Category: General Thoughts

People overestimate ability to learn and maintain second languages. An interesting article explaining how American Hispanics are losing their Spanish tracks with my experience. Sic semper erat, et sic semper erit. People say we should learn foreign languages. Which one? Learn Latin.

I feel that I have something special to add to the language debate. I am a non-linguist with lots of language experience. At one time I SPOKE fluently four languages, although never at the same time. I know that most people who think they can speak more than one foreign language are fooling themselves. Such people exist, but they are rare. I don’t believe that average people can maintain practical professional level competence is even one foreign language unless they use it on a daily basis. Daily basis.

This presents Americans with a dilemma that people from non-English speaking countries do not face. People from other languages know that English is essential if they want careers in science or international business. It makes perfect sense to require English in primary or secondary schools. English is the world language; the only one that is universally useful. Even if individuals never leave their own countries, English will often still be an advantage for them. No other language is like that.

What does an American do? We say you should study Chinese. Fine. This works if you plan to go to China. If you plan to do business with Chinese businesspeople you encounter in Europe they and you will have to speak English. What about Spanish? North of the Pyrenees, it is not much use in Europe and almost no use at all anywhere else except in Latin America. Half of the South American population is Portuguese speaking. Portuguese speakers tend to understand lots of Spanish, but it is a one-way street. As a Spanish speaker, most Portuguese will go over your head. Arabic? Okay in the Middle East, but locals may not understand your dialect and will probably default into English.

I believe that you should learn the language of a country if you plan to live or do business there. I have done that myself. I also understand that learning another language is great intellectual exercise. We Americans should not remain stubbornly monolingual just because our language is the one used throughout the world. But what should be our FIRST language. If we are talking about an American kid with no plans to go to any particular place in the world, what language should he/she learn?

Latin. Kids should learn Latin first. It is true that nobody outside the Vatican actually speaks Latin, but Latin is the basis of all Romance languages. It is much easier to learn French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and even Romansh and Romanian if you have a Latin base. Latin has had a big influence on our own English language and has infiltrated almost all the world’s major languages. But there are other reasons to learn the language of Caesar, Cicero, Augustine, Bacon and Spinoza.

Latin literature is unusually rich and varied. Many of the classics of Western Civilization were written originally in Latin, starting with the Romans and continuing on for more than a thousand years after the fall of the great Empire. Isaac Newton wrote in Latin, hence his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

The study of Latin implies the study of Latin literature and that is something of lasting value. I studied Latin many years ago. I can no longer read Latin w/o great difficulty. I cannot say I have any facility left at all. As I wrote up top, maintaining a language is very difficult. But my English vocabulary is superb, partly due to my Latin experience, and I still recall much of the literature I imbibed only semi-willingly when studying the ancient language.

I think we make a big mistake when we demand that everything we teach or learn should be relevant to our immediate needs. This almost guarantees that we are surrendering the bigger picture, the long term. IMO, we give in too readily to the auto-erotic impulse of letting students study themselves. A lot of this started in the 1960s. Schools gave up the classics to concentrate on various self-esteem studies. How did that work out? Instead of reaching toward things of lasting common value, we explored differences that didn’t make much difference then and today don’t make any difference at all.

I don’t expect a Latin Renaissance. Too bad.

I have become more convinced that success depends less on good initial decisions and more on the ability and willingness to kill off bad ones. You just cannot predict with much precision. It doesn’t mean that you don’t plan, but it does mean that you plan to eliminate many of your endeavors and to modify all of them based on evolving conditions and new information.

This posture makes most of us uncomfortable. We like to believe there is more certainty in this uncertain world. We like to believe that experts, sufficiently intelligent and disinterested, could make big plans that would work. All of the big dystopias of the 20th Century were based on this error, as well as most of the little ones.

Uncertainty cannot ever be banished. The reason the free market works better than the alternatives is not that it can plan better but because it can through up lots of plans and trim off those that don’t work. Our world cannot be perfected. We should not try to do it.

This does not mean that we are helplessly adrift in a sea of uncertainty. We can create robust systems that will function and survive in a wide variety of possible scenarios and will prosper in thrive among the probable ones. We never really have a choice between two alternatives. We have a multiverse of choices, all of which change in fundamental ways based on our choices. It is a process not a plan, or maybe the plan is the process.

When my father wanted to express uncertainty, he would use the term “it’s a crap shoot,” referring of course to the game of playing dice. I only wish it was that easy. Dice are very certain. There are only thirty-six possible combinations and the probabilities of each are well known. You are six times more likely to roll as seven as you are to roll snake eyes (two ones) or box cars (two sixes). Risk is predictable. If you can find someone dumb enough to keep on betting that he will roll box cars before a seven, you will take all his money sooner or later, probably sooner. Unfortunately the world is not that certain so we have to have lots of options.

Even a casual student of history finds that in almost every period of our history contemporaries decried the dissention in the Senate or the House. (In recently read biographies of Lincoln, Coolidge and Lyndon Johnson – 50, 90 & 150 years ago seem very much like today.) But the strength of America comes from the bottom, not the top and most of the innovation comes from outside the Beltway.

The president and congress might sometimes suck, but they are not all there is to America. The “Economist” has a survey of the America that works – the states and the American people. Articles start at this link. States are the laboratories of democracy and their ability to experiment has been one of the open secrets of America’s success for more than 200 years.

Others are indeed catching up, and this is good. It is about time those freeloaders started to pull their own weight, but biggest research nation in the world. We account for a full 31% of all the research done in the world. This is down from an astonishing 38% in 1999 and the absolute dollar amount of research dropped a little in the last five years, but we still are clearly #1 in research.

Research shows the effectiveness of the U.S. mixed system. Government supplies around 31% of research dollars. But the private-public interface is important. For example, one of the greatest innovations of recent decades is fracking for gas. This is a mixture of government-funded basic research, made practical business. The Department of Energy since the 1970s, it only started to work in the 1990s when the private sector made it work.

Shale gas is another big plus for America. The Marcellus already supports over 100,000 jobs in Pennsylvania and this expected to reach to over 220,000 in 2020. Shale gas gave the local economy a $14 billion boost in 2012. Economists at Citibank estimate that shale gas by itself will add a half percentage point to the U.S. GDP EACH year for the next couple of years. Unconventional oil and gas accounted for $238 billion in economic activity, 1.7m jobs and $62 billion in taxes in 2012. Now that is a true stimulus. link

We don’t give up on the federal government, but we need to understand that it will usually be more the consumer than the creator of innovation or wealth. And the Feds can get in the way. The “Economist” has a way of making fun of things in very clever ways. I like this one:

“Proliferating red tape is causing tangles everywhere, from the 400 subsidiary regulations of the Dodd-Frank law on the financial sector to the 140,000 codes the federal government requires hospitals to use for the ailments they treat, including one for injuries from being hit by a turtle.”

Good to know there is a protocol for man-turtle encounters, but imagine the time that went into writing and promulgating those regulations.

But America will go ahead. I have confidence that America will outlast the current hard times. We will be back … again.

Finland & South Korea – that is what works. The problem with copying this success is that Finland and South Korea follow almost polar opposite strategies. South Korea is #2. They follow what seems like a hellish, highly competitive study system where the kids study from early morning until late at night.  In contrast, #1 Finland follows a laid back Andy of Mayberry plan.  Kids don’t do much homework at night; they don’t even do schoolwork during all of the relatively short school day.  Clearly one size does not fit all and culture makes a big difference.  East Asia has a hierarchical educational system with roots in highly competitive civil service examinations that go back 2000 years in China. In theory, anybody could take the test. The tests were cruelly hard, pass rates vanishingly low and the stakes dizzyingly high. Passing the test meant prosperity for the aspirant and his whole family.   Failure could mean poverty & misery. This testing culture persists. Finish culture is very different.  Hierarchy is not much respected and the idea that a single test could determine someone’s future just doesn’t seem to make any sense in the north woods.  I am glad that Finland beats out South Korea, even if it is an irony that it in some ways uses a hierarchical list to argue against a hierarchical system. Mine is clearly a value judgment and I don’t shy away from making it.  Hard work is an important part of life but it is not the only thing and it is just smart to accomplish our goals with as little effort and suffering as possible.

Phrases like “you are always looking for the easy way out” and “you are just picking the low hanging fruit” are often used pejoratively, implying that there is something wrong with doing these things. But who is stupid enough to advocate a harder way to do something if a similarly successful easier way is available? I am willing to work hard when I must but I find no virtue in working hard unnecessarily. I like this phrase, “if it NEED not be done, it need NOT be done.” Lots of what we do during a workday add little or no value to the goals we are trying to achieve. One of our top jobs should be to determine things that need not be done and eliminate them. Presumably we can redirect our efforts to more effective and higher priority tasks.  One priority task that often gets short shrift is thinking about what we are doing and/or preparing to do so by reading good books or taking training.  If you are worried about the exact language in a memo requesting a package of pencils, you are not doing your job or your job isn’t very important.

This is what may be happening with education in these places. Korean kids are working full out and producing excellent results but probably spreading their efforts to include lots of low or no priority activities. It is a kind of full court press.  It gets everything done but at a high cost to participants. We emphasize effort a bit too much. Sometimes the added results are not worth the added effort especially if you have other options. What to do is as important as how to do it. Pick the low hanging fruit first and if that is all you need, move along to the next task. There is no virtue in doing what need not be done, unless it if fun and then that is a different type of game.

I didn’t really talk much about what works in education. I suggest you listen to this from NPR that inspired me to write.  I ordered on Amazon the book “Finnish Lessons” mentioned on the program.  Maybe I will have a few more ideas after I read it. I have already decided that I would not want the U.S. to copy the Korean model.  Finland looks better.