DESCENT INTO THE COMMON DENOMINATOR

DESCENT INTO THE COMMON DENOMINATOR

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© September 8, 2011

PREAMBLE

Writing is an attempt to come to terms with us and other men.  Success is discovered in proportion to the integrity we display as we engage life’s absurdity.  It means plunging the debts of the shadows that encompass everyone’s identity, a descent into the common denominator of personal hell.

African American novelist Ralph Ellison taught us this in his only novel Invisible Man (1952).  He started this quest as a pretender, living at the Harlem YMCA, where he was offered a bed and clean sheets in the mid-1930’s during the Great Depression, and imagining himself a renowned man of letters.  Like other YMCA black men with great aspirations but dressed in threadbare suits, carrying umbrellas and wearing bowler hats, coats with Chesterfield collars, speaking expansively about the state of the economy with the Wall Street Journal tucked under their elbows, he owned nothing other than his ambition. 

Ellison writes in his novel, “I knew I could live there no longer,” says the nameless narrator who provides the title Invisible Man, “That phase of my life was past.” 

The absurdity of YMCA regulars saddened and disgusted him.  They might dress as bankers or brokers, talk of point spreads, but they were lucky if they had work as janitors or messengers.  Ellison dressed like them, but he imagined himself a novelist with his carefully knotted tie, dark suit, and white handkerchief peeping from his breast pocket, shoes brightly shined, and a pencil-thin moustache for distinction.  Towards the end of World War Two, still much in his pretend mode, he acquired two Scottish terriers to join him as he strolled the streets of Harlem.  By night, he closeted himself in the shadows of his flat, read everything he could get his hands on, wrote until dawn, or until he collapsed in exhaustion, still dreaming the writer’s dream of the great black American novelist. 

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ROMAN REDUX

As I thought of Ralph Ellison, my mind wandered to President Barak Obama, who I sense has more than a little bit in common with the great author, but perhaps Machieavelli as well, a man who made a career of outrageous pretense in a shadowy time. 

Pundits and talking heads toss numbers, quantitative indices, algorithms, and such terms as “debt crisis” “Standard & Poor’s US credit rating downgrade” and “fiscal policy” around like the pretentious dress of shadowy young men at the Harlem YMCA eighty years ago.  The current fiscal crisis is not financial but political.  Likewise, the aspiration of the black young men was not for lack of ambition but for lack of opportunity.  In a shadowy wasteland, things are never as they seem. 

The world bankers didn’t abandon the United States in the recent financial meltdown.  They took refuge in US Treasury notes.  America is still the haven of last resort no matter the rhetoric to the contrary. 

And Ralph Ellison was not wrong to dream and pretend to greatness because greatness is never found in the sunshine, but always in the shadows. 

*     *     *

I was recently in the Balkans, and found myself intrigued with the fact that many Roman Emperors in the third and fourth century, when the Roman Empire was still the world’s only superpower, chose to live in the Balkans rather than Rome. 

Diocletian came to power in 284 AD and reigned until he retired in 305, eight years before his death.  During those twenty-one years as emperor, he spent a total of six months in Rome, and hated every minute of it.  I was curious as to why.

It turns out that he was disgusted with the gridlock and power vacuum created by the constant bickering of the Roman Senate.  To combat this disgust, he created a governing class concentrating power in those staff members he took with him to his newly created palace in Split, Croatia. 

Over the course of his first ten years as emperor, he replaced the ramshackle administrative system of the Senate that he had inherited from the short lived reign of Emperor Carinus (father of Marcus Aurelius, author of the famous, Meditations 121 AD, which are still read today), rebuilt the military, steadying the Ship of State, and restoring the Imperial Office of Emperor.  . 

Out went the notion the emperor was a friend to Romans rather than their boss, and out too went the obsolete conceit that the empire had a single capital.  The center of power would henceforth be wherever the emperor chose to reside.

*     *     *

Obviously, our representative democracy is not Ancient Rome, and President Obama is not the equivalent of Emperor Diocletian.  He is in a position to define his presidency and his role in it, and need not let others define it for him. 

That being said he has given delegation a bad name by delegating when he shouldn’t and failing to delegate when he should.  The healthcare initiative and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi come to mind. 

Moreover, the president appears to have a preternatural aversion to conflict when managed conflict is the glue that holds a mission on course.  It would appear he clings to the foolish belief that people in his own party on the far left and people in the opposing party on the far right are men and women of good intentions and are amenable to rational discourse.

President Andrew Jackson cemented the power of the executive branch, bit it would seem President Obama is arbitrarily placing unnecessary constraints on such executive power now.

Sometimes I feel Washington, DC reacts to crises as if the United States were a Third World nation, where the elite take charge, justify drastic measures with a rhetoric of social justice but a governance of social discrimination.  We are a rich nation because of wealth creators, not despite them. 

Obama’s persistent call for austerity seems chillingly similar to Wall Street’s role in the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975.  Wall Street took the lead in that crisis with the imposition of discipline and austerity.  It is why some see his administration as remaking itself in the image of Wall Street while being surprisingly anti-business.  Only he can reverse this perception. 

To recall the 1975 NYC fiscal crisis necessitates going back to the 1960’s, when New York City was living beyond its means.  It was offering generous way and benefit packages to unionized workers, spending too much on welfare and other public services.  Its coffers drained, the city by the early 1970’s had turned to the short-term bond market to cover everyday expenses.  Sensing trouble, Wall Street cut the city off.  The rest of the story seems surprisingly like the nation’s fiscal conundrum today.

I am for food stamps, unemployment compensation, social security benefits to the needy, but I would advocate not giving a single food stamp, unemployment check or social security benefit to anyone who could do some kind of work for the compensation or benefit that would contribute to the well being of the nation.  I would have strings attached to every single benefit. 

When I left Nalco in 1969, and Honeywell in 1990, I was eligible for unemployment benefits in both instances, although I didn’t need them, and therefore felt, as a citizen, it would have been tantamount to stealing should I have registered for them. 

It is time to come out of the shadows of the dream.  He is time for the president to see unions for what they are and they are not.  He has arrived in a new day, as did Diocletian in his, but it is not clear that he is comfortable with that fact or with that identity.

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LEADERSHIP AND THE IMPORTANCE OF A LITTLE MADNESS

Machiavelli is one of the most notable want-to-be wranglers in the center of power in political history.  It is not hard to imagine this sixteenth century figure along side the sycophantic scribes, pundits, talking heads, and gurus of our day.  These people have no real power other than that which they divine from the shadowy figures they cover. The Renaissance man was a nefarious gamer of power, and found a role for himself. 

His model for The Prince (1532) was Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentinois, nobleman, politician, Roman Catholic Cardinal, and the son of Pope Alexander VI.  Cesare Borgia lived a short tempestuous life, being killed at the age of thirty-one, but not before using his cunning, intrigue and murder in his conquest for political power.  Machiavelli not only approved of his deceptions but also characterized it as the quintessential conduct of the prince.

The author of this tiny classic never rose higher than secretary to the Second Chancery in Florence.  He claimed that he did not set out to prescribe the ways to wickedness, but rather to provide a practical guide to political power.  He hoped that it would find favor with the prince whereas it actually found him in house arrest, which is another story. 

For the reader, The Prince is sometimes amusing and sometimes frightening in its declarations.  He writes that anyone who helps another to power is bound to fall himself because he has solidified the power of another at his expense, and no prince can tolerate the existence (at the same level) of another.  Dick Cheney, Vice President of President George W. Bush, demonstrates this frustration with this assessment in his book In My Time (2011).  Machiavelli would have felt a kinship with the vice president who, as his book shows, was not above personality and professional assassination.

Here are some excerpts from The Prince that resonate with the common denominator today:

A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.

A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.

Before all else, be armed.

Benefits (to others) should be conferred gradually; they will taste better.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.

All armed prophets have been victorious; all unarmed prophets have been destroyed.

I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

It is better to be feared than loved; if you cannot be both.

It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver. 

It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.

Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

Politics have no relation to morals.

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life the clearer we should see thorough it.

The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.

The wise man does at once what the fool does finally. 

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others.  This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.

There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people. 

Were the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.

Whoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.

*     *     *

If these homilies resonate with you, it may because the hard scrabble of life has changed little in five hundred years. Next, I will take a look at education, which seems to reify this fact.   The shadows are so deep on progressive education in the United States that you have to have (symbolically) night vision goggles to see through them.  But this is not true of everywhere, as we shall see.

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HIGHER EDUATION – BARBARIAN AT THE GATES

There is common agreement that education is the root to economic, intellectual and emotional realization.  It seems sometimes we have lost the literal meaning of the word, to educate which is to “bring out, lead forth” our capacity to see, observe, process and experience and therefore “learn” something that will assist us in the problem solving of life, as life is a perpetual problem that we continuously engage and never quite solve.

All the disciplines and institutions that house them are celebrated, but in actuality are only ineffective shells to the problem solving.  Man from the beginning has encountered this hostile planet, and himself in the bargain, and has attempted to bring some order to both with, at best, imperfect success.

Higher education has made itself axiomatic to this proposition, indispensable, for cultural change has acquired self-evident power.  Unfortunately, the idea of change has become meaningless.  Change is an anodyne expression for education has lost its way.  The university has become an occupation placement bureau.  It has been reduced to the economistic idiom, “jobs, jobs, jobs!”   Like a Gregorian chant, it is the painful cry across the highways and byways of the nation, but nothing changes, not even the status of jobs.

Management schools dictate the agenda as business consultants, financiers, financial journalists, media types, and think tank commentators have sullied the language to equate education with commerce, students with consumers, and educators with producers.  The Age of Enlightenment is now all-embracing commerce.

In this counterintuitive universe, the most educated society on earth has an economically shrinking middle class and an exponentially growing lower class and upper class as the civil religion obliterates all others with the mantra, “value for money.” 

“Money, money, money” and “jobs, jobs, jobs” are polar coordinates of this economistic idiom.

Higher education has no place for student exploration, discovery and identity, but only room for the student as relativist consumer, in an ever increasingly pricey curriculum.

Concomitantly, the workplace has no place for the worker to hone his individual uniqueness, but rather to train him as a drone of commerce whatever his university exposure.  It matters not if the discipline pursued is art, music, history, language, drama, engineering, science, mathematics or physics, the focus is on the marketplace.  Calibration of elitism is based on starting salaries.  Ergo, college curriculums are skewed towards cost/benefit considerations in terms of market demands, which take precedence over personal satisfaction.  

This is a betrayal of the purpose of education, which is to enlighten the individual to appreciate the full spectrum of existence.  Instead, education has too often been reduced to a narrow form of box checking or filling the right course boxes.  Student-as-consumer is contrary to the purposes of education.  Professor of English at Cambridge (England) writes in “What are Universities For”:

The paradox of real learning is that you don’t get what you ‘want’ – and you certainly can’t buy it.  The really vital aspects of the experience of studying (a condition very different from ‘the student experience’) are bafflement and effort (London Review, August 25, 2011, p. 12).

The student as consumer measures the success of his education too frequently on income, prestige, and place in the pecking order, not the broadening of horizons.  When society reduces universities to job placement centers, it is at the expense of its primary role of deepening and extending human understanding.

To regain this advantage, universities must step back from their draconian practices of preparing students to become round plugs slotted to fit comfortably in the corporation’s round holes, and go back to arousing in the student the capacity to wonder.

This methodology is the reasons so many of our children hate school.  Children resent being regimented, regulated, tested and slotted to fit into preconceived paradigms from pre-K through graduate school.

Whatever happened to education being principally committed to the life of the mind?  Despite the fact that the best and the brightest seek careers in finance and technology, it would seem our spiraling descent into the lowest common denominator has accelerated, not slackened.  Fortunately, there is a notable exception to this.

*     *     *

FINNISH EDUCATION – A RAY OF SUNSHINE IN A SHADOWY MIST

The Smithsonian (September 2011) profiles Finland on education, and a school in particular in that country, Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, west of Helsinki, Finland.  I have been in this area if not this school many times during my frequent visits to Finland during my time with Honeywell Europe, Ltd., in the late 1980’s. 

One-sixth of the sixth graders in this school are Kosovo-Albanian and other immigrants from as far away as Northern Africa. 

The school has a nurse, social worker and psychologist.  These resource people have the authority and are trusted to turn young people around.  Over the last several years, Finland’s success in education has inspired, baffled, and yes, even irked many American educators.  In 2010, a documentary film Waiting for Superman contrasted Finland’s success with America’s troubled public schools. 

Some of the things learned in this film:

(1)   Teachers are selected from the top ten percent to earn master’s degrees in education;

(2)   Nearly thirty percent of Finland’s students receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school;

(3)   More than half of the students in the school profiled or 150 elementary level students are immigrants – from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia;

(4)   The system in place has been progressively modified over the past forty years;

(5)   The school had no idea how successful it was until the 2000 results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was published;

(6)   Finnish students across-the-board were found to be the best readers in the world;

(7)   In 2003, Finnish students led the in math;

(8)   In 2006, Finland for 15-year-old students was the first in science out of 57 countries participating;

One Finnish educator explained it this way, “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers.  We try to catch the weak students.  It’s deep in our thinking.”  What he doesn’t mention is the prestige and the level of competence that is common to Finnish teachers.

Meanwhile, the United States throws tons of money at education, then has the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, throw more money at education, but little changes as American students muddle along in the middle of the PISA rankings. 

American education has a preference for psychometrics and statistics, as well as the rhetoric of “no child left behind” and “race to the top,” but nothing changes.  Meanwhile,

(1)   There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland for high school, college or graduate school;

(2)   Seniors in high school are required to take a test at the end of their matriculation;

(3)   There are no ranking of students, no competing and comparing students to each other, much less schools or regions;

(4)   All Finland schools are publicly funded;

(5)   The people in government agencies running these schools, from national officials to local authorities are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians; 

(6)   All Finnish schools have the same national goals and draw from the same pool of university-trained educators;

(7)   This means every student has a good shot at getting a quality education;

(8)   The difference between the strongest and weakest schools in the nation is the smallest in the world;

(9)   Equality is the most important word in the Finnish language.

Ninety-three percent of all Finnish students graduate from an academic or vocational high school.  This is nearly eighteen (18) percent higher than in the United States.  Two-thirds of all Finnish students go on to college and on to graduate school to pursue some profession, which is the highest rate in the European Union.

Despite this effectiveness, Finland spends thirty (30) percent less per student than the United States.  One Finnish educator explained the difference, “We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test.”  Then he added, “We are not much interested in PISA.  It’s not what we are about.”

More astounding, if that is possible, Finnish teachers spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in the classrooms than American teachers.  They spend the extra time to build curriculums and assess student needs.  Children have a good deal of the school day devoted to play.  They spend far more time playing outside, even in the depths of the winder, which I can attest can be brutal.  Homework is minimal if at all.  Compulsory schooling doesn’t begin until the age of seven.  “We are in no hurry,” an educator states, “children learn better when they are ready, why stress them out?”

On the parents’ side, Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidizes day care for parents, and preschool for all five-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing.  In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros ($210) per month for every child until he or she turns seventeen.  Ninety-seven (97) percent of six-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics.  Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed.  Student health care is free.

Besides taking Finnish, math and science, the first graders take music, art, sports, religion and textile handcrafts.  English begins in the third grade, Swedish in the fourth.  By fifth grade the children have added biology, geography, history, physics, and chemistry. 

Finnish teachers have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests.  “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,” one educator said sarcastically.  “It’s literally nonsense.  We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

When these results were shared with American educators, there was a sense that the United States is a country of more than 300 million, so what can it really learn from a country of no more than 5.4 million with only four percent foreign born? 

It seems like a legitimate point until you look at Norway that has essentially adopted the American plan, and it has similar problems to that of the United States with a similar homogeneous population to that of Finland. 

It might be better to point out that fifty years ago Finland was mired in the Soviet Union influence, and has had to find its own way to health and identity without adopting some other model from the West.  If you ever get an opportunity to visit Finland, or to engage the people, you will better understand why this so-called “miracle” is not a miracle at all.  For hundreds of years wedged between two rival powers, Sweden and Russia, the Swedish monarchy and the Russian Czar, Finland has had little sense of freedom or independence.  Now with it, the Finnish people are making the most of it.

They are a proud, practical and proficient people.  Thirty years ago, Finland, a country that gets little satisfaction from eloquent rhetoric, decided that education was the key to its economic, social, political and cultural survival.  Reformers in government successfully past a proclamation that required every teacher to earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of the eight state universities in the country, and at the state’s expense.  From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers. 

A final set of initiatives shook the classrooms free from the last vestiges of top-down corporate regulation.  Control over policies was shifted to the town councils.  All children, clever or less so, were to be taught in the same classrooms. 

Finnish education is still an experiment with due diligence, a descent, if you will, to the common denominator of a different vintage. 

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