Perspectives on losing our edge

The 'columnist preacher' Friedman goes ballistic this week on the 'dumbing down of America' theme...

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.
To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

Meanwhile some of what he says makes sense - we go about cutting each other lawns, rubbing each others back after taking courses in massage therapy and learn to trim each others hair on select areas of our anatomy - yes, we are a now a true service economy in every sense of the word, but at what cost. A cost that might involve telling our children that opting to cut someone else's lawn or fashion someone else's hair or massage someone else's back is the best that they could hope to make of their lives growing up in America...

This little story in the Times today about a automobile employee who was laid off recently and decided to go to massage therapy classes to make up the money sums it all up nicely.

More than 1,000 workers were laid off at the Moraine plant. Under terms of the U.A.W. contract for all its members, they and the workers in Janesville and Newark will collect unemployment checks and payments from G.M. that together equal about 80 percent of their take-home pay. But those payments will only last about a year. And with the U.A.W. prepared to suspend its “jobs bank” program as a condition of the federal loans, there will be no safety net after that.
Some workers will have an opportunity to transfer to other plants. But with the industry contracting so quickly, there is little job security in making a move. “I can’t risk transferring,” said David Williams, one of the remaining 1,100 workers at the Newark plant when it closed. “I don’t want to go 1,200 miles away to get laid off again.” Mr. Williams installed a sunroof on the last Dodge Durango to come down the assembly line in Newark. Now he plans to take massage-therapy classes and pursue a new career far from the factory floor. “Enough with the concrete,” he said. “It’s time for some carpet and climate control.”

Dumbing down? - Lament

Yesterday my wife and I went to a 'meet the new teacher' gathering at our children’s day care. On the momentous occasion of our children transitioning from their current class to their next, we were given an opportunity to learn the new teacher’s backgrounds, their credentials and personality. We found them great and justly so - it does cost a bit. At the end of the session, it was mentioned that our elder son would be starting his letter writing soon and the head teacher mentioned that they would start with the letter C. As soon as they master writing C, they will proceed to O. I sat there a little flummoxed on the newly discovered order of the English alphabets. As if reading my mind, an audience member behind us piped up with the question du jour; What about starting with A? Then B, C, D etc. like the rest of us learned...

The teacher looked incredulously at us for a split second, resolved to herself that she was speaking to a bunch of parents who really do not know too much about educating their four year olds and slowly proceeded to explain. She told us that starting with the letter C is the easiest as it involves writing the letter in a single pencil stroke whereas starting off with the letter A would involve three discrete strokes to complete the letter. She told us that starting with the letter A will be mentally taxing on the little child. She went onto intone that children will find it emotionally and mentally stimulating to start with an easy letter first and then proceed to the tougher, taxing ones towards the end.

I was not convinced. Somehow, I felt that dumbing down little tasks and making life easy for children in their formative years is necessarily not a good thing. Let me explain.

Our children will live and work in a very different world from what we inhabit. A world more flat, more cohesive and more integrated where global economies intermingle and people, resources and goods cross international boundaries like we drive across states today. In such a world, our children will face competition from the likes of children bought up in countries like Taiwan, China, South Korea, Japan and India. In most of these countries children are given a tougher beginning to life, more material to study and a rigorous outlook in general. They are taught to survive the rough and tumbles of a system that they will have to navigate successfully and triumph a couple of decades from whence they start to write their first letters. Mollycoddling them with asinine explanation of 'mentally taxing’ and ‘emotionally and mentally stimulating' will not work in the future global marketplace where skills, tenacity and competitiveness will rule ever more so. Shielding our children from competition and striving to make their already comfortable lives more so will not do us any benefit in the longer run. Of course, I did not mention any of my wayward thoughts to the hapless teacher, but talked long and hard into the night with my wife. We are still working out a plan.

Jose Chavez Morado (Mexican 1909 - 2002), 'Boy', Oil on canvas, 14" X 11", 1945

Chronicles in mollycoddling

I ran into some footage of a new scramjet type aircraft that NASA was developing using a propulsion technology called rapid pulse detonation. The newscaster on a news show was asking a NASA analyst to explain the engine and emphasized the following words:

"Can you explain in English and not in science-talk?"

I have heard numerous variations of the above. A common reaction to puerile requests like this results in the dumbing down of presentations to three word Powerpoints, explanations being made more palatable for mass consumption, acronyms that half explain the real thing being tossed around and a host of other flotation devices used preventing one from diving deeper to understand a concept more deeply. This necessarily raises the following question: Are we as a group too inept and stupid to deal with a little bit of science in our daily lives? Are we so coddled by the ready acceptance of lower expectations and availability of simpler explanations that we refuse to tax our brains even a little to gain a better understanding of concepts involved?

The larger issue is that the cultural malaise propagated by the newscaster’s outwardly innocent sounding question is slowly transforming us a very superficial, surface skimming group and in the long run will effect the nation's competitive and scientific edge. Just my view…

In an orthogonal reference to the above, I also read that eighteen percent of people in our country believe that the sun revolves around the earth. Not to mention of the legions who think that the earth was created about six thousand years ago…

Kasimir Malevich, 'White on White', 1918, Image from the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Oversimplification

Caleb Weintraub, And all of a sudden the streets were filled with cherubs and uncertainty, the stars fell from the sky, the ground broke up beneath them and all of the walls complained, 2006, mixed media and oil/canvas, 10' x 14' (image ripped from this site)

I have a post over at Art and Perception that talks a bit about the current trends that look to over simplify art and museum spaces...