If I ruled the world

I’m still on a learning rant.

I heard a story a long time ago about a top-school PhD candidate.  He was presenting his thesis defense, and though it rarely happens it is true that the members of one’s committee can actually ask a question about just about anything and take the answer into account in deciding whether to award the degree.  This candidate’s degree was to be in Aeronautical Engineering.  On some whim one of the candidate’s professors asked him to explain how an airplane flies.  He couldn’t, and to its credit the committee declined to award him the degree until he went back to take a fundamental physics course and demonstrate that he’d corrected this basic lack of knowledge.  Good call, say I: would YOU like to have someone working at Boeing at that level who didn’t understand the basic physics of flight?

Unfortunately, that’s a one-off situation.  It appears there are lots and lots of people out there with college degrees and even high school diplomas who don’t seem to have learned the fundamentals that IMHO should be automatically a requirement for obtaining such a credential.  If I ruled the world, there would be requirements for earning degrees that go beyond having taken the requisite number of classes – and you could lose that degree if at any point you show you don’t know them!  For fun, I’m going to create an off-the-top-of-my-head list of the things I think someone should know just to have a full High School diploma.   If my friends see this, it could generate a great discussion because I’m sure some of them will think of things I won’t over the next 20 minutes of writing.

To earn and keep a high school diploma, you should:

• Be able to read a newspaper story aloud – relatively smoothly (OK, unless you have documented dyslexia) and then give a brief recap of what it was about.  Bonus points for knowing enough current events already to know the context.
• Be able to write a short paragraph – say, half a page typed or the equivalent handwritten – with words correctly spelled, punctuation correct, and meaning obvious.  (This is not the content test – it can be on any topic of your choosing. But it has to be lucid, use proper grammar, and contain at least a few words of more than one syllable.)
• Be able to describe our system of government and know who your representatives are and how to reach them
• Understand the fundamentals of the scientific method, the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, and some fundamentals of science – enough to understand some things about your own body, about the world we live in, about the solar system.  This therefore would cover the very basics of biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, physical geography and archeology.  We’d need to work on the details to see what level best reduces the superstition and gullibility our society lives with today.
• Be able to do basic arithmetic (balance a checkbook, make change, be able to calculate fractions and percentages – for example, how much of your income is really paid as tax?) and understand numbers and how to look at them well enough to figure out whether a number is in the ballpark of being real --  for example, if you hear someone say “One Billion Children in America are being deprived of their right to Pray in School!”, to know to wonder if perhaps there even are that many children in America.   Very basic economics, financial planning.  How to use math in everyday life.
• Have a reasonable understanding of American History and some things about the state you grew up in.  Recognize the major figures in history, know their role and approximately when they lived/served.  Know when the Civil War was fought.  Know when and why America entered the 1st and 2nd World Wars – and, by the way, the fact that both were underway for several years before we got involved.  Understand some things about the Civil Rights Movement, and when we landed on the moon.  Details of what is really needed in the way of history are subject to clarification, change and expansion – suffice it to say my objective here is to have every citizen holding any kind of educational credential show some understanding of America’s journey.   This would probably also expand to some basics about World History, going back to what we’ve learned studying human civilizations via archeology. 
• Know and keep up with the basics of political geography: be able to recognize a country when you hear its name and know the continent to which it belongs.  Be able to find things on a globe – eastern Europe, Brazil, Australia.  
• Know some things about cultures and religions other than your own.  Maybe a senior project requirement would be to investigate and report on what life is like for someone living on a different continent (I might disallow the selection of western Europe and would almost certainly disallow Great Britain), how it differs from yours, and how they might view you.  In this age of the internet, the project might include evidence of a real correspondence with someone. 
• Be able to speak and read a little of a 2nd language.  For English-speaking Americans, Spanish is strongly encouraged, since 1/3 of the folks in this country also speak it.  For anyone living in the US who doesn’t speak English, that’s the requirement.
• Know a few things about human creative capacity – art, literature, music, architecture, crafts (woodworking, cookery, knitting, or other things people used to have to do by hand in order to do a bit better than survive), and dabble a little bit more in one of these.
• Demonstrate that you can consider both sides of an argument, including the veracity of all statements.  I’m not asking you to change your outlook, opinion, or politics.  I am saying you have to know how to see the flaws in someone else’s so that you can understand the flaws in your own.  Perhaps I am a starry-eyed optimist in this realm, but I believe there would be far fewer extremists on both ends if everyone knew how to see what is right and wrong with any set of arguments – and there are usually both. 
• Know how to look something up that you don’t know, for goodness’ sake.

I’m sure I’m missing something important.  I’m also sure this is more than what a GED requires, based on what I’ve read.  I’ve not taken the GED so don’t know if it is a decent subset of the above.  I doubt it, seeing the work and writing of GED holders.   And I know for certain it is more than most school systems require of their graduates. 

Given that I don’t rule the world, I’d like in this personal space to challenge you to think about whether you still deserve the credential(s) you have now.   What have you done lately to earn the right to keep your diploma or degree?  Have you taken a workshop in whatever your college major was?  Do you read regularly – newspapers, biographies, history, science?  Looked at a map or a globe?  Looked something up before you reposted it on Facebook to be sure it made any sense?  Thought, really thought, about whether something someone told you could really be true – especially if you think you agree with him or her? 

Grandpa’s voice continues to sound in my head.  He received his high school diploma several years later than he might have, working at night after he went to work full time.  And though there were still gaps (we never quite convinced him that he wouldn’t be able to create a perpetual motion machine), he never stopped studying.  I don’t think anyone should.  Continuing education would be a way of life if I ruled the world. 

Daily learning -- and befuddlement

My grandfather always said “You should learn something new every day.  Never stop learning.  When you do, you’ll die.”  He lived to be almost 94 and was clear-headed and independent right up to the end, so I think maybe he was onto something.  In any case, he inspired me to commit to being a lifelong learner.  I’m always reading and usually studying something.  If I could get someone to pay me to go to school, I’d definitely do that for the rest of my life!  The more I learn, the more fantastic and wonderful the universe is, even if I also learn how little I know. 

I love the internet.  It used to be that I’d have to go digging at the library to find information on something.  Now I sit down to my computer, even if what I want to do is dig at the library (not that I don't still love libraries and read books a lot!).  I often answer questions in moments that before I might never have bothered to answer in the first place.  Now there’s never an excuse not to learn at least one new thing a day, just like Grandpa told me to do. 

Of course, there’s something important that must be paired with access to so much information, and that is the ability to think critically and require real evidence.  It’s too easy to publish complete crap and make it look good.  The mere act of asserting something doesn’t make it true, even if you surround it with pretty graphics and lots of links.  It’s important for every reader, every video watcher, every user of the internet to have a good foundational education and the ability to consider information skeptically.  It would appear, however, that most people don’t. 

I read recently that the percentage of Americans who believe in the veracity of complete rubbish – let’s take astrology as an example – has gone up since 1900, despite clear debunking evidence and easy access to same.  The author suggested it has partially to do with a twisting of the premise of Free Speech.  If it’s OK to say anything, then it must be that everything has equal chance of being valid.  I have trouble believing people could possibly think this, until I run into it directly.  When I talk to someone who “believes in” astrology about precession having moved where the sun comes up against the background of the stars and the more recently discovered planets the Babylonians didn’t know existed, they generally a)have no clue what I’m talking about and b)don’t really wish to know.  And they continue to arrange their lives around the vague and often silly pronouncements of astrologers.  This troubles me.  Astrology was the best the Babylonians could come up with, and in fact for some centuries we didn’t have enough information to really argue with it, even though many people noticed it only “did the job” when it was so vague as to be useless for anything except after-the-fact reinterpretation.  But now we do know better, and yet people still “believe” in something that clearly isn’t true.  What does that say about us?  And more important, how can we possibly expect to keep from being swindled or worse if we can't look at evidence and think critically and clearly about what it means?

I had two run-ins with people in the last few days that really made my eyes cross.  One was with a stranger, a woman I met while on the Blue Line, who has (among other things) signed on to conspiracy theories about 9/11 and for some reason wanted to talk about it.  From what I could tell, this is at least in part because she didn’t understand the physics of the buildings’ collapse.  She thinks there had to be explosions in the basement.  How she thinks explosions in the basement would have made the towers pancake from the top, I’m not sure. 

The other was with a friend, an old high school chum with whom I recently reconnected on Facebook.  He posted something that declared, in part: “poetry is to religion what analysis is to science”.  I commented that I did not get the analogy.  He replied that it fits exactly, that science is just a guessing game!  I was appalled.  I actually went for a walk to think about it.  How can someone born near 1960 and college-educated think such a thing?   I really, really wanted to retort that he ought to have a little more respect for science, that the paramedics who tended to him during a recent health crisis did not save his ass by consulting his horoscope.  But it seemed pointless to do that.  Instead, I tried to explain the scientific method and what analysis is (i.e., not just guessing).  It turns out he’s a poster boy for the “equal point of view” frame of mind.  He’s only interested in his truth and doesn't care about anyone else's point of view.  He actually seemed to be using "truth" and "point of view" interchangeably.  In fact, he says it’s clear I have “issues with science” that I’m trying to force on him.  All I could say was, “Wow”.  His profile talks about becoming enlightened.  What irony. 

I wonder if he therefore believes that David Duke’s (he’s black) and Jerry Falwell’s (he’s gay) “points of view” are equally valid?  I won’t ask him; it’s pretty clear he isn’t interested in honest debate with me.  But I would love to know.

The late Dr. Carl Sagan is one of my heroes, because in addition to all the excellent research and teaching he did,  he worked much of his career to make science accessible to people like me.  He wrote many books, and I have read them all.  The one I love the most is called Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  In he explains, very carefully, how the scientific method works and why we should all think critically and skeptically.  He also talks about how learning the truth doesn’t reduce a jot the wonder of it all.  I wish I could give a copy of his book both to my Blue Line companion and to my friend.  I wish I had any hope that either would consider reading it. 

If you haven’t read it, please do, and tell me what you think.  Or better, tell me what you've learned.  I learn something new every time I read it.