Disillusionment

Lost in the Meritocracy: 

The Undereducation of an Overachiever 

by Walter Kirn

"'I won a nice fellowship, Uncle Admiral. To Oxford. I know you always loved London'."






"Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever," Walter Kirn's 2009 memoir, is a scathing and frequently comical indictment of the American educational system and the concept of a merit-based society in general. Kirn's journey from a rural Minnesota upbringing to Princeton University's esteemed halls is chronicled in the book; this path was supposedly paved by academic ambition and high test scores. Kirn's experience, however, exposes a system that, in his opinion, places more value on the unrelenting pursuit of credentials and points than on sincere intellectual curiosity and personal development.

"Lost in the Meritocracy" is fundamentally an examination of disillusionment. Kirn describes how he felt empty and "under-educated" despite being an "overachiever" because of his unwavering pursuit of success within the conventional parameters of academic achievement. The tyranny of credentials and testing, the "undereducation" of an overachiever, the critique of elite institutions, social class and belonging, and the price of conformity are some of the major themes.

Walter Kirn is one of my favorite writers, and this book, like his satirical novel Thumbsucker, was fun to read.

Active Shadows of a Writer's Life

My Unwritten Books 
by George Steiner


"A book unwritten is more than a void.  It accompanies the work one has done like an active shadow, both ironic and sorrowful."  - George Steiner


In Alberto Manguel's wonderful compendium of libraries, The Library at Night, he writes:
"We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if the are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are."

This idea, and I share his feelings along with the distress of finding books that I would love to have in my library but are too dear for my pocketbook, as expressed in the line "even if they have not yet been written" leads me to a wonderful book that is in my library, My Unwritten Books by George Steiner; described as a "grand master of erudition", he is a both polymath and eclectic as a thinker and writer of prose, both fictional and non-fictional.
In My Unwritten Books he imagines seven books that he did not write, but would have written if only he had not met some insurmountable physical, intellectual or psychological obstacle that prevented him from doing so. The essays describing these books are mini-books in themselves with excursions into such disparate worlds as the multiple languages of sex, the claims of Zionism, the natures of exile and a theology of emptiness.

My favorite among the essays is his personal excursion into the nature of education, "School Terms". Beginning with his own anarchic education that saw the onset of his school life with three languages while studying in Manhattan and France. All this before spending his university years at the University of Chicago and Harvard and completing his graduate work at Oxford. He contrasts the differences between education in France (orderly) and America (anarchic) and moves on to a brief commentary on some of the changes that these systems, especially in Great Britain are currently undergoing. With a flick of his pen, he highlights educational philosophies and movements from Locke and Rousseau through the battle between humanities and science of C. P. Snow whose polemics he decries. But this is used as a catalyst for his own thoughts on education. We must first consider what literacy means in our technological age with the immanent rise of "artificial intelligence" and the ubiquity of the Internet.

Steiner concludes that "the hope of preserving or resuscitating humanistic literacy in any traditional mode" is illusory. Yet, he goes on to suggest a "Utopian" plan or outline of a core curriculum that will provide to arouse the "awareness interactive with the demands and fascination of the world". (p 151)
He calls this plan a new "quadrivium" of mathematics, music, architecture, and the life sciences. Aimed at challenging the senses to "embody an incommensurable potential for fun, play, and aesthetic delight. Homo ludens is enlisted to the turbulent heart of his being." (p 159) 
This is heady stuff as Utopian plans often are. But it is exciting and challenging as George Steiner engages with the reader in sharing ideas in these notes for his "unwritten books". For even greater stimulation I would encourage readers to engage in his written books. His works are part of my own partially realized ideal library. By this I mean the sort of ideal that is characterized best by Alberto Manguel in another of his fascinating books, A Reader on Reading, where he writes:

"The ideal library is meant for one particular reader. Every reader must feel that he or she is the chosen one." "The ideal library (like every library) holds at least one line that has been written exclusively for you."

My Unwritten Books by George Steiner.  New Directions Books, 2006.
The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel.  Yale University Press, 2006.
A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel.  Yale University Press, 2010.

The Power of Education

The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas




Alexandre Dumas was born on July 24, 1802, in Villers-Cotterêts, France. He adopted the last name "Dumas" from his grandmother, a former Haitian slave. Dumas was a prolific writer of essays, short stories and novels, as well as plays and travelogues. He achieved widespread success with the novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, initially published as serials. These novels made Dumas a household name in France and a popular author throughout much of Europe.


The Count of Monte Cristo has been one of my favorite novels since my early teens.  While it is a  romance novel, the qualities that appealed to me upon first reading, and to this day, are its historical detail set as it is in the midst of the Napoleonic era and the portrayal of justice and injustice.  Above all it is a tale of revenge and retribution that leads from historical detail to a world of magic,  fabulous treasure buried on a deserted island, of bandits and dark intrigue,  and of wizardry and splendors borrowed from the Arabian nights.  I have been enamored of superheroes and the fearless Monte Cristo was one of the first I encountered as he overcomes all the odds.  A master of disguise, he has the secret of all knowledge, immense physical strength, endless resourcefulness, and complete power to punish the wicked.  There are few heroes outside of comic books that rival The Count of Monte Cristo.  Writers as disparate as Swinburne and Thackeray were both enthralled reading the exploits of Dumas' famous count.  Above all Dumas was a great story teller and this is perhaps the main reason that he was popular throughout Europe in his day and his stories continue to appeal to readers and moviegoers (the recent, 2002, film version with Jim Caviezel as Edmond Dantes is splendid and captures the essence of the revenge story).

In addition to the above-listed qualities The Count of Monte Cristo is not just an exciting tale of adventure and revenge, not only an historical fiction. Edmond Dantes has been wrongfully accused, convicted, and imprisoned in the Chateau D'if, an infamous island prison.  His story is a psychological portrayal of obsession of the highest order and at the same time a paean to the value of education. The last item is the one I remember the most from my many readings of this magnificent tale of precipitous decline, betrayal and ultimate rise with vengeance at hand. It is the "plan of education" that Edmond Dantes completes under the tutelage of the elderly Abbe while imprisoned in the Chateau d'If that impresses me more than any other aspect of this tale. The Abbe tells him that "to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other." Dantes enters upon a regimen of learning and swiftly begins to learn principles of mathematics and to understand several different languages. That he does use this knowledge in a way that belies the notion that he was gaining true wisdom seems to be the case, but the reader must traverse many hundreds of pages of exciting adventure before he can judge one way or the other. Whatever Dantes' eventual fate, the story that provides the exhilarating ride for the reader makes this a great book to read, and if your mind is like mine, to reread. 
The following brief section from the novel describes how the Abbe imparts his inestimable knowledge to Edmond.

"You must teach me a small part of what you know," said Dantes, "if only to prevent your growing weary of me. I can well believe that so learned a person as yourself would prefer absolute solitude to being tormented with the company of one as ignorant and uninformed as myself. If you will only agree to my request, I promise you never to mention another word about escaping." The abbe smiled. "Alas, my boy," said he, "human knowledge is confined within very narrow limits; and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do myself. Now, it will scarcely require two years for me to communicate to you the stock of learning I possess."

"Two years!" exclaimed Dantes; "do you really believe I can acquire all these things in so short a time?"
"Not their application, certainly, but their principles you may; to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other."
"But cannot one learn philosophy?"
"Philosophy cannot be taught; it is the application of the sciences to truth; it is like the golden cloud in which the Messiah went up into heaven."
"Well, then," said Dantes, "What shall you teach me first? I am in a hurry to begin. I want to learn."
"Everything," said the abbe. And that very evening the prisoners sketched a plan of education, to be entered upon the following day. Dantes possessed a prodigious memory, combined with an astonishing quickness and readiness of conception; the mathematical turn of his mind rendered him apt at all kinds of calculation, while his naturally poetical feelings threw a light and pleasing veil over the dry reality of arithmetical computation, or the rigid severity of geometry. He already knew Italian, and had also picked up a little of the Romaic dialect during voyages to the East; and by the aid of these two languages he easily comprehended the construction of all the others, so that at the end of six months he began to speak Spanish, English, and German. In strict accordance with the promise made to the abbe, Dantes spoke no more of escape. Perhaps the delight his studies afforded him left no room for such thoughts; perhaps the recollection that he had pledged his word (on which his sense of honor was keen) kept him from referring in any way to the possibilities of flight. Days, even months, passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive course. At the end of a year Dantes was a new man. Dantes observed, however, that Faria, in spite of the relief his society afforded, daily grew sadder; one thought seemed incessantly to harass and distract his mind. Sometimes he would fall into long reveries, sigh heavily and involuntarily, then suddenly rise, and, with folded arms, begin pacing the confined space of his dungeon. One day he stopped all at once, and exclaimed, "Ah, if there were no sentinel!" (from Chapter 17, "In the Abbes Cell",  of The Count of Monte Cristo)

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.  Oxford University Press, 1990 (1845).

Education: From Plato to MOOCs

With the internet, new education technologies are arriving at a quickening pace, such as the free online courses known as MOOCs (for massively open online courses). These have sparked intense debate about the role of the classroom and the long term fate of traditional learning institutions. Yet new technologies have long spurred such debate. With the advent of the printing press and textbooks in the late 1400s and 1500s, some predicted that classroom teaching would no longer be needed. In Plato's era (429-347 B.C.E.), writing had begun to spread beyond the elite scribes to a broader segment of the population after the introduction of a true alphabet by the Phoenicians to the Greeks. Famously, in his book Phaedrus, Plato decried that more widely spread use of writing as detrimental to the attainment of wisdom. In it, he used the character of Socrates to proclaim that writing "is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." The passage from Phaedrus where this quote appears is shown below:

 
"SOCRATES: Enough appears to have been said by us of a true and false art of speaking.


PHAEDRUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing.

PHAEDRUS: Yes. ...

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them a censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, 'This,' said Theuth, 'will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.' Thamus replied: 'O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.' ...

PHAEDRUS: I acknowledge the justice of your rebuke; and I think that the Theban is right in his view about letters.

SOCRATES: He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?

PHAEDRUS: That is most true.

SOCRATES: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

PHAEDRUS: That again is most true."


Author: Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett 
Title: Phaedrus
Publisher: Actonian Press; 2.0.0 edition (January 19, 2010)

Phaedrus by Plato translated by Benjamin Jowett  pub. by Actonian Press; 2.0.0 edition (January 19, 2010)  

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The Pursuit of Liberty

Up from the Projects: 

An Autobiography 

by Walter E. Williams

"An autobiography permits me to talk about my life as it actually was, or as I recall it, as opposed to risking having someone else--friend or foe--make untruthful statements, wrong assumptions, and distortions." (Preface, x)

Walter Williams begins his autobiography as one might expect, discussing his childhood.  It is one that began in the "projects" in Philadelphia. What one does not expect and what sets the tone for his life and his story is his answer to the question he poses: "What was it like to grow up poor?" He immediately says, "we didn't consider ourselves poor; in fact, being called poor was an insult."(p 4) Thus he turns conventional thinking on its head and alerts the reader that his life and ideas will be unconventional indeed, and sometimes inconvenient and somewhat radical.
He tells his story with simple and clear prose, demurring literary flourishes, providing straightforward reporting about his experiences in school, the army, searching for direction, and the importance of education and family.
I was most impressed that by sharing these experiences he demonstrated a life of integrity, courage, determination through hard work, intellect and curiosity, a sense of humor, and above all an independence in thought and action that, with a bit of luck led him to great achievement in his chosen field of economics. Some notable episodes included his defiance of racial stereotyping during an encounter with the academics of Amherst, his unconventional but principled criticisms of the "Davis Bacon Act" and other government actions, and his courageous decision to not join the Reagan administration. But these were no surprise following his example of independent thinking at UCLA that led him to question his professors including the famed Armen Alchian, and in doing so gaining their admiration for his courage and independent thought. He came into his own during the three decades of his tenure at George Mason University showing determination in developing private funding for the renowned Economics department and eventually leading it as the department head.  Domestic episodes of his life include family scenes that demonstrated the importance of the women in his development: mother, wife and daughter.
I began reading this autobiography somewhat familiar with Williams' thought through his opinion columns and media appearances. My admiration for his defense of the liberty and the free market was increased by great measure learning of his development, not without some stumbles, into a principled leader who deserves the admiration of all who love liberty.

Up from the Projects by Walter E. Williams. Hoover Institution Press, 2010.

Coming of Age with Books

An Open Book:

Coming of Age in the Heartland 

by Michael Dirda

We learned from you so much about so many things
But never what we were; and you made us that.
-- Randall Jarrell


This is both a great book and a challenge to readers based on Michael Dirda's memoir of his reading life and as a source for books to read and reread. Dirda not only shares the typical stories of how friends and family shaped his life, but he shares the impact of reading. This is what I enjoyed the most. When he describes his encounter with Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo as a boy I remembered the same experience that I had discovering that great adventure story. His reading was both wide and deep. He did not discriminate among books with the Green Lantern and Tarzan just as welcome as Raskolnikov and Hamlet.
The result is a book that is not only challenging, but also inspirational. One plus is a listing of books he read in his teen years -- I'm always looking for suggestions for reading even as my own to-read lists already seem to be overflowing.  Whatever your personal experience, and it's likely that it differs from both mine and Dirda's in the details, I am sure that you will find this memoir a delight and one more reason to read the work of Michael Dirda, one of our great literary commentators.


"My taste in reading has continued to develop since those ancient days.  I now find myself suspicious of the overblown, the gaudy, the excessive.  No more tub-thumping.  The art I prefer is cool, controlled and finely milled, witty instead of touching, artful or even artificial rather than realistic." (p 321)  


An Open Book by Michael Dirda.  W. W. Norton & Company, 2003