Intelligence

For the past few months I have been part of a very strong academic institution where kids are driven and excel in their studies. These kids have excelled in getting good grades in high school and getting high SAT scores. They are very capable of solving certain types of problems which society has defined as problems that test for intelligence.
Many of my peers however, are not interested in a different type of intelligence, namely the intelligence of how to live their life in the best possible way. They love considering abstract puzzles and question but have never been brought up to consider the questions relevant to what the proper way of living is.

Richard Mitchell writes about this in his Gift of Fire (Chapter 5). It is long (I posted the whole chapter) but a very worthwhile read;

I WENT TO TALK TO THE MENSANS. The members of Mensa are the smartest people in America, and I was intimidated. I was afraid that they might catch me in a circular argument or a lexigraphical fallacy. I was afraid that they would rise up, right in the middle of the pathetic little lecture I had thought up for them, and demolish my silly little premises, and then go, not storming, but laughing, from the room, to hold high converse among themselves, not even offering me any coffee and doughnuts.

The speech was meant to be the opener of a small convention, and scheduled to take place right after breakfast. I got there early, and was sent to join the Mensans in a room on the fourth floor, in an upper room, where they were standing around having coffee and doughnuts. I was relieved of at least one of my fears. But they were all watching television, and no one said anything to me. I stood around for a while and went back downstairs, where the brisk young woman who had sent me upstairs told me that I would have to understand that Mensans never did anything on schedule, and that I would have to wait till they came down, Soon, maybe.

I sat in the lobby and read some of the Mensan handouts that I found on the floor near the sofa. One of them was a sample test. To become a Mensan, you have to get high grades on some tests, and what I was reading was a kind of prep for those tests. It had some very interesting questions. One of them asked which diagram of a group of six would be generated by taking diagram C and subjecting it to whatever operations had transformed diagram A into diagram B. Or maybe it was the other way around. There was a very good train question, whose details I can't recall, but it had all the classical attributes of train questions--train A and train B leaving at different times from points C and D, moving at rates E and F, and meeting, at last, at the mysterious point X where ships also, I suppose, pass in the night. It really took me back. But the question I liked best of all went something like this:

Bob and Carol and Alice and Ted all took the Mensa test. Bob scored higher than Alice, who scored ten points lower than Ted. Ted's score added to Carol's score and then divided by the difference between Bob's score and Alice's score was either twenty points more or twelve points less than the average of all four scores. Which of the four made it into Mensa?

Well, I may have forgotten some of the less important details. But it was a great question.

I had planned to start my talk to the Mensans with some mention of Prometheus, and to quote a little from Aeschylus. It was the passage in which Prometheus, about to be chained down for quite a long time, makes a little recitation of the things he has done for humanity, and in which he does not mention at all what we usually think of--the gift of fire. He speaks instead of such powers as those of language and number, and, most important of all, the mind's grasp of itself, in Locke's words. It is the ability not only to think, but to think about thinking. Before humanity had that, Prometheus says, humans lived a random and aimless life, "all blindly floundering on from day to day." I knew that the Mensans were people interested in their minds, as people should be, and I thought that I might encourage them in that interest, and, at the same time, give due praise to the great minds of the past who understood long ago that the mind's grasp of itself is what alone makes possible the examined life, and thus the good life.

So I imagined myself in conversation with Prometheus, who had come back to find out what we mortals had managed to do with the astounding powers that he had given to us alone of all creatures.

How fortunate I am to run into you, he began, for I see by your rumpled clothing and your knitted brow that you must be in the mind business.

I'm honored to meet you, Sir, I replied, and I will confess that I am in the mind business, for I do no heavy lifting. Would you care to have some coffee and doughnuts with the Mensans?

Not just now, thank you. I have come, I must admit, not for social reasons, but on business. Long, long ago I gave you all the power of the mind's grasp of itself, the fire by which you may burn and glow like no other mortal creature. That got me into a lot of trouble at first, of course, but since my release I've had long, long ages of time in which to wonder whether or not I had done the right thing. I have grown so curious, in fact, that I have now undertaken, as you see, a journey whose enormousness you can not imagine, and only for the purpose of finding out to what good uses you have put my gift.

Aha, I said, you have come not only to the right man, but to the right place, and also at the right time. There must be something to that Divine Guidance business. As it happens, I hold here in my hand the answer that you seek.

What have we done, you ask. Just listen to this. Imagine a train leaving point A and moving toward point B at the rate of C. Imagine now another train moving from B to A at rate D, having set forth on its journey E minutes after the departure of the first train. Would you believe it if I told you that we--well, some of us--are able to figure out where and when those trains will meet? So how's that for mind business?

He looks at me steadily for a moment. He clears his throat. I begin to feel that I have not yet fully stated our case. I rush into the silence with six diagrams.

And look at this, just look at this. You see these diagrams? Now this little one over here was made by doing something or other, maybe a little twisting or turning this way or that, to this other little diagram. Now, and this is the beauty part, one of these six diagrams down here got to be the way it is because the very same things, the twisting and turning stuff, you know, were done to this little diagram. Pretty neat, eh? Now suppose I were to tell you that we--well, some of us--by the power of the mind alone, can say exactly which of these little...

At this point, Prometheus silently rises and begins to walk off. I get the impression, probably through Divine Guidance, that he is going to go back and chain himself to the rock for another long sentence.

Wait, wait, I call after him, now heading through the door and out into the street. Let me tell you about Bob and Carol and Alice and Ted! They all took this test, you see, and... and...

But Prometheus is gone. I begin to wonder whether the nature of his gift is such that he can take it back. I begin to suspect that he has taken it back. My mind is losing the grasp of itself. All I can think of is Bob and Alice and Carol and Ted drawing little diagrams while traveling on a train from point A to point B at the rate of C.

What should we mean by "intelligence"? I think it is important to ask the question in just that way--What should we mean? This seems to me an essential rule of thought, that when we talk about things that do not simply appear to us as a part of the world, we take on a grave responsibility to each other and to ourselves. Such things as intelligence and love and patience are possible only where there is a person. We do not find them lying around so that we can weigh and measure them, so there truly is no such thing as deciding whether love is the "true" kind or some other. We can, of course, mean anything we please by such terms, and just as easily mean one thing today and another tomorrow. In the best possible world, we probably would know better than to talk about such things at all, and we probably wouldn't have to. However, if the mind is to take the grasp of itself, and if we are to instruct ourselves in the art of taking that grasp, we must end up talking about things like intelligence. And love. And patience. And whatever else "exists," in some strange way, because persons exist.

Is it by the very same power that we can, in one case, conclude that it is better to suffer an injustice than to do one, and, on the other, discover which of six diagrams was generated by what process? Do we use the same faculty to consider whether patience can and should be cultivated and to tell where the trains will meet?

My questions, I know, seem to imply that we don't use the same power or faculty in all of those cases, but I truly don't know that. Whatever it is by which we do such things, it is not a fish that I can show you so that you might check what I have said about it, and I do not want to pretend that it is a fish, and speak of it as something that we all can see and measure. For when people do pretend that it is a fish, some strange things happen.

Let me rephrase a question just a little bit. Which will be detected by an intelligence test: the ability to make some rationally demonstrable conclusion as to whether suffering injustice is better than inflicting it, or the ability to tell where the trains will meet? Is it possible that we might meet some person who does indeed give himself to consider whether patience is a fixed or a changeable attribute, but can not for the life of him tell you which diagram was made from which? And one more question: How did the makers of the intelligence test come to "know" what intelligence is, that they can devise ways to measure it, and then pronounce its worth in numbers?

In detail, I can not answer. In principle, I can. They made certain choices. They made them, probably, for what they deemed very practical reasons, but with consequences that are not best described as merely practical. They have given the rest of us ideas, of which we may not even be thoughtfully aware, and by which we may, and often do, make choices of our own. We choose, for instance, every bit as much in families as in schools, how to train the minds of children, and which children to subject to which form of training, in accordance with some packaged and delivered ideas about intelligence. On the basis of those decisions, we commit acts, acts that have consequences in the very deepest centers of persons. That is a perilous business.

And that is why I ask: What should we mean by intelligence? It is not a question of fact, for there is no fact; it is a moral question. There is "shouldness" in it.

The word "intelligence" comes from two Latin words, inter and legere, which, put together, suggest the act of one who looks around among different things and makes choices, gathering some and leaving others. That is a portrayal of a mental activity very different from figuring out where the trains meet, but also an act that is a little bit like discovering the right diagram. But only a little bit. The idea of intelligence includes not only the choosing, but the chooser, an agent who chooses to choose. But when you choose the right diagram, you are not truly doing your own choosing. You are walking in someone else's footprints, and the "rightness" of your choice is in having done what someone else has already done.

There is a special case of thinking that is called problem-solving. Solving a problem is not the same thing as understanding a principle. It is, however, the sort of thinking that we have come to accept as the mark of intelligence, and the thinking that some people seem to like a lot. Somebody chose that understanding. Not one somebody, of course, but many somebodies, and I deceive myself and you if I say that "we" have either chosen it or that we have come to adopt it. Certain people did all that. Haphazardly. And now we live by it. We fashion our schools to match it, and measure their "products" by its yardstick. And thus we will win the disapproval of Prometheus and then perhaps even the loss of his gift.

I think I may lead myself into confusion if I accept without thinking Locke's name for the gift of Prometheus--"the mind's grasp of itself." There is no such thing as the mind; where there is mind there is a mind. It is not the mind that my mind might be able to grasp, but only my mind. I will not be able to take the grasp of your mind, nor you of mine, and for that we are both properly grateful. Some things are better kept private. When I do set out to take the grasp of my mind, I must find myself walking into unknown, and perhaps very dangerous, territory, where no one has ever gone before. I can find models of that journey, and accounts of other such journeys in other minds, but I can not find that journey. I end up doing, therefore, what is absolutely unique to me, and what, should I not do it, can not be done.

But when I solve Mensan problems, that is not the case. There, I will be doing what others have done. But those are, of course, problems that seem fake, somehow. Somebody cooked them up to be problems. They are a kind of game, a trivial pursuit. There is something to be learned in such a practice, of course, some habits of consistency and attentiveness, but in those who have learned those habits from earlier problems, the industrious solution of later problems, more of the same, seems a bit childish. The great charm of problem-solving lies in tackling the problems that have not been solved, which is to say, the problems that have never before arisen.

Such problems are almost always related to technology, and their solutions seem wondrous to us not because they come from newly devised powers of the mind, but always because they provide some new thing in the world. In that respect, microwave relay stations and eggbeaters are similar, both wonders. The most important difference between them is that Attila the Hun would have given you Asia Minor for the latter, but nothing at all for the former.

There is a sense in which the unsolved problem, even the problem that has yet to appear to us, is already "solved." You can provide your own easy example of the fact by making up your own train problem, using whatever numbers please you. You don't have to stick to trains. Airplanes or ox carts will do as well. What you now have is a "new" problem, a never-before solved problem. But, of course, its solution does exist. Although you can not make it just now, there is a statement that you will be able to make once you have made the statements that lead to it. That's how any problem is solved, however complicated, and however long.

Problem-solving is a wonderful device, and fun, but it ought to be kept in its place. The best way to do that is through a careful use of language. When I say that I have a problem, my first thought should be to consider as well as I can whether it truly is a problem. As to the meeting of the trains, I have little doubt. When I consider the problem of rearing children sanely and decently, or the problem of making ends meet, I become uneasy. And when it comes to World Peace and the Brotherhood of All Mankind, I am frightened, frightened of what will happen to us if we imagine that such grand hopes are to be realized by the process of problem-solving. In such matters, can the pertinent facts be known? Can anyone know when he has them all? Can they be tested and found as "true" as those given in train problems, or even in the most elaborate and complicated possible versions of train problems?

Where human beings are concerned, can we ever have all the facts? Can we ever know that we do, or that we don't? If we imagine that human dilemmas can be unraveled by that sort of thinking that problem-solving represents, are we not likely to run into something more vexing than problems?

That social and moral human "problems" have proved insoluble for the whole history of our species up to now, is not the least bit surprising, and it is exactly by the gift of Prometheus that we can know that. When we consider and question, and come to have some understanding of the process of problem-solving and its necessary attributes, we are not solving a problem. We are understanding. A mind is taking some grasp of itself. Because it is a mind, its understanding will be its understanding, not the understanding, and what it understands, however more or less, will be itself and its work, not the mind and its work. Not even another mind and its work. As to your mind, I do suspect that mine can make some pretty good guesses, even theories, but they are guesses and theories.

Problem-solving is something that we can also do by the gift of Prometheus. Understanding is the thing that we can do by that gift. The light of problem-solving is like the light of the moon, a reflection of some greater light. And when we single out the skills of problem-solving and give them the name of intelligence, we make a choice between the moon and the sun, and run the danger of putting out our own fires.

There is, in all of those dilemmas and mysteries that arise from the unfathomables of our humanity, a hauntingly familiar quality, as though we were all doing everything again and again. Thus it was, for instance, that Freud could conclude that Sophocles was not just right, but still right, perhaps always right. And it is to help us understand not the quaint beliefs of primitive and unscientific people, but, quite simply, ourselves--at any time, and in any place.

As fire is given in the myth, fire is given again and again in each of us, as it must once have been given to creatures who by its power became human. Like the species, we have all lived out of an impenetrable antiquity into the now. Every one of us must awaken out of sleep and come into the light of self-mindedness. And when self-mindedness arises, when the mind first comes to consider itself and knows that it considers itself, it is in language. It seems that the propensity for language and the propensity for self-mindedness are the same thing, which is, really, not sufficiently distinguished by the word "propensity." "Destiny" seems better. We are the creatures who are destined to think and to know themselves, and that is the gift of Prometheus.

Nobody knows when all that happened, but everybody who knows anything can see that it must have happened. Every single one of us lives again the astonishing and utterly unaccountable history of the coming into this world of the truly human. And we do it, for there is no other way, one by one. It is not humanity that comes into the grasp of the mind. It is a person that comes into the grasp of that person's mind. Information and examples I can take, in that degree to which I am literate, curious, and attentive, from countless other persons, most of them long dead but still speaking to me, but I must discover thoughtfulness for and in myself and come to understand for the first time what I have never understood before and what no one else can understand for me, any more than he might nourish me by his eating or refresh me by his sleep.

Nevertheless, while no one else can nourish me, I will never be nourished by those who are not themselves nourished, never brought into thoughtfulness unless others have gone there before me. This is, I think, a great mystery, and the most powerful suggestion I know that two seemingly contradictory possibilities are both true: that the individual person is the root and dwelling place of all that is truly human, and that society is the root and dwelling place of all that is truly human. Unless, of course, there really was a Prometheus, who started the whole business, out of nothing.

But if there was, he has obviously gone away and left us to what we must call, lacking better knowledge, our own devices. And our own devices are pretty good. As persons, we do make society, and as society, we do make persons. The enterprise of education is entangled in that paradox, and it is the proper business of everybody both to nourish and to be nourished, both to take the grasp of his own mind and to provide for others the power to do the same. It is for that reason that we properly connect the idea of education with the rearing of children. As to which of us are truly the children, we really have no clear idea, but we do know that there are children among us, and that something should be done about them. If we knew exactly what that was, and who the children were, there could be education.

Never Isolate Part 2

When I walk into a restaurant buffet, I always get really excited. There are so many choices from which to choose from and I wont even have to limit myself to one selection. Not only that, but there is no limit on how much I can take. I will be able to eat as much as I want, whatever I want...

I quickly fill my plate up with all kinds of different foods. I sit down and begin to eat. But there is so much I would like to try that I simply don't know what to try next. I shove the food in my mouth because I know that as soon as I finish chewing this bite, the next one will be the most spectacular tasting bite...

After twenty minutes I get full. I stare at my fourth helping with wariness. I start to wonder whether I enjoyed the meal as much as I thought I would. If I were to try and locate which bites were the enjoyable ones, I'm not so sure I would be able to answer. Any bite I took was only a precursor, a preview for the next bite or the next piece which was the one that really mattered. If I were to draw it out in a diagram it would look like this;

Beginning Super excited

Sit Down Eat frantically to get to the next bite

5 minutes Eat frantically to get to the next bite

10 Minutes Eat quickly so these that I really liked.

Twenty Minutes Later Stomach ache

Is food just not something enjoyable, or did I just relate to it improperly? If so, then what is the proper way of viewing food. What in me is causing my mistaken view?

I will share another example, but this one based on second hand knowledge on how someone who enjoys clothes feels like when they walk into a shopping mall.

The Shopping Mall
When you want into a clothing store you get particularly excited. The selection is huge and there is so many great “outfits” to find. Like in the example of the buffet, you go around trying everything on. When you walk out of the store with your one purchase you are pretty content. However, in no way would you say that your experience measured up to the excitement with which you entered the store.

Why was that original excitement never fully satisfied by the experience? Is your view of the experience of shopping incorrect?

Fantasy
On a simple level the disappointment in both experiences can be attributed to our faculty of imagination and fantasy. We have a certain fantasy of how great the food will taste like, and how beautiful the clothes will look. Reality never lives up to our imagination so it is not a surprise that we will always be disappointed. But how do these fantasies work?

It is Mine for Keeps- the isolationist point of view

The incorrect perception of either experience stems from a similar problem that our pasuk in Mishlei addressed, the mistake of isolating experiences. The “isolated”perception, is viewing a pleasure as something that can be grabbed onto, and kept. It is the feeling that this pleasure will be a thing to have, and that it is not just a passing feeling.

To further understand this fantasy it is useful to consider a third type of isolationism, the isolation of experiences. I will then tie in and connect the two types of fantasies.

Isolation of Experiences
All school kids eagerly await the day that they will finish school. They will graduate and be free from the authority figures that force them to wake up early in the morning and sit all day in a claustrophobic room. Graduation night is the pinnacle, of this achievement of freedom. It is a defining moment that causes this change in me from being “a kid who goes to school” to FREE!!!!...or at least that is the fantasy kids have.

I remember my own graduation. It was extremely boring and I kept waiting for it to end. After a few hours it was over, but I felt no internal change. Not only did I not feel like someone different, but I wasn't even as excited to have graduated as I had always imagined myself to be. I was expecting a grand spectacle but it had just passed, with me feeling like an observer.

My mistake in this case was viewing this experience as an isolated incident. Graduation was a destination point in my life, so I expected it to feel like a destination point. But that simply was not true. It was just another experience that passed after a few hours without any drastic changes in who I really was.

This fantasy of isolating experiences can be very dangerous. People comfort themselves from their unhappiness in the present by focusing on a future event that will make them happy. How many times have you heard someone say, “just wait till ____ happens, then everything will be great”. They get what they have been waiting for but they immediately start looking forward to the next thing. In other words, humans always live with a fantasy about the future. But what that fantasy really is, is an isolationist view of experiences. It is a belief that once this "destination" is reached the person will always be content.

The very same thing happens in how we view pleasures. We view them as destinations and therefore we expect them to feel like destinations. When we walk into the buffet we expect the ultimate pleasure of food to be reached and kept forever. This is a false view. Nothing is isolated and everything is bound to the changes of time. We will always be disappointed because our fantasy of reaching an "acquisition of pleasure for keeping" is simply not true.

in the next post I will address how I think a person can overcome this fantasy in specific areas of his life. I will give more examples to show how far this isolationist perspective really pervades our view of reality. I will also try to tackle the question of what is the proper view of pleasures, experiences, and consequences? Stay tuned! .

Public School Education

I recently came across a fascinating piece on modern day schooling. I will not write my thoughts on it yet but simply post an excerpts from the essay. The whole piece http://johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm is quite long and gives a history of modern day schooling. Here, I will simply cut straight to John Gatto's criticism of modern day schooling.

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.

Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."

It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Never Isolate Part 1

Mishlei Chapter 16 Verse 4
“The Lord made everything for His praise-even the wicked man on the day of retribution.”

Questions
1)What does it mean that something is for God's praise?
2)Is the praise that the pasuk is referring to when a wicked man does evil or when he suffers retribution?
3)How is either one of the possibilities listed above, a praise to God?


Praise for Hashem
One of the foundations of Judaism is the appreciation and awe of God through the appreciation of the complex world that he created.
More specifically, this appreciation premises a view of the world as one complex and interconnected system that operates by certain laws. When we study a specific area, it is with a basic assumption that it will fit in with our understanding of the world as a whole. If it doesn't, then our understanding is lacking. An example might help clarify.
It would be ridiculous for a physicist to say that when we see a ball falling from a roof, we are seeing an isolated incident that shouldn't be fit in with physics or the laws of nature. Instead, the physicist will see how this incident is part of a particular pattern of events in physics, otherwise known as gravity. Recognizing the law of gravity is a praise to Hashem, because it is an acknowledgment of the system (the world) that God created.

Therefore, when it says that everything Hashem made is for His praise, it means that everything operates by certain laws, in respect to the system that it is contained in. To recognize this, is to see how a falling ball is a praise to Hashem.

Human Interaction
It is easy to sustain this view of the world when it comes to physics, but it can become very difficult in the area of human lives. When events happen, we view them as isolated incidents (for simplicity, I will call this view isolationism). If we get pulled over for speeding we immediately think of how unlucky we are, or how mean this cop is. However, if we were to look at this ticket as part of a pattern that started with years of speeding on this road, we will not feel so wronged. Instead, we will view it as an opportunity for teshuva, realigning our philosophy of life in line with reality.

When the Rasha experiences retribution
When we see evil people fail, we feel a sense of satisfaction. It is a happiness fueled by to the desire for revenge. This man wronged the world, now he gets payback. This is a natural response that is difficult to overcome. When we saw Saddam Hussein get captured we were all happy because we remembered all the terrible things that he had done. We viewed this as a victory where the good guys finally beat the bad guys.

Mishlei rejects this view. Viewing the evil person fail in this way, is the same as if the physicist viewed a falling ball as an isolated principle. “Finally, this ball gets what it deserved!” he would say.
Mishlei tells us that when we see a rasha experience retribution, we must view it within its proper context. We can spur teshuva through this event by analyzing what in the rasha caused his demise. We must investigate to see whether we ourselves possess those very same qualities. Then we must work on making decisions that are not affected by these “destructive character traits”. However, we cannot do this unless we get out of our predisposition to view things out of context. We must recognize the fact the praise of Hashem extends to the way we live our lives as well. Oftentimes you see the physicist ridicule the idea if isolationism in his area of study. But when he comes home after work, he makes decisions in his life letting that operate by the very same isolationist principles. He refuses to extend the praise of Hashem outside of his laboratory.

If we view everything as a praise to Hashem, then everything becomes an opportunity for Teshuva. We will learn to see the context of any event, to learn how to make decisions in order to live a happier life.


Post Addendum: This idea does not only apply to events and situations. It even applies to our understanding of pleasure and pain. In fact, in the next post, I will show how the very fantasy of any pleasure is rooted in the view that the isolationist espouses.

The Awkward post on the nature of Awkwardness

One of my favorite shows on TV is Curb Your Enthusiasm. The show is about Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld, who retires and lives life as a famous producer. The lines are improvised on the spot, but Larry always manages to get himself in the most awkward and hilarious situations possible. Oftentimes, the scenes become so awkward that I am simply forced to turn away from the screen.
This puzzled me because the situation wasn't happening to me, yet I had that same distinct feeling that occurs when I am personally in an awkward situation.

Curious about the phenomenon of awkward, I decided to ask Rabbi Moskowitz;

Awkward
Rabbi Moskowitz responded that awkward is when that which you hide, gets revealed. It could be an unconscious or suppressed desire or fear that we do not want people knowing. There are a varieties of reasons for why we suppress these feelings. Oftentimes it is a desire that we have but we cannot reveal because it is made taboo by society. In general, we conform, and suppress these desire. But if a situation arises that exposes it, then immediately we feel very awkward.
It can also be the case that someone else's actions make us feel awkward. That is because their actions are triggering that same desire. We are associating a situation that someone else is in, as if we were in it ourselves. When we see others encounter a situation, and we feel terribly awkward, it is because they are exposing our own desires and fears .
The clearest way to explain this is through giving one or two examples.

Example 1- When I was at Yeshiva High School I was in minyan with people coming from very different backgrounds. There were kids who literally didn't know how to do anything. When they were called up to the Torah they would put on the talit completely wrong and would make numerous “obvious” mistakes in their performance. During these moments, I simply had to look away because the situation was so awkward for me.

As Rabbi Moskowitz would explain, these kid's mistakes exposed my own fears of being embarrassed on stage. It is almost certain that they themselves did not feel awkward at all. Situations are not themselves objectively awkward and it is not necessarily the case that everybody feels awkward about the same situations that I would feel awkward. It is only in so far as it exposes something about a specific person that the person feels awkward. In that case, it was only me who felt awkward, since only I had that fear of being embarrassed.

Example 2- Person a talks about person B behind B's back. When B finds out, and A knows that, a will feel very awkward in his encounter with B. That is because A's true feeling's about B have been exposed.

In this case, the feelings a has are not even subconscious. A in some way knows that he hates B but there is no way he will tell b that straight to his face because he is scared of him. Again, it is not necessarily the case that B will also feel awkward. It is possible that B doesn't care and will feel completely comfortable in his encounter with A.

How to Avoid Feeling Awkward
In general, once a person gains understanding of the desire or fear that he has, he will feel less awkward when it gets exposed. Awkward is the conflict between our attempt to keep a feeling hidden from ourselves and from the world, versus the reality which exposes it. Once we recognize and understand the reason for a desire or fear, we will not feel as awkward if a situation exposing it arises since we will not “push back against reality” as strongly.
Once I understood that my discomfort was a result of my own fears of being embarrassed “on stage”, my awkward feeling subsided. I had already exposed it to myself and therefore did not feel as bad if somebody else triggered it in me as well.


Back to Curb
In short, my enjoyment of Curb Your Enthusiasm is a result of my own shortcomings. Although I feel awkward while watching the show, I enjoy the fact that someone else is in the awkward situation and not me. I immediately assume that they feel the same conflict that I do, and I gain an enjoyment from watching other people suffer.

The Jew in The Modern World

In a few days I will be going of to a secular college. Given this drastic change in my life I felt it was worthwhile to re look at an excerpt from Rav Hirsch's "The Jew in the Modern World". The excerpt is a response to the liberal and reform movements whithin Judaism. Although it was written in the 18th century, the ideas are as true today as they were back then. The bold is my own doing, for the purpose of highlighting a few important ideas.

Rav Hirsch- The Jew in the Modern world- Emerging Patterns of Religion Adjustment

First a point of fact, it was not "Orthodox" Jews who introduced the world "orthodoxy" into Jewish discussion. It was the modern "progressives" Jews who first applied this name to "old, "backward" Jews as a derogatory term. This name was at first resented by "old" Jews. And rightly so. "Orthodox" Judaism does not know any varieties of Judaism. It conceives Judaism as one and indivisible. It does not know a Mosaic, prophetic, and rabbinic Judaism, nor Orthodox and Liberal Judaism. It only knows Judaism and non-Judaism...It does indeed know conscientious Jews and indifferent jews, good Jews, bad Jews or baptized Jews; all nevertheless, Jews with a mission which they cannot cast off. They are only distinguished accordingly as they fulfill or reject their mission.
Now what about the principle, the world redeeming principle of religion allied to progress? If it is meant to be a principles, something more than an empty phrase meant for show - it must have a definable content and we must be permitted to clarify it. In the expression "religion allied to progress," progress is evidently intended to qualify religion. Indeed, this is the very essence of the "idea," not religion by itself but religion only to the extent in so far as it can co-exist with progress, in so far as one does not have to sacrifice progress to religion. The claim of religion then is not absolute but is valid only by permission of "progress"? What, then, is this higher authority to which religion has to appeal in order to gain admission? What is this "progress" evidently not progress in the sphere of religion, for the the expression would amount to "religion allied to itself" which is nonsense. It means then, progress in every sphere other than religion. Speaking frankly, therefore it means: religion as long as it does not hinder progress, religion as ling as it is not onerous or inconvenient.
The subordination of religion to any other factor means the denial of religion; for if the Torah is the law of God how dare you place another law above it and go along with God and His law only as long as you thereby "progress" in other respects at the same time? You must admit it: it is only because religion does not mean to you the word of God, because in your heart you deny divine revelation, because you believe not in Revelation given to man but Revelation from man, that you can give man the right to lay down conditions to religion
"Religion allied to progress"- do you know, dear reader, what that means? Virtue allied to sensual enjoyment, rectitude allied to advancement, uprightness allied to success. It means a religion and a morality which can be preached also in the haunts of vice and iniquity. It means sacrificing religion and morality to every man's momentary whim. It allows every man to fix his own goal and progress in any direction he pleases and to accept from religion only that which does not hinder his "progress" or even assist it. It is the cardinal sin which Moses of old described as a "casual walking with God."...
Now what is it that we want? Are the only alternatives either to abandon religion or to renounce all progress with all the glorious and noble gifts which civilization and education offer mankind? Is the Jewish religion really of such a nature that its faithful adherents must be the enemies of civilization and progress?...We declared before heaven and earth that if our religion demanded that we should renounce what is called civilization and progress we would obey unquestioningly, because our religion is for us truly religion, the word of God before which every other consideration has to give way.we declare, equally, that we would prefer to be branded as fools and do without all the honor and glory that civilization and progress might confer on us rather than be guilty of the conceited mock- wisdom which the spokesman of a religion allied to progress here displays.
For behold whither a religion allied to progress leads! Behold how void it is of all piety and humanity and into what blunders the conceited, Torah criticising spirit leads. Here you have a protagonist of this religion of progress. see how he dances on the graves of your forefathers, how he drags out their corpses from their graves, laughs in their faces and exclaims to you: "Your fathers were crude and uncivilized; they deserved the contempt in which they were held Follow me, so that you may become civilized and deserve respect!"
Such is the craziness which grows on the tree of knowledge of this "religion allied to progress"!
If our choice were only between such craziness and simple ignorance, again we say we would remain ignorant all our life-ling rather than be thus godlessly education even for one moment.
There is, however, no such dilemma. Judaism never remained aloof from true civilization and progress; in almost every era its adherents were fully abreast of contemporary learning and very often excelled their contemporaries. If in recent centuries German Jews remained more or less aloof from European civilization the fault lay not in their religion but in the tyranny which confined them by force within the walls of their ghettos and denied them intercourse with the outside world. And, thank goodness, even now our sons and daughters can compare favorably in cultural and moral worth with the children of those families who have forsaken the religion of their forefathers for the sake of imagined progress. They need not shun the light of publicity or the critical eye of their contemporaries. They have lost nothing in culture and refinement even though they do not smoke their cigars on the Sabbath, even though they do not seek the pleasures of the table in foods forbidden by God, even though they do not desecrate the Sabbath for the sake of profit and enjoyment.
Indeed, we are shortsighted enough to believe that the Jew who remains steadfast amidst the scoffing and the enticement of the easy going world around him, who remains strong enough to sacrifice to God's will, profit inclination and the respect and applause of his fellows, displays a far greater moral strength and thus a higher degree of real culture than the frivolous "modern" Jew whose principles melt away before the first contemptuous glance or at the slightest prospect of profit, and who is unfaithful to the word of God and the teachings of his fathers in order to satisfy the whim of the moment.

Eating and Talmud Torah

this is an idea from a dvar Torah given by Rabbi Kahn the Rosh Yeshiva of Yesodei Hatorah.

"And you shall eat and be satisfied, and you must bless Hashem your G-d for the good land which He gave you." (Devarim 8:10)

Chazal utilize this pasuk to prove that just as one must bless Hashem following a meal, one must also bless Him before eating:

"What is the source for the requirement to make a beracha before eating? It can be derived from a kal vachomer (an a fortiori inference): If he must make a beracha when he is full, how much more so when he is hungry." (Berachot 35a) This statement clearly implies that there is greater reason to bless before eating than after.

Interestingly, the Gemara gives the reverse kal vachomer argument when deriving the need to make a blessing after learning Torah:

"...If Torah requires a beracha before learning [as was previously derived from Devarim 32:3], is it not logical that it requires it after learning?" (Berachot 21a) This argument states that the beracha after learning is the more logically compelling blessing.

How can we understand the difference in the two cases in regards with the more appropriate blessing?
The Vilna Gaon provides a valuable insight. He says that the principle for deciding which beracha "takes precedence" is the same in both cases. According to him, the beracha that accompanies a greater obligation of a beracha is the one that provides the greater enjoyment.
When a person is eating the greatest enjoyment is before he partakes of the pleasure. He is hungry and his mouth is watering. He has a sort of fantasy of what the food will taste like. Once he eats the desire for the pleasure subsides. Eating does not appear as appealing as before.
With Talmud Torah, the opposite is the case. Before we begin learning we do not gain very much satisfaction from the fact that we will learn. We must force ourselves to open up a sefer. But once we begin learning and thinking we gain a tremendous amount of enjoyment. When we are done learning we view the experience of learning with much more enthusiasm than we did before we started. Therefore, the kol ve chomer applies to the beracha that elicits the most amount of pleasure.