scale, they're even less meaningful in a country like America.  We have too much mixed ancestry, and the groups that have been most at odds--southern whites and African-Americans--have the most shared ancestry of all, due to their complicated and tragic histories.)

Finally, chapter 12 notes that, as much as Americans think schools are needed to shape society, nobody has ever wanted high taxes for schools.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Next book: Plutarch's Lives

My next reading project will be Parallel Lives by Plutarch, a compilation of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans.  Because all of this has happened before and will happen again.

Ehrenreich, start of Chp. 3

I've started chapter 3.  She's chronicling the way that the media "discovered" the "white working class" and "middle America" after Nixon's win in 1968.  It sounds a lot like the media's discovery of conservative whites after 2016.  Of course, the backlash against 60's liberals and hippies and civil rights and whatnot was broader than lower-income whites, there were plenty of affluent whites who were plenty reactionary, there were plenty of liberal and moderate white people with modest incomes, and there were plenty of non-white people who worked similar jobs and had similar lifestyles.  But the media became obsessed with a certain stereotype of working-class white men, and vacillated between treating them as distasteful and Authentic.  Sometimes the focus was on how to appease them, sometimes on why the Better Classes should never appease them, but they were definitely the focus.

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Quick thoughts on "We're All Multiculturalists Now"

Much of this book is descriptive, and reasonably even-handed for such a hot button topic as multiculturalism.  There's a lot of discussion of history, both noting that debates over cultural assimilation of immigrants are nothing new (all of this has happened before and will happen again) and also noting that assimilation mostly works.  HOWEVER, what is different is that after decades of ever-increasing attempts at integration, with a large-scale marshaling of resources for a more-or-less benevolent (though not necessarily respectful or well-informed) effort to reduce educational and economic disparities, it's much harder for some people to sustain faith in integration.  It's worked for new immigrants but not for a continuing underclass.  The woes of that underclass arise directly from America's original sin, and will not be remedied easily.  So, some people throw up their hands cynically and say do nothing, while others throw up their hands earnestly and decide to define the problem away by celebrating difference, and declaring that disparities come from policymakers' failures to properly account for cultural difference rather than inflicted pathology.

I think I largely agree with this.  We are desperate to define a problem away, or channel guilt, because if we don't define the problem as arising from some difference worthy of celebration then people will define it as arising from some difference worthy of scorn.

But, as I've said before about how you can have different theories of failure, you can have different theories of difference.  Making difference into too big of a thing will eventually cause some to question whether it is always a positive thing, let alone a positive thing that always favors a group that you are trying to shield from harm.  As unsavory as the motive is, they will be able to wrap themselves in the mantle of disinterestedness and open-mindedness.  Spend enough time saying that groups are different and eventually someone will come along and say "Yeah, groups are different, and I freakin' love my group!  My group is the best!"

And that never takes us anywhere good.

But as easy as it is to scold those who celebrate difference, it's a response to an original sin that we've been unable to wash away.  Its effects linger, they resist efforts at reform, and the legitimacy of the system requires that we either remove the difference, rationalize it, or properly assign blame.  The first has yet to be realized, the third is something that people try to do but don't really get satisfying results from, so we go to the second.

Privilege, class, and diversity

I like this essay from the Hedgehog Review.  The three final paragraphs are the best:

 The concept of diversity first germinated in the corporate world, and was quickly seized upon by academia in the 1990s. It arrived just in the nick of time. The previous two decades had seen the traditional mission of the university undermined, if not abandoned, under pressure from a highly politicized turn in the humanities that made its case in epistemic terms, essentially debunking the very idea of knowledge. The role that the upper-tier university soon discovered for itself, upon the collapse of ideals of liberal learning, was no longer that of training citizens for humane self-government, but rather that of supplying a cadre to staff the corporations, the NGOs, and the foundations. That is, the main function of elite schools is to supply the personnel required to run things in an economy that has become more managerial than entrepreneurial.

The institutional desideratum—the political antipode to hated “privilege”—is no longer equality, but diversity. This greatly eases the contradiction Furet identified, shielding the system from democratic pressure. It also protects the self-conception of our meritocrats as agents of historical progress. As was the case with the Soviet nomenklatura, and the leading Jacobins as well, it is precisely our elite that searches out instances of lingering privilege, now understood as obstacles to fulfillment of the moral imperative of diversity. Under this dispensation, the figure of the “straight white male” (abstracted from class distinctions) has been made to do a lot of symbolic work, the heavy lifting of legitimation (in his own hapless way, as sacrificial goat). We eventually reached a point where this was more weight than our electoral system could take, as the election of 2016 revealed. Whether one regards that event as a catastrophe or as a rupture that promises the possibility of glasnost, its immediate effect has been panic in every precinct where the new class accommodations have been functioning smoothly, and a doubling down on the moralizing that previously secured them against popular anger. We’ll see how that goes. 

The term shibboleth is interesting. Its definitions include “a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons” and “a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.” It is a random Hebrew word that acquired its present meaning when it was used by the Gileadites as a test to identify members of an enemy tribe, the Ephraimites, as they attempted to flee across the Jordan River. Ephraimites could not pronounce the sound sh (Judges 12:4–6). I think it is fair to say that one’s ability to pronounce the word diversity with a straight face, indeed with sincerity made scrupulously evident, serves as a shibboleth in this original sense. It answers the question of whether one wants to continue as a member in good standing of those institutions that secure one’s position in the upper middle class.

It's all about legitimizing the status quo while dismissing class.  An upper class can be diverse in terms of gender, sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc., but by definition it cannot be diverse in terms of class, nor can it be equal to other classes. (And if you're confused about why I would separately list sex, sexuality, and gender in the previous sentence, that just points to another shibboleth that you can't pronounce, you heretic.)

I think it's particularly interesting how diversity is now the concept placed in tension with privilege, instead of equality.  When I was a kid, the privileged kids had affluent parents.  Now the white lower-middle class is deemed privileged, and the men of that class especially so.  That's quite a rhetorical trick.  Equality (whether economic, or of opportunity, or whatever) got pushed aside somewhere along the line, replacing solidarity with celebration of difference.  I'm not a Marxist, but on this one I see their point.  Yes, there are very valid points about the differences in the life experiences of men and women, or white people and people of color, but it's quite remarkable that the word we used to use for rich kids got co-opted to frame those very valid points.  The word may have a new denotation, but it still carries old connotations that sit uneasily with the new usage.

Also, I think there's a very important point in there about the difference between a managerial economy and an entrepreneurial one.  Founders/owners of privately-held businesses (or even businesses that have gone public but still have a very strong Founder presence) are often quite different from people who climbed corporate ladders.  They aren't always self-made people who rose from nothing (Trump built his empire on inherited wealth) but they are people who spent most of their careers making their own decisions (sometimes appropriately bold decisions, sometimes risky follies) rather than answering to a boss.

Corporate managers aren't fans of the regulatory state, but they can often make compromises (even lucrative compromises) with the regulatory state more easily than an entrepreneur can.  A corporate manager has spent his career answering to people, and following rules written by higher-ups who may be several time zones away.  This leads to a different demeanor and ideology than men who didn't have bosses.  And while privately-held companies typically face most of the same PR and HR issues as corporations of similar size, the quirks of founders play can play more of a role in how they respond to those issues (though more on that below), so they may have more room for managerial liberals (with all of their diversity talk) than a company still dominated by an entrepreneur.

One interesting exception to this dichotomy is Silicon Valley.  Large tech companies are mostly young (at least in comparison with other corporations of similar size, though Google just entered its third decade), but they are, for the most part, very socially liberal.  Mind you, I have no doubt that there are plenty of Google and Facebook managers who hate taxes and regulations, but the prevailing cultures of those places are famously liberal (at least on social issues) and unabashedly pro-diversity (unlike most of the right-wing billionaires who rose to power in the pre-internet era).  This has helped them make peace with the same cultural and regulatory issues as older corporations.

So, Trump is, on the one hand, a rich guy who has ripped off many ordinary people, and treated many workers like shit.  On the other hand, in this economy dominated by corporate managerial types (often liberal, at least in their acceptance of rules and certain PR and HR imperatives) rather than entrepreneurial types (who are often right-wing), Trump is an exception, a rich man who doesn't talk like a corporate manager.  That helps me to understand why he has appeal among some (not all) middle class white voters.  It's not the only factor, of course, but it's among them, and helps to make sense of why they see him as different from the other rich guys.

Finally, let's return to this line:

It also protects the self-conception of our meritocrats as agents of historical progress. As was the case with the Soviet nomenklatura, and the leading Jacobins as well, it is precisely our elite that searches out instances of lingering privilege, now understood as obstacles to fulfillment of the moral imperative of diversity.

This helps me understand why so many academic administrators honestly see themselves as "change agents", even while repeating the same slogans and buzzwords as every other administrator out there, and diligently following in the templates taught to them at workshops.  It explains to me why academic administrators from families of administrators see themselves and their advancement as bold and progressive rather than the fulfillment of a status quo destiny laid upon them when sperm met egg.  It helps explain why I, from a family that has grown more educated with each generation, a family that still circulates stories of immigrant roots, feel old-fashioned and traditional rather than progressive in academia:  Because the born insiders are all proclaiming their progressivity, leaving tradition as the only refuge of the outsider.

My only dissent from the above-quoted observation is that I don't see this as a uniquely contemporary thing, an artifact of a new liberalism that replaces economic class solidarity with diversity.  Hofstadter noted that Dewey's disciples, all managerial types, were desperate to find a way to institutionalize anti-institutional ideology.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

All of this has happened before and will happen again

Since one of the themes of this blog is that all of this has happened before and will happen again, I present this amazing cartoon:

Some of this has happened before but will not happen again

A few months ago in a used book store I came across a copy of Max Planck's textbook on thermodynamics.  I am amused by this description on the inside cover:

"...meeting the needs of both students and research workers..."

The text is dense, terse, and requires effort of the reader.  I neither agree nor disagree with the idea that it can meet the needs of students, because the concept of a student's "needs" must be unpacked.  What are those "needs"?  By what criteria do we distinguish between what we might properly call a "need" and what might be better framed as a student's mere "desire" or "wish"?  Which wishes are reasonable for a textbook author to comply with?  And who are the students that we have in mind?

While I offer no firm conclusion on whether this textbook meets the needs of students as I might wish to frame the concept, I can say with great confidence that most of my colleagues would denounce this book as inappropriate for the needs of the modern student.  And so we see how the world has changed.

The Sacred Scrolls are not inerrant.  While some of the the textbooks of the past are similar to the present, it's clear that Planck's idea of appropriate pedagogy is not a good match to the modern understanding.  But don't worry:  While we might not uphold Planck's intellectual standards, we do allow trash TV stars to become President, and we do everything in our power to make college degrees more attainable.

Hayek, Chapter 9

Having talked about the difficulty in getting people to see emergent order in chapter 8, in chapter 9 he talks about the belief in the superiority of planning over emergent order.  This is definitely a thing, especially among the educated classes.  I find it funny that technocratic liberals also tend to like "natural" food.  It's generally believed that if there is emergent order in an institution then there must be missed opportunities, because resources are not being directed.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how modern this is.  Central authorities have always banged their heads against emergent orders, determined to rule rather than go with the flow.  I doubt that they put it in the same technocratic language as their modern counterparts, but the ability to let go and steer on the margins has never been a strong suit of rulers.

Sadly, this chapter is somewhat jumbled (he took the opposition to planning a bit too literally), and not always well-argued.  Steps and connections are left out.  I did manage to parse out, eventually, what he meant when he talked about people trying to plan the progress of the human mind:  I don't think he was talking about engineering the human mind like geneticists in Orphan Black, but rather plans for scientific discoveries, technological progress, and the progression of ideas in other scholarly endeavors.  The problem is that you can't plan where you will go when you engage with the unknown.  Things almost always turn out to be harder than you planned, and sometimes serendipity happens.  Hayek's point was that if we knew what we could/would discover next then we would have already made the discovery, so there's a logical impossibility.  I just wish he had organized his thoughts more clearly.

After arguing that, Hayek quickly leaps to arguing against the idea that truth is not determined by deduction from observations, but from hidden causes which have determined the thinker's conclusions, and thus truth or falsehood can depend on the social position (race, class, etc.) of the person making the argument. It seems that he's arguing against ideas of implicit bias, but I don't really see how he got there from his previous point, unless he's making a very subtle argument against the idea that all of our knowledge is already in our minds (hence the possibility of planning) but some of it is fake (hence the possibility of bias or distortion).  It's a big leap of the argument.

Also, while I have no doubt that modern political correctness has plenty of antecedents (remember, one of the main themes of this blog is that all of this has happened before and will happen again), I'm mildly surprised that 1952 had substantial numbers of people arguing that implicit bias is a huge thing, or that the privileged cannot know certain things.  I suppose it's possible that the Marxists might have made the second point (I don't know, I'm just speculating) but that's the sort of argument that could easily be wielded by peasants against planners.  (Unless he's arguing against the idea that only the top of the ladder has the proper perspective.)

Near the end of this chapter, Hayek does offer one point that I like very, very much:  It is dangerous when people abandon religion but see no reason to submit to anything that they do not rationally understand. If people respect neither God nor arbitrary moral codes (and ultimately all "ought" statements are rooted in assertions rather than logic, a point that I spent this afternoon making to a colleague) then they could engage in great hubris.  If this comes at the same point in historical evolution as the rise of great technological capabilities (e.g. nuclear weapons) and a belief in the superiority of planning over emergent order then the unguided might create upheavals that lead to disaster.

I think we have the nuclear genie more-or-less controlled (arguably less, right now, with North Korea rattling the saber) but in higher ed I think we have undermined too many principles, leaving only short-term thought about individual selfishness.  Hayek might be greatly sympathetic to the good that can emerge from selfishness in market economies (and I am, as well) but institutions need rules (even for-profit companies require a certain amount of coordinated sacrifice for greater benefit down the road--it's the whole concept of investment in a project that involves more than one person!), and non-profit educational institutions supposedly offer a chance be supported while indulging one's passions via creative pursuits, in exchange for work that benefits students.  However, when the concept of duty collapses, when the quasi-monastic sacrifice inherent in academic work is regarded as an oppressive norm feasible only for men of a certain class and era, when pervasive and unfair bias is seen as driving every decision, then what is left but short-term selfishness?

Hayek, as a man of ideas, is less of a capitalist than he'd ever admit.  He wanted people to submit to duty and purpose without a clear answer to "Why do I have to listen and what is in it for me?"

Back to book blogging: The Philosophy of John Dewey

I'm reading a collection of essays by John Dewey.  About 2/3 of the volume is on philosophy, and largely out of my depth, so I've just skimmed those parts.  But now I'm at a 1931 essay titled "Science and Society."  The editor of the volume indicates that this essay deviates somewhat from Dewey's usual views on the nature of knowledge--he treats science as impersonal, objective knowledge, whereas usually he stressed the contextual nature of knowledge and learning.  That is actually unsurprising to me, because the second half of this essay reads as technocratic, and technocrats have a soft spot for the opportunities offered by objective knowledge.  Of course, he spends the first half of the essay urging would-be technocrats to be less smug (and good for that!) but Dewey was neither the first nor last technocrat to think that if they just rethought the project they could totes make it work.

He starts by noting that the societal changes wrought by technology had not actually changed human nature:

In its effect upon men's external habits, dominant interests, the conditions under which they work and associate, whether in the family, the factory, the state, or internationally, science is by far the most potent social factor in the modern world. It operates, however, through its undesigned effects rather than as a transforming influence of men's thoughts and purposes. This contrast between outer and inner operation is the great contradiction in our lives. Habits of thought and desire remain in substance what they were before the rise of science, while the conditions under which they take effect have been radically altered by science.

Maybe that's because technology isn't actually new to human beings.  Indeed, we control the planet precisely because we are the best tool-users on the planet.  So a technology-reliant existence isn't a new existence for humans, it's actually all that humans have known for at least a few tens of thousands of years.  We fought off predators by using spears rather than superior muscles and speed, we survived the ice age with fire and blankets rather than fur and insulating fat, and we acquired food with tools rather than claws.  And while I freely concede that the pace of technological change today is greater than in ancient times, when I read the classics I do not notice any substantial differences in human nature.  The Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Greek philosophers, the scribes of ancient Egypt, they all show people who are remarkably similar to today's people.  The educated classes of today feel compelled to visibly celebrate diversity, but similarity is a much bigger fact of human existence.

Having just conceded that humans of 1931 are remarkably similar to those of the past, Dewey goes on to note that information technology has not transformed society:

No sooner do we begin to understand the meaning of one such change than another comes and displaces the former. Our minds are dulled by the sudden and repeated impacts. Externally, science through its applications is manufacturing the conditions of our institutions at such a speed that we are too bewildered to know what sort of civilization is in process of making.

Because of this confusion, we cannot even draw up a ledger account of social gains and losses due to the operation of science. But at least we know that the earlier optimism which thought that the advance of natural science was to dispel superstition, ignorance, and oppression, by placing reason on the throne, was unjustified. Some superstitions have given way, but the mechanical devices due to science have made it possible to spread new kinds of error and delusion among a larger multitude.

... 

The airplane binds men at a distance in closer bonds of intercourse and understanding, or it rains missiles of death upon hapless populations.

Honestly, this reads like an account of the hopes and subsequent disappointments among those who envisioned the internet as transforming society and freeing people.  Yes, the internet has enabled great things, and spread information to be used for good, but it has also been used for dull entertainment and malignant propaganda.  Let us remember that Wikileaks was originally founded as a site for undermining totalitarian regimes via the cleansing light of truth, but in 2016 it was used to advance the political machinations of a Russian dictator and his billionaire puppet.

Also, if we were to change the dated term "mechanical devices due to science" to "information technologies enabled by science" we would have something that any reader in 2017 would think is a critique of the internet.  It's been noted before that the rise of cinema was accompanied by predictions of the demise of universities (classes would be delivered on film reels), as was the rise of television.  It seems that every new information technology elicits the exact same cycle of euphoria and frustration.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Beyond information technology, Dewey's basic point is not so different from Kentaro Toyama's Law of Amplification: Technology doesn't so much level or transform human society as allow us to do what we were doing before only moreso.  The advantaged can derive more advantages from technology (though they can also fall if they don't keep up with competitors), the disadvantaged can be left behind in the new economy as they were in the old (though some can also discover a new path forward), people who seek to do good with technology can do more good with new technology, and people who seek to do ill with technology can do the same.

Having noted the ways that science has enabled both good and evil, merely amplifying on human nature rather than transforming it, Dewey goes on to note a point that has my most enthusiastic agreement (though not his):

Shall we try to improve the hearts of men regard without to the new methods which science puts at our disposal? There are those, men in position in church and state, who urge this course. They trust to a transforming influence of a morals and religion which have not been affected by science to change human desire and purpose so that they will employ science and machine technology for beneficent social ends. The recent Encyclical of the Pope is a classic document in expression of a point of view which would rely wholly upon inner regeneration to protect society from the injurious uses to which science may be put. Quite apart from any ecclesiastical connection, there are many "intellectuals" who appeal to inner "spiritual" concepts, totally divorced from scientific intelligence, to effect the needed work.

Indeed, my own belief is that character matters in every age.  Dewey will go on to urge that we apply the methods of social science to solve the problems of human society.  However, the 20th century saw the formulation of theorems (e.g. Holmstrom's Theorem, Sen's Theorem) that demonstrated the limits of what can be accomplished via institutional designs.  There's no way to totally automate decision-making.  And central planning failed.  In my own job I am seeing more and more evidence that "best practices" only take you so far, and in the end you need to hire and retain people with character and values that drive them to do the job within a reasonable incentive structure; process only gets you so far.

Anyway, Dewey does name two areas where the application of science to social problems has been beneficial:  Insurance (where we use statistics to price and mitigate risk, so that people can take the risks that inevitably accompany attempts at great things) and the germ theory of disease/hygiene.  However, the first example involves something that people can choose to buy, and that can be priced without subjective value judgments, and the second ties quite closely to facts of the natural world.  Neither relies too much on the steering of behavior.

He goes on to consider education as an arena for the application of science to social problems.  Despite the exasperation I often display with educational fads, I actually have a lot of sympathy for the idea of applying science to educational problems.  However, I believe that the passions aroused by the cultural, ethical, and political dimensions of education often leak into educational studies, and people believe that their subjective choices about which question to ask shape the answers that they get and (more importantly) the ways in which those answers are applied.  For instance, it is only very recently that people looked at whether "reformed" physics classes were as good as "traditional" classes for improving student understanding of the topics and skills that get greater emphasis in "traditional" classes (since "reformed" classes often emphasis different aspects of the subject).  For decades, many researchers were emphasizing "conceptual understanding" over quantitative problem-solving, for a number of reasons.  I have argued before that this is in part because of the cultural baggage that gets attached to mathematical reasoning (at least in the US), but most of the people who study physics education in the US are natural scientists who have not done a lot of reading on American cultural history, so they are blind to their own assumptions.  It is interesting that the lead author in the study I linked here is a psychologist, not a physicist, and is probably better-trained at unpacking cultural baggage and accompanying assumptions than most physicists would be.

(Then again, Dewey was trained as a philosopher, a field that specializes in skewering assumptions since at least the days of Socrates, yet he also fell into the technocrats' trap.)

So, as far as my own views go, I'm a big fan of social science as science, but skeptical of social engineering.  It's the difference between pure and applied science.  As far as Dewey, I find it fascinating that he could start an essay by noting the ways in which the technological environment experienced by humans has failed to change thought and behavior, but then express great confidence that science can be used to shape social environments in such a way as to steer human behavior.  In that sense the essay falls flat.  On the other hand, I give him full marks for understanding the distinction between changes in the technological environment and changes in human nature.  He even managed to note ways in which the information technology of his era failed to live up to hype about transforming society.  Too bad he didn't carry that humility forward in thinking about social engineering.

Two Cultures: Where's the other one, dude?

I finished reading C.P. Snow's Two Cultures essay of 1959.  It isn't quite what I was expecting.  I've always heard it described as a lament of the divide between the two sides of academia.  I was thus expecting some sort of essay along the lines of a defense of broad liberal arts education, and I was dreading the platitudes.  Instead, it seems to be more of a critique of the UK's historic emphasis on humanities over the sciences in their elite educational establishments, followed by a comparison of the ways in which the UK, US, and USSR educated people in the 1950's and a discussion of alleged needs for more scientists and engineers in the UK. He's not trying to integrate science and humanities so much as get STEM up on the pedestal.  He might insist that it's a call for equality, but there's precious little discussion of the UK's needs in any area outside STEM, or a comparison of how other countries educate people in subjects besides STEM. In many ways it could be read as an early "STEM crisis" narrative.  However, it's difficult for me to extract much from that for comparative purposes, because I'm mostly only familiar with American "STEM crisis" narratives, not the UK analogues, so I can't really say if this essay is sign of everything happening before and happening again, or a sign of genuine change.

Here are some interesting tidbits that I can take away from it:

First, Snow acknowledges that the Industrial Revolution happened in the UK despite the lack of a first-rate basic science establishment in the 18th century, and without much involvement from college grads.  This is an important thing, one under-appreciated by the STEM crisis hand-wringers.  I made this point before regarding Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon.  I wish he'd considered what this might mean for future economic development.  We academics over-estimate our own importance, and he went from academia to the Ministry of Labour and then a post as a civil service commissioner.

Second, the differences that Snow notes between the US, UK, and USSR systems, regarding their relative levels of specialization, seem to remain true today.  To this day, Russian scientific research institutes often have incredibly narrow names and mandates.  They don't produce mechanical engineers; they produce graduates in computational thermal systems analysis, and structural mechanics, and so forth.

Third, he traces the cultural differences between science and humanities to the fact that the humanities scholars study the human condition, which tends to inflict pessimism, while scientists believe that technical solutions to problems are possible.  On that point I agree with him completely.  I wish he'd said something interesting about how to educate people who integrate those mindsets on some interesting level, not just "OMG, I'm, like, so broad-minded!  Because I see multiple perspectives!"

Fourth, I give Snow credit for recognizing that the production of Einsteins is not the main task of a STEM education program.  He believes that the "alpha plus" types will do fine as long as they're put in some sort of half-decent academic environment.  It's hard to screw up with them.  It's also pretty hard to screw up the "alpha" types.  (He seems to have adopted the language of Huxley's Brave New World here.)  He recognizes that the hard part is training people in the third tier, some of whom will do technical work but many of whom will go on to do managerial or business ("human") work in the technical fields.  I give him credit for recognizing that that's more important than trying to ensure that a system maximizes the output of top talent.  With the top talent you mostly have to get out of the way, and it's only the dilettantes who worry about how The System is allegedly so unfair to would-be Einsteins.  He doesn't have much in the way of practical advice on how to do it, but he gets full points for at least recognizing it.

He has one spectacularly wrong prediction:  He predicted that since human ability is pretty much the same everywhere it's inevitable that the gap between the rich industrialized world and the rest of the world would evaporate by 2000.  While he was right on the even distribution of ability around the world, he under-estimated the systemic, cultural, and institutional factors that are needed to develop successful industrial sectors.  That said, he was at least right that the poor countries would start to compete with rich countries; by 2000 the off-shoring of factories was well underway, and this November we felt the effects of that in the US election.

So, in sum, Snow's "Two Cultures" lecture isn't what it is usually cited for being about, but it contains an interesting bunch of tidbits.  I purchased an edition with several more essays and lecture transcripts, so I'll have more to say about Snow in the coming week.

Next reading project: Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais

I'm currently reading Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais.  It's a biography of Einstein, heavy on scientific detail.  I'm about half-way through.  Some key observations:

• Historians have debated ad nauseum whether Einstein himself was aware of the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1905.  Pais seems to believe that he wasn't.  However, even if Einstein himself wasn't, it was very much "in the air" that no sound experiment had ever found direct evidence of the ether, and Einstein was certainly aware of that fact.  Moreover, regardless of whether Einstein himself knew of Michelson and Morley, many of the prominent physicists of that era were definitely aware of it, and directly cited it.  To the extent that Einstein's work on relativity was guided by concerns that we well-known among scientists of that era, he was influenced by Michelson and Morley, irrespective of whether he was directly aware of their experimental result.
• Poincare, Lorentz, Fitzgerald, and others had all worked on ways to modify physics to account for the non-observation of ether effects.  The Lorentz transformations and length contraction formula had been written down, and Poincare openly pondered a possible need for modifying the laws of motion.  However, everybody was positing these things as either ad hoc fixes or as mere observations on the symmetry of the Maxwell equations.  Nobody prior to Einstein posed these ideas as being derivable from the equivalence of all inertial reference frames.  That's Einstein's real contribution:  To see that these equations that address all of the deficits in the ether model are in fact consequences of the laws of physics being the same to all observers.
• I learned about the post of privatdozent in German-language universities, which seems quite similar to the modern phenomenon of the adjunct professor.  Apparently a privatdozent could teach classes and receive a very modest fee for it, but did not have the status, institutional role, salary, or research support that a professor would enjoy.  Many people back then said that academic careers were only suitable for the independently wealthy.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Metzger: Administrations and Bureaucracy

Now Metzger is discussing the growth of university bureaucracy and the backlash against it.  As universities expanded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries they inevitably became more bureaucratic.  Metzger has no problem accepting Thorstein Veblen's decision to blame boards of trustees (mostly businessmen) for some of it, but also notes that it helped to protect academic freedom to the extent that professors were subject to rules and procedures rather than the whim of the president of the university.  I definitely need to read something by Veblen at some point.

I also like how Metzger notes that expanded PhD production had an effect on the academic job market.  (Page 454)  This is something that some people still can't wrap their minds around, even though the National Science Foundation just released a report on how many new PhDs are taking jobs as postdocs rather than industry despite the alleged need for more PhDs in industry.

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

The Silicon Valley Bros of their time

On page 141 of The Age of Reform, Hofstadter quotes Progressive journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd as saying:

Our great moneymakers have sprung in one generation into seats of power kings do not know.  The forces and the wealth are new, and have been the opportunity of new men.  Without restraints of culture, experience, the pride, or even the inherited caution of class or rank, these men, intoxicated, think they are the wave instead of the float, and that they have created the business which has created them.  To them science is but a never-ending repertoire of investments stored by by nature for the syndicates, governments but a fountain of franchises, the nations but customers in squads, and a million the unit of a new arithmetic of wealth written for them.  They claim a power without control, exercised through forms which make it secret, anonymous, and perpetual.

This reads like a condemnation of the arrogance of hyper-macho Silicon Valley types talking about disruption.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

The Age of Reform, Chapters 1-2

Not much to say here. Chapter 1 is spent debunking the myth of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer. Hofstadter argues that for most of US history, and certainly by the early 19th century, farming was a capitalistic enterprise, where families were not farming merely to produce for their own table but to produce a surplus that they could sell for profit.  The idea of a farm where people grew all of their own foods, raised the sheep or plants that produced their clothing, did their own blacksmithing, etc., was largely a myth.  Of course, since farming was a for-profit endeavor in a wider economy it was subject to ups and downs, bubbles of land speculation, and all of the other risks that come when rewards go up.

He also spends a lot of time in the first two chapters arguing that the myth of the virtuous farmer as some simpler, purer being than city folk came from a lot of romantic speculation that never matched reality, including speculation by plantation owner Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson could only be considered "self-sufficient" if (1) you ignore the fact that he used slave labor and (2) had 300 people working on his plantation, i.e. enough people that they could specialize in different things, so what he had was less a model of self-sufficiency than a model of a diversified and specialized (though thoroughly unfree) local economy.  The myth of the self-sufficient and virtuous farmer only grew larger as family farming declined, the industrial economy rose, and farmers and immigrants alike left their homes for American cities.  That era saw a lot of xenophobia, and a lot of militarism in isolationist guise:

On the surface there was a strong note of anti-militarism and anti-imperialism in the Populist movement and Bryan democracy.  Populists were opposed to large standing armies and large naval establishments; most of them supported Bryan's resistance to the acquisition of the Philippines.  They looked upon the military as a threat to democracy, upon imperialist acquisitions as gains only to financiers and "monarchists", not to the people.  But what they chiefly objected to was institutional militarism rather than war itself, imperialism rather than jingoism.  Under a patina of pacifist rhetoric they were profoundly nationalistic and bellicose.  What the nativist mind most resolutely opposed was not so much war itself as co-operation with European governments for any ends at all. (page 85)

I didn't intend to use this blog to talk about Brexit or Trump, but all of this has happened before and will happen again.

Next Book: The Age of Reform

Since I love Richard Hofstadter so much, my next read will be The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter.  This book is, on the surface, not about education at all, but about the Progressive Era and (to a lesser extent) the New Deal Era.  The book is not offered as a detailed account of policy-making and the associated negotiations among players, much less a detailed and quantitative account of the consequences of those policies.  Rather, it is a story of the ideas that were popular in the broad middle of American culture, to get a sense of Americans as a people.

Already, just in the introduction, I can tell that I will like this book.  I shall quote from page 16:

A great part of both the strength and the weakness of our national existence lies in the fact that Americans do not abide very quietly the evils of life.  We are forever restlessly pitting against them, demanding changes, improvements, remedies, but not often with sufficient sense of the limits that the human condition will in the end insistently impose upon us. This restlessness is most valuable and has its most successful consequences wherever dealing with things is involved, in technology and invention, in productivity, in the ability to meet needs and provide comforts. In this sphere we have surpassed all other peoples. But in dealing with human beings and institutions, in matters of morals and politics, the limits of this undying, absolutist restlessness quickly become evidence.  At the so-called grass roots of American politics there is a wide and pervasive tendency to believe--I hasten to add that the majority of Americans do not habitually succumb to this tendency--that there is some great but essentially very simple struggle going on, at the heart of which there lies some single conspiratorial force, whether it be the force represented by the "gold bugs", the Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, the liquor interests and the saloons, or the Communist Party, and that this evil is something that must be not merely limited, checked, and controlled but rather extirpated root and branch at the earliest possible moment. It is widely assumed that some technique can be found that will really do this, though there is always likely to be a good deal of argument as to what that technique is.

Indeed, am I not myself pitting myself against the perceived great evil of edufads?  What could be more American than for me to go off on this crusade?

Edufads come, of course, from our adorably earnest belief that there is some secret trick that will surely fix our social problems.  We need only find it and adopt it whole-heartedly and it will be great, and if it isn't it will be because some insufficiently dedicated professors didn't really adopt them with the proper enthusiasm.  It was our selfishness and conservatism that kept us from fixing timeless problems.  But if we had just adopted the fad then we could have made American schools great again and there would have been so much winning on the international comparisons that we'd frankly get bored of it.

Anyway, it occurs to me that not only do edufads come from this restless desire to fix problems, but also that the particular form of edufads these days arises from the determination to personify the stubbornness of educational problems.  There are many things that one can do to improve the structure of a course and help students learn more, including more frequent tests and checkpoints (as noted in the book Make It Stick), and better-crafted assignments, but education reformers in higher ed mostly aim their fire at professors for their manner of presenting and interacting and discussing.  I am more personified in my presentations and Q&A's than I am in my assignments, so that is what physics education reformers largely focus on.  Interestingly, the physics education community has put a lot of effort into developing online homework systems, and there's even a buzzword called "Just In Time Teaching" (JITT) which involves a lot of pre-lecture quizzes to help the professor make better use of class time and incentivize students to prepare (and also echoes a buzzword in business management), but most education reformers aim most of their rhetoric at the professor for being a "sage on a stage."  It fulfills our need to personify the perceived obstacles to achieving universal success.

(A tempting rejoinder to my contention that edufads fit this cultural strain identified by Hofstadter might be that some of the most enthusiastic adopters and promoters of edufads are immigrants, but, as I have said before, immigrants are Americans par excellence. If even the immigrants are playing along that's just another way of saying that you're tapping deep into the American psyche.)

Finally, I continue to find comfort in the fact that the things that frustrate me have happened before and will happen again.

Resurfacing

I have been reading fiction lately, and the themes of this blog are much more suited to discussing non-fiction than fiction (unless we count the promises of education reformers as fiction).  But the LA Times has an article on how the Gates Foundation is beginning to acknowledge that silver bullets are in short supply, and that is worth sharing.  I used to be a big fan of the TV show Once Upon A Time, and in Once Upon A Time there are two lines particularly worth quoting in discussions of education reform:

1) "All magic comes at a price."  Said repeatedly by Rumpelstiltskin, the point is that whenever you use magic to solve a problem you might get a a quick and easy way to do something, but you'll pay for it down the road.

2) "That's the problem with this world.  Everybody wants a magical solution to their problems but nobody wants to believe in magic."  Said by the Mad Hatter, one of the few characters in the first season who knows that magic and fairytales are real, he's complaining about people who want something that's as quick and easy as magic, but somehow fits into their (supposedly) rational world-view.  They want things neat and tidy.  He was talking to a character who wanted to believe that there was a way to fix her situation without accepting the reality of other worlds and much bigger things than she had previously contemplated, things that could shatter her world and thrust her into a much bigger drama.

But it could just as easily be applied to technocrats.  They want to believe that with properly-designed studies they will find the tricks that nobody else found before, and use those tricks to solve the problems of education.  They are forgetting a few inconvenient facts.  For starters, scientific discovery is never as clean and linear as the technocrats want to believe.  You don't simply follow a best practice for research and thereby identify a best practice for teaching or social work or whatever.  True insights, let along truly new insights, are dearly bought.  They come at unexpected moments and from unexpected directions.  New knowledge is the most expensive thing imaginable. There's a reason why thousands of years ago the Egyptian scribe Khekheperre-Sonbu, living in a time when so many of today's great innovations were unknown, lamented the difficulty of developing new and meaningful ideas.

Also, they want to think that success is just a matter of telling people to do the right things and then watching it happen.  Just today I was talking to a couple people who found in their research that teaching assistants who were sent to a seminar in which they were told about the (supposedly) best practices for teaching would start out following those practices but would then deviate.  Their belief was that they need to find some way to persuade or train the teaching assistants to stick with the best practices.  Well, first, let me note that maybe some of these practices are only best for particular people in particular settings, and the teaching assistants might not be the right audience for these practices.

But second, getting people to do the right thing is more complicated than telling them to do the right thing.  Perhaps the best way to instill a practice is not with a seminar that meets for a couple hours once per week over a period of 10 weeks, but rather to provide a role model.  Perhaps they need to take a class from an inspiring teacher who uses the (supposedly) newer and better practices.  Perhaps that is a better way to instill something into the brain.  If you want people to believe down to their very bones that a particular method of teaching physics (or whatever subject) is better than any other method, perhaps they need to actually experience the method itself, and actually learn and appreciate physics via that method, and experience enough growth and insight into physics that they will emulate that method as much subconsciously as consciously.  Perhaps role models and meaningful experiences matter more than simply hearing and believing best practices.

Think about how much we emulate our parents, and ask yourselves this:  Do you do what your parents told you to do, or do you do what your parents did?  You probably got some good habits from them, but did you get any bad habits from them?  And did they tell you to adopt those habits, or did your mothers tell their children not to do what they had done? (To quote a great song.)  I'm pretty sure that your parents discouraged you from emulating their worst habits, but that probably didn't stop you from emulating them (probably without consciously intending to do so).  We know from more than a century of research on k-12 education that parents and family background predict educational outcomes better than any practice on the part of teachers.  Why?  Because people spend far more time around parents than around teachers, and (usually) get more attention from parents than teachers.  (If they get more attention from teachers than parents then there's an entirely different set of problems here.)  Likewise, people spend far more time with teachers trying to teach them subject matter than teachers trying to explicitly teach them about teaching.  Perhaps the best way to shape the next generation of teachers is to teach subject matter as well as possible and inspire people to do what you did, not to spend 2 hours per week over 10 weeks telling people about best practices.

Of course, teaching the subject matter as well as possible is slower-impact than a special seminar, even if it is higher-impact.  And we want the fast solution in our society.  We want to believe in the magic without accepting that when the magic actually does happen it happens in a much bigger context.  So I'm quite confident that when Bill Gates has left the stage Mark Zuckerberg or some similar figure will attempt to implement an education reform agenda, convinced that This Time It's Different.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

All of this has been hyped before and will be hyped again

This is a fascinating survey of hype over educational technology.  Naturally, though, I must remind the reader that this time it's different!