Bach Too Fast

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Letting Go

It is a beautiful Spring morning in Montreal, the last Sunday in April, and I'm listening to the last of Peter Togni's all-Bach concerts on CBC. Perhaps I'm having trouble letting go.

It seems only yesterday that I could listen to classical music all day on CBC. Midday was Off the Record with Bob Kerr. For the last five years or so, his leitmotif was complaining about liner notes. He never quite came to terms with the transition from LP's to the new CD's with their sharply reduced space for pictures and text. I can still hear the pauses and sighs of exasperation as he tried to read the small type in a CD booklet or searched for a piece of information that was just not there.

Frustration. Stuff left out. Things that are just not there anymore.

Listening to Bach. To the St. Matthew Passion. And remembering Otto Klemperer and his recording from 1961. The classic that has become famous because of the very slow tempi. I have found it in my collection and am listening as I write this. Yeah, it's probably too slow.

Glory

Otto understood something. Just as the body of the violin resonates with the strings, receiving and amplifying their musical energy, so does music capture the listener, fastening his heart to its pulse, breathing with him, giving substance to the torment in his soul.

But music doesn't move us by force. The connection is a tenuous one. It is like rocking a car stuck in the snow, back and forth, gently feeding the rhythm of the rocking. If it is expertly done, enough energy can be transmitted to break the car free. Just so does music move the soul. Its work is not done when it emanates from a violin body or a speaker cone. It lives on in the listener, building momentum, beauty, glory. Bach does it.

Bucket Music

Peter Togni opened Choral Concert today with Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, saying this is the music he would like to hear at the end of life. My bucket music came later in the the program: Mache dich, mein Herze, rein – Make yourself, my heart, pure. (So Jesus can live there.) It was preceded by other excerpts from the St. Matthew Passion and the tempi were, well, fast.

It's a sign of our times. Fast is fashionable. It's not that a fast tempo is bad – it can be very exciting, as for example, in some sections of Glenn Gould's first recording of the Goldberg Variations. But at a certain point I find myself asking, is there more to this than the technical virtuosity? Does it do anything musically?

Here I am, a heavy Chevy stuck in a drift, and the conductor isn't speaking to my rhythm. His energy whistles by and I'm still stuck. So here I am later in the day, thinking about Mache dich and hearing it in my head, much slower. Now the sixteenth notes are the third-story facade of an elegant piece of architecture. They build on the first and second story, elaborating on the structure beneath, adding momentum to the great design. How they do that is a subject for a long musicological article, or perhaps just a conversation between Bach and God. But now I am moved. I feel the beauty and the glory of death. I feel the intense longing, the sweetness, the desire for an innocence I left behind in the womb. I guess I'm just getting old.

Stuff of Dreams

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Chicago?

Reading a New York Times article last month about the Dreamliner’s troubles, something jumped out at me. Deep in the article were the words Chicago-based Boeing.

Of course I know that Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago some years back. But still, airplanes are made at airports, else how will they fly away?

Boeing field, Seattle, where the first B-17 crashed on takeoff with the controls locked. Boeing Field, almost downtown, nestled between the freeways. Boeing Field, where I myself went in 1974 for simulator training on the new B-727-200. Everett, WA, where the mighty Whale has been put together since forever. Boeing and its people are a part of the Pacific Northwest, and nothing will ever change that.

The Dreamliner Project

On the technical front the B-787 is ambitious. Carbon-fiber construction, fly-by-wire and all that, of course, in the service of reduced weight and therefore greater economy of operation. But these technologies have been proven in the field with the B-777 and Airbus aircraft. The leap forward is the almost complete elimination of hydraulic systems, replacing them with electrically operated everything. Six huge (by aircraft standards) generators provide enough power for a small city. And infamously, two lithium-ion battery packs provide power to start the APU and to back up cockpit instruments.

It is on the business front, however, that the real leap has been made. Following business school dogma, or perhaps to be near their largest customer, Boeing management made the move to Chicago. There they hatched a plan to build the new plane by doing less than forty percent of the work. The rest they farmed out to fifty-odd “strategic partners” around the world (See James Surowiecki's Requiem for a Dreamliner? in the February 4, 2013 New Yorker).

The Problem

As everyone now knows, the B-787 has been grounded following two incidents involving the meltdown of a lithium-ion battery pack. My own experience with these batteries is limited to a lightweight portable circular saw I used last year in a roofing project. It worked beautifully, except for when I used it to rip a ten-foot length of decking and overheated its battery pack. Wisely, it shut down and refused to go further. I had to wait half a day for the pack to cool enough to be recharged.

That battery pack still works fine today, thanks to the built in sensors and software. And I have learned to appreciate the lithium-ion battery's tendency to overheat when a large current demand is placed on it, such as ripping a long board or starting an APU.

From the New York Times' coverage this last month I also learned that the lithium-ion battery produces oxygen when it overheats, leading to the possibility of an uncontrollable fire. It would seem that when it comes to using lithium-ion batteries, it would be wise to know what you are doing.

The Solution

Recently Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX) wrote to Boeing to offer assistance with the battery problem. His offer was declined (Flight Global, January 29, 2013). Apparently, it is better to look like you know what you're doing than to actually know anything. Isolated in Chicago, Boeing management are doing damage control by gagging their Chief Engineer in Seattle and labelling the battery failures “maintenance issues.” (For an elucidation of this process in aviation, see the papers and speeches of Mark H. Goodrich.)

Whither the Dream?

Flying is based on confidence. We fly because it is cheap and we believe it is safe. We are lured by deals and fed statistics proving that flying is safer than it ever has been before. We understand that with today's technology aircraft usually “land themselves.”

But none of this is so.

Our single most polluting act is not driving a car or consuming coal-fired electricity, but taking an airline flight. The cost of climate change is not factored into those cheap tickets. But – perhaps closer to home – neither is the cost of non-existent pilot training or remote project oversight in aircraft manufacture. The statistics are re-assuring but mask obvious truths: a) in two recent tragedies the pilots stalled the airplane and didn't recover b) the Dreamliner is at risk of failure because of the financialization of business.

The B-787, as far as I can see, has the potential to be a winner. There are no technical obstacles that cannot be overcome with a little real work. But the danger lies in the dream, in the concentration on maintaining that flying is risk-free. Because, you see, there was something else that jumped out at me in the New York Times article. A Boeing Chief Engineer was quoted about the difficulties of building an airplane with fifty “strategic partners.” It may be my research, but I have been unable to find that quote since.

Management: Blinded by Success

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Blinded

We have become very good at management – so good that we have set it (and ourselves) on a pedestal. But management is not a panacea. We throw it at every problem, expecting the usual success. More and more we are encountering intransigence as we attempt to solve problems with measurement and money.

Two of the most pressing problems facing us today are health care and education. The cost of the former is out of control. The quality of the latter is declining and testing isn't fixing it.

The reason is straightforward: health care and education require a relationship between individuals – one person helping another. True, there is more to it than that – but the basic requirement remains. Ask anyone whose life was changed by a good teacher.

Atul Gawande

I am a huge fan of Dr. Atul Gawande. He writes like a dream, takes me into his world of medicine and surgery, and seriously addresses the problems facing his profession. But his most recent article Big Med (the New Yorker, August 13) took me into new territory. He describes how hospitals (including his own) are forming into conglomerates, and compares the management of these conglomerates with that of The Cheesecake Factory, a large and successful restaurant chain.

I devoured the article with my usual fascination and perhaps a touch of trepidation. The next day, I brought it up with one of my sons, who had also read it. He had been horrified, he said, both by the idea that health care could be “managed” like a restaurant chain, and by the “creepy” remote monitoring (by closed-circuit TV) of doctors on the job.

We had a lively discussion. In hindsight I can see my son brought me around to his point of view.

Finland

For the last decade the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been ranking countries in educational achievement using PISA tests. (Program for International Student Assessment). Finland has consistently ranked at or near the top. What is its secret? Respect for teachers.

The Finnish position on education is the opposite of the North American (especially the U.S.) position. There are tests, but they are not standardized. Teachers make and give tests to see if the student has learned and if they themselves have taught. Teaching is a higher-prestige occupation than medicine or the law. Teachers must have a degree, but it is not in education. The degree itself (at least an M.A. with a thesis) is the license to teach. When asked what might make them leave the profession for, say, business, Finnish teachers cite not higher pay, but loss of autonomy.

Management or Collegiality?

As recently as a generation ago, doctors and teachers could and did operate alone: the private practice and the one-room schoolhouse. Since then huge advances in technology have made that impossible. So much knowledge is available today that health outcomes are compromised if the patient's medical history is not instantly available to the specialist. Learning is limited if the teacher cannot back up her teaching with the Khan Academy and Coursera and learn from these herself. As Dr. Gawande points out, doctors (and teachers) must continue to learn from each other.

All this argues for collegiality. Good management can make sure fresh food isn't wasted at The Cheesecake Factory and it probably has a role running schools and hospitals. But as Finland's example shows, it is counterproductive when used to control doctors and teachers.

Why is this so? And why now, more than even a decade ago?

Financialization

Financialization. The word is not in the dictionary, at least not yet. But there it is in Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man, the excellent and revealing article about Mitt Romney's background in the October 1, 2012 issue of The New Yorker. With financialization – financial “products”, hedge funds, and private equity – management has been taken to a new level where, effectively, only money matters.

Of course, money is called productivity and efficiency among other euphemisms. But what it means in practice is that human interaction, energy, and invention are now virtual qualities at best, and at worst ignored altogether. Is it any wonder that in North America and especially in the U.S.A. health care and education have the highest costs in the world and some of the worst outcomes?

Human Potential

George Romney told his son, who idolizes him, that “there's nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success.” During Wednesday night's debate Mitt himself said his goal was to maximize the potential of each individual. How ironic is it that the son's policies and politics – the real policies, not the slight-of-hand wordplay visible Wednesday night – are systematically dismantling his cherished management and stifling each individual's God-given gifts, effectively fulfilling his father's prophecy?

Mitt Romney may, in his heart of hearts, believe in the sacred gifts of each human being, and even in the absolute necessity of their being channelled into paths that benefit society as a whole. It is, alas, probably too late for him to see how his actions are undermining his belief. That is for us to see and correct.

Mitt the Spider

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Watching Landings

 

You’re at the local airport. You watch landings, because pilots always do. Today, because there is a lot of traffic and you're not pressed for time, you watch for awhile. Twenty, maybe thirty landings go by. What do you see? Fifty percent (this is a flight school strip) touch down halfway down the runway. One or two touch down in the last 1000 feet.

What do you take away from the experience?

Gossip, certainly – if you're standing there with fellow pilots. Comfort, possibly – if you feel you can do better than most of what you're watching. Or perhaps chagrin, if the reverse is true and a recent example of your own work sticks in your craw.

But there is a more important take-away: forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing.That is the dictionary definition of judgment. And the aviation version of judgment is more practical: if I find myself in this situation, can we do it?

The we in the last paragraph refers to you and your airplane. You learn skills and you memorize your airplane's limitations. You are a team.

The situation is whatever pickle you're going to get into on your next flight. Can I land on a 2000-foot runway?

You look up the Landing Distance Required in your Flight Manual or Pilot Operating Manual. For my N-Model Bonanza I find 1600-2000 feet (no wind, 75°F. or less, 2000 feet pressure altitude or less). So we can do it, right?

Not so fast. The runway at my local airport is just under 4000 feet long. I consistently turn off on the center taxiway, but not without some braking. I have a bit too much speed over the fence and I float too long. So I'm not quite ready for that 2000-foot strip. My airplane is, but I am not.

Here is another clue. My POM also lists Landing Distance Required for a Short Field Landing. Same configuration, but the over-the-fence speed is 5 knots less. Instead of 1600-2000 feet, the required distance is 1200-1400 feet. Add five knots and add five hundred feet! Nope: my energy management – hey, my hands and feet, if you get right down to it – are not good enough yet.

Why not, you may ask? After all, I have been a pilot for 45 years. Well, two things: first, I'm 68 years old; and second, after I retired from airline flying I didn't touch a yoke for six and a half years. So I had to write exams and do a lot of re-learning. Now I'm learning the hands and feet again.

In short, for the moment my airplane is better than I am.

Hours, Experience, and Judgment

How do we discern and compare on the road to developing pilot judgment? First, look at the one or two Bottom Guns who touched down in the last 1000 feet. “Good enough,” they say. I guess so, if their airplane can stop in that distance. Then the fifty percent who touched halfway down. “Plenty of runway left. No sweat.” These guys are like me. Their airplanes are better than they are. It's just a matter of how much better.

What's missing? A path to learning judgment.

Experience is measured in hours. Judgment, theoretically, comes from experience. But it is not automatic. Hours of flight or even hours of practice take you nowhere unless they are accompanied by some discernment and comparison. Neither the Bottom Guns nor the halfway-down-the-runway pilots are safe trying to land on a 2000-foot runway. But do they know that?
Spiders are kind to their own. Well, story except for the kinky Black Widow, who eats her husband after sex.

Spiders are very good at controlling the populations of lesser insects – gnats, for example.

Above all, spiders dine in style. Pheasant under glass has nothing on them. Have you noticed? A fine, strapping exoskeleton gets stuck in a beautiful, geometric web whose strands are stronger than steel. There is no rush, no baring of teeth or ripping of flesh. No blood on the floor.

The spider, epicure and medical professional, injects a magic potion under the shiny shell. The guts and muscle of the beautiful captive are reduced, sautéed and flambéed. Only then does the spider dine – elegantly and unhurriedly.

After the meal the prize remains. The beautiful prey is still there, intact and whole, framed in the skyscraper web. Its value seems undiminished.

But it will move no more, except when the wind pulls at the strands binding it. The soul is long gone.

So too does private equity provide for its own.

Developing Pilot Judgment

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Watching Landings

You’re at the local airport. You watch landings, because pilots always do. Today, because there is a lot of traffic and you're not pressed for time, you watch for awhile. Twenty, maybe thirty landings go by. What do you see? Fifty percent (this is a flight school strip) touch down halfway down the runway. One or two touch down in the last 1000 feet.

What do you take away from the experience?

Gossip, certainly – if you're standing there with fellow pilots. Comfort, possibly – if you feel you can do better than most of what you're watching. Or perhaps chagrin, if the reverse is true and a recent example of your own work sticks in your craw.

But there is a more important take-away: forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing.That is the dictionary definition of judgment. And the aviation version of judgment is more practical: if I find myself in this situation, can we do it?

The we in the last paragraph refers to you and your airplane. You learn skills and you memorize your airplane's limitations. You are a team.

The situation is whatever pickle you're going to get into on your next flight. Can I land on a 2000-foot runway?

You look up the Landing Distance Required in your Flight Manual or Pilot Operating Manual. For my N-Model Bonanza I find 1600-2000 feet (no wind, 75°F. or less, 2000 feet pressure altitude or less). So we can do it, right?

Not so fast. The runway at my local airport is just under 4000 feet long. I consistently turn off on the center taxiway, but not without some braking. I have a bit too much speed over the fence and I float too long. So I'm not quite ready for that 2000-foot strip. My airplane is, but I am not.

Here is another clue. My POM also lists Landing Distance Required for a Short Field Landing. Same configuration, but the over-the-fence speed is 5 knots less. Instead of 1600-2000 feet, the required distance is 1200-1400 feet. Add five knots and add five hundred feet! Nope: my energy management – hey, my hands and feet, if you get right down to it – are not good enough yet.

Why not, you may ask? After all, I have been a pilot for 45 years. Well, two things: first, I'm 68 years old; and second, after I retired from airline flying I didn't touch a yoke for six and a half years. So I had to write exams and do a lot of re-learning. Now I'm learning the hands and feet again.

In short, for the moment my airplane is better than I am.

Hours, Experience, and Judgment

How do we discern and compare on the road to developing pilot judgment? First, look at the one or two Bottom Guns who touched down in the last 1000 feet. “Good enough,” they say. I guess so, if their airplane can stop in that distance. Then the fifty percent who touched halfway down. “Plenty of runway left. No sweat.” These guys are like me. Their airplanes are better than they are. It's just a matter of how much better.

What's missing? A path to learning judgment.

Experience is measured in hours. Judgment, theoretically, comes from experience. But it is not automatic. Hours of flight or even hours of practice take you nowhere unless they are accompanied by some discernment and comparison. Neither the Bottom Guns nor the halfway-down-the-runway pilots are safe trying to land on a 2000-foot runway. But do they know that?

What’s in it for Me?

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I admire Maureen Dowd and enjoy her columns, but she is off track on this one (Playing Now: Hail to the Chiefs – New York Times, Sunday, September 9, 2012).

She does, however, speak for us.

We live in a market-driven society that has come to expect service. I'm paying. You deliver. We have become puffed up with the importance of our money.

But education doesn't work that way. Good health care doesn't work that way. And – this was the President's point – democratic government doesn't work that way.

Just before the line Ms. Dowd satirizes – the election four years ago wasn't about me. It was about you – the President had the courage and the leadership to remind Americans that “We, the people, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights.” He goes as far as to say that “freedom without a commitment to others . . . . is unworthy of our founding ideals.”

President Obama is right. We won't get out of the mess we're in unless each of us can turn to a fellow citizen who has done good work and say, “Welcome home. You did that. You did that.”

We can't demand good work. We can't demand good teaching, good health care, or good government. No matter how much money we have, we can't put the “good” in any of these. Paying is not enough, and the Market is not a leader.

So perhaps Ms. Dowd has done all of us a service by putting a voice to our selfishness. The voice rings hollow in a society largely emptied of respect for good work and of motivations other than money. But perhaps Ms. Dowd was satirizing us and not the President?

How To Live: What Humanity Has Learned So Far

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Be grateful. Do good work. Keep the faith. This is how to live, according to two millennia of world culture.

Different cultures put it differently. Within a cultural tradition, the religion might put it differently from the philosophy or from the literature. And of course there are many religions, philosophies, and works of literature, each with its own voice.

But that is not what we are concerned with. Here we want to speak of what they all say, even if they do so in different words.

Be Grateful

This is the starting point. Without gratitude it is difficult, if not impossible, to move ahead into a productive life, into happiness, into peace. All religions address this point. The clearest exposition is the awakening of the Buddha. Sitting under the Bodhi tree, he saw that the self is the source of all unease.

Self-awareness is a great gift, but it is a double-edged sword. One can easily become drunk on self-awareness and slide further into addiction to its many temptations. Self-pity. Depression. Unhappiness.

Other religions are not so direct in their path to peace. Most approach from the other end, from faith. Believe in a god or gods, they say. Then by surrendering you will have expanded your awareness beyond your self. Believe and your problems will be solved.

This approach, it seems to me, is less attractive for two reasons. First, we are endowed with intellect and curiosity, and to be well we must use our gifts. To be told to suspend them, right off the bat, goes counter to our valid instincts. Second, there is a temptation to laziness in any belief. By accepting Jesus, for example, we can be saved. Or perhaps by saying we have accepted Jesus we can be saved, from one moment to the next. Have we really stepped outside ourselves, or is it a delusion? Are we instead inside ourselves, thinking of ourselves as good persons? And maybe of others as not quite as good persons?

I am not saying it is impossible to get to gratitude through faith. Or through good work, for that matter. It is just harder. And there are more pitfalls along the way.

Think of a cow, lying in a field of clover, chewing her cud. Is she content? Probably the question is meaningless. She is one of many cows eating clover and ruminating. She is surrounded by green and birdsong, by life, by creation. She knows she is not the center of the universe, or rather, she would never be tempted to think such a thing. She is already saved.

We humans can always be tempted. The doctrine of original sin is a way of pointing this out. The Christian cycle of acceptance and absolution, the ritual of the mass, is a path to awareness beyond the self. But it is not the only path. True, pain is part of life, and through the pain of transgression we can walk into gratitude. But it can be simpler. We can hear a thrush sing its greeting to the dawn and be made whole, which is to say to be made part of a whole, our awareness extending beyond our selves. Gratitude. For nature. For creation. For not being alone. For not being the center of the universe.

Do Good Work

I said earlier that we are endowed with intellect and curiosity. From birth, we have many other gifts as well, although just as each of us has different DNA, so each of us differs in our particular combination of gifts. Good work is putting these gifts to work for the benefit of mankind.

Of course we need money. Or maybe some land on which to grow food. Our first goal, after all, is survival. Once again, here is a valid instinct to be heeded. But the goal is not land. The goal is not money. The goal is survival for the purpose of doing our good work. Work which is unique to each one of us. So yes – as individuals we are important. But not because we are better than others. We are important because humanity and all creation will be better off if we manage to realize our gifts and give them back. We will be better off if we don't die with those gifts still clutched to our bosom.

Keep the Faith

This is another way of saying, be hopeful.

Be in the moment. This is important. When we are doing our best work we are in the moment, fully engaged, like the cow chewing her cud. But we are humans, endowed with intellect and curiosity. So we remember the past and think of the future. So yes – be in the moment when you can, as much as you can. But don't be dismayed if your thoughts turn to the past or the future. Our ability to do so is one of our gifts. But like many of our human gifts, it comes with temptations. To regret the past. To worry about the future. Some regret and worry is fine, of course. Regret and worry have their purpose. But don't get stuck there. The past must be accepted if we are to move on. And the future must hold promise. We have to believe in a future, whether it is in this life or beyond. We have to be hopeful.

I will finish with a personal parsing of the Lord's Prayer:

Our father who art in heaven. I am not alone. There are others. There is all creation.

Hallowed be they name. This creation is beautiful, and beauty will feed me.

Thy kingdom come. Let there be a future which is better than today.

Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Let me understand the limits of my gift of free will. Let me not suppose that I have dominion over others, or even complete dominion over my own life.

Give us this day our daily bread. May I have what I need to survive, so I have a chance to realize my gifts.

And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. May what I have done wrong not stop me, not prevent me from going on. And I know it is a bargain: I must forgive others as well as myself.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. I know that each one of my many gifts comes with temptations. I know that by struggling against those temptations I increase my chances of survival to do what I must do. Once again, this is a bargain.

For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. When I succeed and do my good work, let me understand that it is not for me. It is for all of humanity and even all of creation. It is not to put me above my fellow creatures. It is not to wield power for power's sake. If I am given power let me be a leader, not a bully. And if I am successful let me be grateful, not puffed up.

For ever and ever. May this continue beyond and outside of me for a century of centuries. For as long as my intellect can comprehend.

Amen.

The Education Myth

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What do we mean by Education?

 

Educate: from the Latin educere, to lead out. Teach: this is from deik, a much older word. The Proto-Indo-European from which it springs is thought to be more than 5500 years old.

Today, as our education system suffers, there is much talk of educating and teaching but few speak  of indoctrinating. It just doesn't sound right. We want to do something high-minded for our kids, not beat them with rulers. But wait. Indoctrinate: from Middle French and Latin, to give instruction in the fundamentals or rudiments. This is the same root (the Latin doceo, docere: to teach) as doctrine: something that is held or put forth as true; and doctor: teacher. But there is another meaning to indoctrinate and that is why it didn't sound quite right: to imbue with an idea or opinion. That is the indoctrinate we are leery of.

What is it that we want to do with education, anyway? If we are honest we will have to include some indoctrination, some giving of instruction in fundamentals. Remember Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmatic? The three 'R's? But we want more than that. We want the educated person to be able to think for herself.

Keeping the Public in Public Education

This is the title of a newly-published small book by Rick Salutin, teacher, writer, and long-time columnist for The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star (Linda Leith Publishing, 2012). He dedicates the book to his teachers – two of them in particular. He reports on his visit to Finland, which in the last decade has ranked consistently first in the world in student achievement. What he found was simple: in Finland teachers are respected and allowed to do what they do best.

I recommend this book highly to anyone seeking evidence and carefully reasoned arguments for the following conclusions:

Teaching and learning is an interaction between two human beings.

Teaching to the test is counterproductive.

Management oversight of teachers is counterproductive.

Graduate degrees in “education” are useless.

Curricula can be good, bad, or offensive.

The real goal is to think for yourself.

What Industry Wants

North American industry finds itself in a bit of a bind. Most of the jobs it needs done require a thorough grounding in Math and Science. We are not educating enough people to fill these positions. To be sure there are generations-old partnerships like that of Stanford University with Silicon Valley. But in general industry doesn't look far enough forward to help in the education of the next decade's engineers and scientists. Instead, what we see is the proliferation of “for profit” universities, which are in essence vehicles for turning student loans into capital formation tools. Never mind that the student victims wind up with a degree which is even narrower and more overpriced than one from a legacy non-profit university. Charter schools are another example where public money is used to finance a “free market” experiment.

So where do we look for guidance? The right points out that government only imposes tests and hierarchies, so the free market is the only option. The left says big money tilts the income curve and skims the graduating cream to work for hedge funds, so government is the answer. While these are arguable points, they don't help us to improve education, to get us to a place where, as in Finland, citizens respect teachers and kids learn naturally and well.

The Education Myth

The myth is simply that education is found in institutions. We have come to so thoroughly identify learning as emanating from schools and universities that we have forgotten the basics: a teacher shows something, points it out, says, look at that! Then a student sees that thing as if for the first time.

If we consider this simple but essential relationship, many useful insights follow:

The institution is the house, the teacher and student make the home.

Learning depends on mutual respect.

There are as many ways to learn as there are students.

There are as many ways to teach as there are teachers.

Forcing conformity kills the motivation to learn or to teach.

What Now?

Teachers should have a university degree. Just not in Education. If they are really teachers they will know what to do.

We should stop worrying about tests, for teachers as well as for students. Let teachers teach and let students learn. It will be obvious soon enough who is getting it right.

No one has a right to be taught. Everyone should have a chance to learn. At a policy level this seems like a contradiction, but it is not. Let teachers and student find each other and chances and opportunities can be winnowed out from rights and entitlements.

There have always been teachers who got it right. In the fifth century B.C. it was Socrates. In the last decade it has been the Finns. We have been looking in the wrong place.

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." W.B. Yeats

 

Work is Dead

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Hello, Grandmas and Grandpas. Ever wonder why your kids are living at home? Or why, when they do make money, it's one-shot, scavenger deals that pick away at the edge of the economy? Our kids – gleaners, snatching the crumbs?

For an answer, take a look at the corporate executive. No, not the entrepreneur, still in charge of the company he founded twenty years ago. No, not even that new political god, the small business owner – he (or she) is so busy with cash flow that there is no time for vision. I am talking of the CEO of a publicly traded company, hired by the Board of Directors and responsible to the shareholders.

The job of this CEO is to systematically devalue work.

Why, you ask? Remember – the time horizon for a CEO is the next quarterly report, which is never more than three months away. He could spend his time dreaming a vision for the future. But – especially in these hard, competitive times – he doesn't dare. The bottom line has to look better three months hence and his only choice is to cut costs. So he merges, divests, moves work offshore, and fights unions. He cuts costs, because that seems to be the only way he can protect the shareholders.

But work, and workers, are more than just a cost to the company. They are also its most important asset. A generation ago workers were loyal, dedicating their life's work to the company that kept a roof over their heads and food on the family table. That loyalty is long gone. Today every worker is stressed as his salary and benefits suffer the Death of a Thousand Cuts. He can't quite voice it, but he knows his company thinks he is replaceable and essentially worthless.

So we have the Occupy movement and We are the 99%. We have to do something to stop this race to the bottom. But what?

We might start by asking Who are the Shareholders?

As I wrote March 18, the shareholder is most likely a hedge fund, which owns a stock, on average, for twenty-two seconds. The decision to buy and sell the stock is made by a computer algorithm.

So the Board exercises its fiduciary duty and hires a CEO, who in turn exercises his duty to the shareholder, who turns out to be no one, a chimera, a moving target.

Our work, our careers, are being devalued by an algorithm, for the profit of a very few. Sadly, no one else is in control.

Twenty-two Seconds

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I remember learning about money and velocity. Apparently money doesn’t do society much good sitting in a pillow. Rather, it should be circulating – invested – enabling the endeavors of man.

For the last decade a mantra has been buzzing in the business background: we're doing it for the shareholders. The buzz, though, is coming from a few well-connected and (now) wealthy top executives, not from the bulk of individual shareholders, whose interests have been poorly represented.

In today's Sunday New York Times Jonathan Haidt has a piece titled Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness. He writes in the context of the 2012 US presidential election, but his insight deserves wider application. He speaks of tribal and group behaviour, and observes that “the great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred”. We have done that with The Market.

The PBS Newshour of March 15 contains not one but two segments of importance both to the financial world and to the rest of us. The first is a reaction to Greg Smith's Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs, wherein he speaks of the firm's lack of integrity and disregard – even scorn – for its customers. The second (21:20 to 29:46 in the March 15 Newshour) is an interview with Robert Harris, whose new novel, The Fear Index, came true even as he was writing it. It seems that certain hedge funds have mopped up the scientists who were to work on the Texas Supercollider (before it was cancelled) and got them instead to develop software which scans the news (a digital feed from Bloomberg first and foremost) for anything that could spook the market. The software then makes the appropriate trades. At one such fund author Robert Harris (in real life, in real time) watched a software algorithm make 1.5 million dollars in twenty minutes.

But the most significant and disturbing moment, for me, comes at 25:22 in the March 15 Newshour. It seems that although high-frequency trading firms make up only 2% of the 20,000 trading firms operating today, they make 75% of all trades. And – and here I nearly fell off the couch – the average time a stock investment is held these days is twenty-two seconds.

Remember how money with velocity is good? By that measure we should be doing very well indeed. What happened?

We could ask ourselves Who is this shareholder to whom executives pay lip-service? And Who or what is The Market that we seem to revere and to which politicians kowtow? Is it a Wizard of Oz? Or, as Robert Harris says, is it more like a Frankenstein run amok?

We would do better worshiping a god.