Jeffrey Martin

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

To My Mother - Toni Martin - For the Gift of Life

The movie 'It's a Wonderful Life' is a classic. People often watch it around Christmas. It starts off with a man thinking about committing suicide by jumping off a bridge into a freezing river. It's based on the short story 'The Greatest Gift' by Philip Van Doren Stern. Here's a powerful line from that story: "You had the greatest gift of all conferred upon you—the gift of life, of being a part of this world and taking a part in it. Yet you denied that gift."

My mother wasn't supposed to be able to have children because she had some internal injuries from a childhood illness. She had surgery, but it was still doubtful. Therefore my life is miracle adjacent from the beginning. Not only was I born, my mother also had my younger sister a couple of years later. Hopes and wishes made real, the first gift of life.

Life doesn't always feel like a gift though. Often it can feel like a curse of physical, mental, and emotional pain. Thirteen years later I was deep in all three and contemplated suicide myself. The thought of my mother's sadness turned me away from that and toward a replacement life pursuit of finding the meaning of life. The second gift of life.

Another thirteen years later I was on a misadventure in Africa and in a situation I probably wasn't going to survive. My mother called some people and made some threats. It was still close, but I made it out. The third gift of life.

That's three times that my mother has given me the gift of life. If I think about it there are more. One time as a teenager I decided to walk from Blue Lake to Fremont, Michigan in winter. In total it's the same distance as a marathon. It had taken me all day. As I was getting closer to home the wind was picking up, clouds covered the sky. The road was covered in ice, the snow in the ditch on the side of the road was deep. As the wind picked up it was blowing so hard that when I stood on the road it would blow me back and I was sliding on the ice. It was snowing and the visibility was getting low, and since it was later in the day it was getting darker. I had a few more miles to go and I was exhausted. I decided to sit down in the snow in the ditch to take a short break. At that moment my mother pulled up in the car and saw me because of my red coat. It took me awhile to warm up at home. I assume I would have found deeper reserves to keep going on my own, but I'm not sure.

Years later when I was recovering from brainstem damage complications in my late 20s there were times that I couldn't walk more than a few steps without falling down, and at times I couldn't stay awake for even 30 minutes straight. Without her patience I doubt I would have been able to recover over the following years like I have.

I have lived a better life than anyone has ever earned. In the absence of the ability to repay, there can only be gratitude.

When my father graduated high school he couldn't read, and then he found out that you need to be able to read even for working in factories. So he believed in the importance of reading. My mother agreed and she was better at it, so she became my first teacher. It worked, and now I've read thousands of books.

There is much else that wouldn't have been possible without my mother: finding the meaning of life (value attainment), joining the high IQ society Mensa after recovering from brain damage, leading and reforming a local government, traveling the world, teaching thousands of students, and writing hundreds of articles.

Over the decades we've had a lot of adventures together, and they are some of my best memories. This one time I took mom to a murder mystery dinner in Grand Rapids. The host asked for a volunteer. My mother doesn't want to be in front of a group like that, so as the host walked near our table she put a bread roll in her mouth and turned away, thinking that she wouldn't be chosen if she was chewing something and not looking at the host. Well, I enthusiastically pointed at her, and she was chosen.

The host was a magician and she was his assistant. He took a handkerchief and produced a dove from it. Then he gave it to her and she was to put it down his throat, and he would magically produce another dove. When she put the handkerchief in his mouth, he choked and died (not really, it's a murder mystery dinner show remember). I got one blurry photo of it. When she came back to the table we had to figure out who poisoned the handkerchief and was the murderer. But at first it seemed like it was her. It was hilarious.

My mother was born of the 4th of July, and because of the festivities her birthday is often forgotten. For years I tried to get in at least one unusual adventure with mom every year, not on her birthday, as a type of replacement celebration. When she turned 60 I wanted to do something on the actual day. We had been on the riverboat in Grand Rapids before. It was a classic rear paddle wheel, which we both enjoyed going on. The problem was that they had only one cruise that day in the evening, and in the evening mom wanted to be back in Twin Lake to watch the fireworks show.

I contacted them about renting the entire boat. That was a bit expensive, so what I did instead is guarantee a minimum number of boat ticket sales for them to open a new time slot earlier in the day. If they didn't sell enough tickets then I would cover the difference. I made a social media post letting everyone know, and more people than I expected joined us for the day. It was great.

One year we took a helicopter ride over Traverse City. One year we took the Badger ship across Lake Michigan to Wisconsin. We fed and even petted a bear at a park in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We visited the Ark Encounter in Kentucky and the Parthenon in Tennessee. We went to an Amish zoo in Indiana. We went to Mackinaw Island and I did parasailing. We visited Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, which ended up being bigger than I realized, and rode in a 1914 Model T, and on a different trip we visited the Ford F-150 factory. And oh, there have been so many more adventures.

We've watched a lot of murder mystery and sit-com shows together. One time we were watching a comedian travel around Canada doing a documentary and a stand up show about small towns called 'Still Standing'. One of the towns was just a little way on the other side of Detroit called Amherstburg, about a four hour drive from us. They had a pizza joint that looked excellent, so we decided to give it a go. When we drove into Canada they asked us why we were going there. We told them we were just entering and exiting on the same day to get some pizza at a place we saw on a comedy tv show. The Canadian officer said he knew of the place and we would like it.

The pizza was decent. We also walked around and even found a store called Evelyn's that had everything labelled Evelyn where we bought some chocolate and things for Evelyn. When we were driving back into the US the officer told us her name had been flagged. He knew it wasn't her, but he put a sticker on the car anyway and we had to drive to the line with military security. They were opening and searching cars. I started thinking, "Wait a minute, were we supposed to declare the leftover pizza and the chocolate? Are we going to get in trouble for that?" I thought about calling a state senator that I knew, but then they removed us from the car and we had to leave our phones as we were sent into the detention building.

They gave us two assigned seats in a little room. No one was talking. We weren't allowed to move without permission. You said, "Just don't leave me, okay?" But, I had to use the bathroom. I asked the security guard and he let me in. I was gone for less than two minutes and when I came out you were gone, and two other people were in our assigned seats. I wandered around and found you at the counter with the manager overriding the alert. It was an odd little two hour adventure on its own.

This year we had our adventure of a cruise to Alaska to complete me visiting all 50 states, and traveling to twelve different countries in Europe. We had more adventures on just those two trips that I can recount. I know you had your doubts about being able to walk as much as we did, and especially about traveling for two weeks one time and four weeks the other time with just a backpack, but you did it. They were very different trips than if I had gone on my own, and I had a lot of fun. Even before we left it was surprising. I had put in a request with Buckingham Palace for a tour route with fewer stairs. I was sitting on the couch in the living room and you were standing in the kitchen. I got a call and answered it. You looked over and I said, "It's Buckingham Palace." You were quite surprised.

When I was in elementary school I wrote a poem called 'Colosseum Mom'. I remember getting corrected by the teacher for it being incorrect because I had referenced how you protected me like the roof in the Colosseum, and the teacher pointed out that the Colosseum doesn't have a roof. I had to look up reference material showing that the Colosseum had a partial retractable roof to protect against the sun and get my grade raised. This one is somewhat different.

Ode to My Mother

Before our beginning,
there is another.
Who hopes and dreams,
of our existence.

Who hopes and dreams,
that we will have,
hopes and dreams,
and some of them made real.

Who worries over our worries,
and worries over our non-worries,
and worries over worrying,
about worries and non-worries.

Who spends time and care,
for us to grow,
and become,
more than she can know.

With attention and direction,
we move from beginning to middle,
and slowly start to see,
her perspective.

From beginning to end,
nothing can replace,
the love of a mother.
To the greatest of all, my mother, Toni Martin.

Find more at https://t.co/fER26OXVES or https://t.co/WugXzBNorD

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

Jeffrey Alexander Martin: To My Mother - Toni Martin - For the Gift of Life https://t.co/swrLesu8AN

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

Across intellectual, athletic, and competitive domains, parents attempting deliberately to cultivate exceptional ability appear to use recurring practices: early instruction, individualized progression, intensive practice, high expectations, immersion, feedback, and substantial control over the educational environment.

Yet the autobiographical accounts of their children suggest that the meaning of educational success remains contested.

The same education can simultaneously produce extraordinary competence and generate questions concerning autonomy, motivation, emotional development, identity, and family relationships.

Exceptional education therefore provides an unusually clear setting in which to investigate a fundamental educational problem: Is the purpose of education to produce exceptional capability, or to produce a person who retrospectively judges that the education contributed to a good life?

Find more at https://t.co/fER26OXnPk or https://t.co/WugXzBMQC5

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

PhD Idea - Exceptional Parent-Child Education

As you look through the history of education and autobiographies you find an interesting connection between parents who wanted their children to be the best, and their children that became the best. It has been done better and worse by different people, but it has been done and documented quite a number of times. The philosopher James Mill raised his son John Stuart Mill to be a genius, and he became one. Laszlo Polgar wanted to prove that most children could be raised to become a genius if done correctly, and all three of his daughters became chess champions. There are similarities in sports: Tiger Woods and his father Earl in golf, Serena and Venus Williams and their father Richard in tennis, Wayne Gretzky and his father Walter in hockey. There is also the family through generations before and after Marie Curie in science, and multiple families that built business or political dynasties. There is something to it.

Educating the Exceptional Child: Parental Educational Theory, Practice, and Autobiographical Retrospect

Proposed Field: history and philosophy of education or educational studies.

Background and Rationale

Some of the most remarkable intellectual, artistic, and athletic achievements in modern history have emerged from unusually intensive forms of parental education. In several especially valuable cases, the parent responsible for designing or directing the child's education also wrote explicitly about education, child development, training, or the principles underlying the educational program. The child, after reaching adulthood and often achieving exceptional distinction, later produced an autobiography, memoir, or other retrospective account of that upbringing.

These paired bodies of evidence create an unusual opportunity for educational research.

Educational theory is ordinarily examined from the perspective of the educator. The educator explains what education ought to accomplish, which practices should be employed, and why those practices should succeed. Autobiography permits the same educational process to be reconstructed from the opposite direction: the person who experienced the education can describe what was actually done, how it was experienced, and what consequences the learner believed it produced.

The proposed study will therefore examine exceptional education through four related levels: intended education, enacted education, experienced education, retrospective evaluation.

The study will focus particularly on parents who deliberately attempted to cultivate exceptional ability in their children and whose educational programs can be compared with the later accounts of those children.

Potential cases include:

- James Mill and John Stuart Mill
- Leo Wiener and Norbert Wiener
- Laszlo Polgar and Susan, Sofia, and Judit Polgar
- Earl Woods and Tiger Woods
- Richard Williams and Serena Williams
- Mike Agassi and Andre Agassi
- Walter Gretzky and Wayne Gretzky
- Marie Curie and Eve Curie

Additional or alternative cases may include Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott, Bertrand Russell and Katharine Tait, and Richard Lovell Edgeworth and members of the Edgeworth family.

Rather than asking simply whether these parents "produced geniuses," this research will investigate how theories of exceptional education were conceived, translated into practice, experienced by the children, and interpreted retrospectively by both generations.

Central Research Question

How do the autobiographical accounts of exceptionally accomplished children confirm, modify, or contradict the educational theories, intentions, and practices described by the parents who deliberately directed their development?

Secondary Research Questions

1. What did each parent understand the purpose of education to be?
2. What conception of exceptional ability, talent, genius, or excellence guided the parent's educational program?
3. Which educational practices did the parent deliberately employ?
4. To what extent did the parent's stated educational theory correspond to the practices later described by the child?
5. How did the child retrospectively interpret the educational process?
6. Which aspects of the education did the child regard as beneficial, harmful, unnecessary, or indispensable?
7. How did parent and child differ in their definitions of educational success?
8. What recurring practices appear across otherwise different forms of exceptional education?
9. What trade-offs appear between exceptional achievement and other educational goals such as autonomy, emotional development, socialization, play, or family relationships?
10. What broader principles concerning the education of exceptional ability can reasonably be derived from these historical cases without treating exceptional individuals as simple experimental evidence?

Working Thesis

The study begins with the hypothesis that deliberate exceptional education tends to share a recognizable group of practices despite differences in historical period and domain.

These may include:

- unusually early instruction;
- extensive parental involvement;
- deliberate sequencing of increasingly difficult tasks;
- high quantities of purposeful practice;
- individualized instruction;
- rapid progression unconstrained by age-grade norms;
- immersion in a specialized intellectual or performance environment;
- frequent feedback;
- unusually high parental expectations;
- extensive exposure to accomplished adults or advanced materials;
- deliberate cultivation of confidence and identity;
- reduced dependence upon conventional schooling;
- and the integration of education into ordinary family life.

The study also hypothesizes, however, that the retrospective accounts of the children will reveal important differences between achievement and education.

Parents may judge an educational program successful primarily by the abilities it produces, while children may evaluate the same program in terms of autonomy, motivation, happiness, relationships, emotional development, or the ability to construct an independent adult identity.

Exceptional education may therefore expose an important general problem in educational theory: an educational system can be extraordinarily successful according to one definition of human development while appearing seriously deficient according to another.

Conceptual Framework

Each case will be reconstructed according to four stages.

1. Intended Education

What did the parent believe?

This level will examine explicit statements concerning:

- the nature of the child;
- the nature of intelligence or talent;
- the purpose of education;
- the role of discipline;
- the role of practice;
- the role of motivation;
- the appropriate age to begin instruction;
- parental authority;
- formal schooling;
- competition;
- specialization;
- and the ultimate purpose of developing exceptional ability.

2. Enacted Education

What did the parent actually do?

This will reconstruct educational practice wherever the historical evidence permits, including:

- curriculum;
- daily schedules;
- instructional techniques;
- practice routines;
- use of books and exercises;
- conversation;
- testing;
- competition;
- rewards and punishments;
- exposure to adult environments;
- relations with schools;
- and the changing role of the parent as the child developed.

3. Experienced Education

How did the child describe the education?

The child's autobiography or memoir will be examined for descriptions of:

- learning;
- parental instruction;
- expectations;
- practice;
- motivation;
- discipline;
- pleasure;
- resentment;
- confidence;
- fear;
- independence;
- family relationships;
- schooling;
- social relationships;
- and development of personal identity.

4. Retrospective Evaluation

How did the adult child judge the education?

Particular attention will be given to whether the child later:

- endorsed the parent's methods;
- rejected them;
- distinguished useful from harmful aspects;
- reproduced them with the next generation;
- deliberately avoided reproducing them;
- or reinterpreted the parent's purposes.

The distinction between these four levels makes it possible to compare educational philosophy with educational reality while avoiding the assumption that either parent or child possesses a completely objective account.

Principal Case Studies

James Mill and John Stuart Mill

This case provides an important historical foundation because James Mill possessed an explicit educational philosophy and personally directed an extraordinarily intensive education of his son. John Stuart Mill later provided one of the most famous autobiographical accounts of childhood education.

The case is especially valuable because John Stuart Mill acknowledged the extraordinary intellectual advantages of his upbringing while also identifying significant deficiencies in his emotional development.

The Mill case therefore introduces one of the dissertation's central questions: whether exceptional intellectual development can coexist with serious shortcomings in other dimensions of education.

Leo Wiener and Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener was subjected to an unusually accelerated intellectual education by his father, Leo Wiener, and became one of the most famous child prodigies of the twentieth century.

His autobiographical account provides a particularly valuable learner's perspective on accelerated education, parental expectations, intellectual precocity, social development, and the experience of being defined as exceptional.

The case also provides a historical bridge between the Mill model of nineteenth-century intellectual education and twentieth-century attempts deliberately to cultivate exceptional children.

Laszlo Polgar and the Polgar Sisters

Laszlo Polgar represents perhaps the clearest modern example of a parent deliberately attempting to demonstrate that exceptional ability could be created through education.

His educational experiment is especially important because it involved three children rather than one.

Susan, Sofia, and Judit Polgar consequently provide something close to a within-family comparative case. Similar parental theories and environments produced three exceptionally accomplished chess players, but their personalities, careers, experiences, and later interpretations were not identical.

This case offers an unusual opportunity to distinguish characteristics of the educational system from characteristics specific to one child.

Earl Woods and Tiger Woods

Earl Woods explicitly described his methods of developing Tiger Woods and offered those methods as principles that could be used by other parents.

This case extends the study from intellectual achievement into elite physical performance.

It raises questions concerning deliberate practice, play, competition, confidence, parental expectations, early specialization, and the boundary between education and coaching.

Tiger Woods's retrospective accounts can then be used to examine the same process from the child's perspective.

Richard Williams and Serena Williams

Richard Williams deliberately planned the development of his daughters Serena and Venus before they became elite tennis players.

The case is especially valuable because Williams rejected several assumptions of conventional elite athletic development. He placed limits on tournament participation, emphasized family control over training, and attempted to protect his daughters from aspects of the professional tennis establishment while simultaneously preparing them for extraordinary achievement.

Serena Williams's autobiographical account provides a complementary perspective on the experience and perceived consequences of this upbringing.

Mike Agassi and Andre Agassi

The Agassi case may provide an important contrasting example.

Mike Agassi pursued exceptional athletic performance through intensive early training, while Andre Agassi's autobiography provides an unusually critical account of the experience.

This creates a valuable comparison with cases in which adult children more strongly endorse their parents' educational programs.

The dissertation could therefore distinguish between educational methods that successfully produce performance and educational experiences that the learner later considers desirable.

Walter Gretzky and Wayne Gretzky

Walter Gretzky provides a particularly useful case of parental cultivation in which intensive practice appears to have been combined with unusually strong intrinsic motivation. Walter built the famous backyard rink at the family home in Brantford and became Wayne's first coach, creating drills, teaching positioning and anticipation, and giving him an environment in which he could spend extraordinary amounts of time skating and experimenting with the game. Walter later described his methods and philosophy in Gretzky: From the Back Yard Rink to the Stanley Cup and other autobiographical writing.

The case is especially valuable because Wayne's retrospective explanation complicates a simple model of deliberate practice imposed by a demanding parent. Wayne remembered spending hours on the backyard rink, but emphasized that he did not experience those hours primarily as formal practice. He described hockey as something he wanted to continue doing because he enjoyed it. Walter therefore appears less as a parent forcing an externally designed program upon a reluctant child than as a parent who constructed an unusually rich environment around an already intense interest.

Wayne also produced Gretzky: An Autobiography, providing a learner's account that can be considered alongside Walter's explanation of his own coaching and parenting. This makes the Gretzky case particularly valuable for examining the relationship among parental guidance, environmental design, repetition, deliberate instruction, play, intrinsic motivation, and exceptional performance.

The case also offers an important comparison with Earl Woods, Richard Williams, and Mike Agassi. All four fathers were deeply involved in developing elite athletes, but the balance between parental direction and child motivation appears substantially different across the cases. The Gretzky case may therefore help distinguish intensive education that grows out of a child's sustained interest from intensive education primarily driven by parental ambition.

Marie Curie and Eve Curie

Marie Curie provides a different type of parental-education case because she combined exceptional intellectual achievement with deliberate concern for how her children should be educated. Dissatisfied with conventional schooling, Curie participated in organizing a small cooperative educational arrangement in which leading scholars taught one another's children in their areas of expertise. The program included subjects ranging from mathematics and physics to languages and art and emphasized direct intellectual engagement rather than ordinary mass schooling.

The Curie family is particularly valuable because Marie's two daughters developed in strikingly different directions. Irène Joliot-Curie followed her mother into science and ultimately won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, while Eve Curie pursued music, writing, journalism, diplomacy, and humanitarian work. Eve became a professional pianist and later wrote the major biography Madame Curie after organizing and studying her mother's papers.

Eve therefore offers a distinctive child's perspective on an exceptional parent, but one that differs from cases such as John Stuart Mill or Andre Agassi. Madame Curie is principally a biography of Marie rather than an autobiography centered upon Eve's own education. It nevertheless provides evidence from a daughter who knew the parent personally and who later attempted to interpret her mother's character, family life, values, sacrifices, and achievements. That makes the source useful, but methodologically somewhat different from a direct retrospective learner account.

The case becomes especially interesting if Irène is retained as an internal comparison even when Marie and Eve remain the named pair. The same mother and family environment produced one daughter who continued the family's scientific tradition and another who became accomplished in fundamentally different fields. This allows the dissertation to ask whether exceptional parental education should be evaluated by reproduction of the parent's abilities or by the broader development of independence, competence, and the ability to pursue a distinct vocation. Contemporary accounts of Eve's upbringing emphasize both her difference from her mother and sister and the independence encouraged within the family.

The Curie case therefore broadens the dissertation beyond deliberate specialization. Unlike Polgar, Woods, Williams, or Agassi, Marie Curie's educational involvement did not simply aim at producing elite performance in one predetermined domain. It may provide a useful counterexample in which an intellectually demanding family environment contributed to two quite different forms of exceptional adult development.

Methodology

The project will use a comparative historical and qualitative textual methodology.

The principal sources will be:

- educational treatises written by the parents;
- parental memoirs and autobiographies;
- children's autobiographies and memoirs;
- letters;
- journals;
- interviews;
- contemporary accounts;
- biographies;
- and, where necessary, archival materials documenting educational practice.

Each case will first be treated individually.

The parent's educational theory will be reconstructed before the child's retrospective account is analyzed, reducing the danger of interpreting the parent's writings solely through the later testimony of the child.

The two accounts will then be compared according to a common analytical framework.

Themes may include:

- educational purpose;
- early childhood;
- curriculum;
- specialization;
- practice;
- difficulty;
- autonomy;
- discipline;
- motivation;
- competition;
- feedback;
- confidence;
- parental authority;
- conventional schooling;
- peer relationships;
- emotional development;
- identity;
- achievement;
- and retrospective judgment.

The final comparative analysis will identify both recurring patterns and significant differences across the cases.

The study will not assume that autobiographical testimony provides an objective record of childhood. Autobiographies will instead be treated as retrospective interpretations. Differences between parent and child will themselves constitute evidence about the meaning assigned to the educational experience.

Scope and Limitations

The project will not attempt to demonstrate experimentally that particular parenting techniques caused exceptional achievement.

The subjects were highly unusual individuals, the cases were not controlled experiments, the historical evidence is incomplete, and genetic, cultural, economic, psychological, and historical factors cannot be isolated.

The study therefore concerns educational interpretation rather than simple causal proof.

Its questions are:

What did these parents attempt?

What did they actually appear to do?

What educational principles recur?

How did the children understand what had been done?

And what does the disagreement or agreement between generations reveal about exceptional education?

Selection bias will also be acknowledged. The cases have survived precisely because they produced notable individuals and substantial documentation. The dissertation cannot establish how frequently similar parental programs failed.

Where possible, unsuccessful or less successful siblings and comparable cases will therefore be considered as contextual evidence.

Original Contribution

The principal contribution of the study will be to place two bodies of evidence into systematic dialogue that are normally examined separately: the educational theory of the educator and the educational autobiography of the educated.

Studies of exceptional individuals commonly ask how they became exceptional.

Studies of educational thinkers commonly ask what those thinkers believed.

Autobiographical studies commonly ask how individuals remembered their development.

This project combines all three.

It examines what happens when an explicit theory of human development is applied within a family and the resulting adult later writes back against, alongside, or in support of the theory that shaped him or her.

The study may therefore contribute to:

- history of education;
- philosophy of education;
- autobiographical studies;
- gifted education;
- talent development;
- homeschooling research;
- parental pedagogy;
- deliberate practice;
- and theories of human development.

Its broader significance lies in showing that educational success cannot be reduced to measurable achievement.

Exceptional cases make this problem unusually visible because the achievement itself is not in doubt. John Stuart Mill, Norbert Wiener, the Polgar sisters, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, Andre Agassi, the Curies, and Wayne Gretzky became extraordinarily accomplished.

The more difficult question is: What kind of education produced that accomplishment, and what did the person who received that education ultimately think it was worth?

Possible Chapter Structure

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Problem of Exceptional Education

Defines exceptional education, presents the research problem, reviews relevant literature, and explains the parent-child comparative method.

Chapter 2: James Mill and John Stuart Mill: The Education of the Intellect

Examines the classical case of deliberately accelerated intellectual education and Mill's later evaluation of its benefits and deficiencies.

Chapter 3: Leo Wiener and Norbert Wiener: Educating the Prodigy

Examines accelerated intellectual education, precocity, social development, and the experience of being constructed as a prodigy.

Chapter 4: Laszlo Polgar and His Daughters: Can Genius Be Educated?

Examines the most explicit modern attempt to demonstrate that exceptional performance can be deliberately produced through education.

Chapter 5: Earl Woods and Tiger Woods: Education Through Deliberate Performance

Examines early skill acquisition, play, practice, confidence, and parental coaching.

Chapter 6: Richard Williams and Serena Williams: Exceptional Development Outside the Conventional System

Examines family-directed education, selective competition, independence from established institutions, and the development of elite ability.

Chapter 7: Mike Agassi and Andre Agassi: Achievement and Educational Rejection

Examines a case in which extraordinary achievement and retrospective satisfaction diverge sharply.

Chapter 8: Walter Gretzky and Wayne Gretzky: Education Through Environment, Play, and Practice

Examines parental guidance, environmental design, intensive practice, intrinsic motivation, and the relationship between structured instruction and self-motivated play in the development of exceptional athletic performance.

Chapter 9: Marie Curie and Eve Curie: Exceptional Education and Divergent Development

Examines intellectually demanding family education, unconventional schooling, parental influence, independence, and the development of two daughters who pursued markedly different paths, raising the question of whether exceptional education should reproduce parental achievement or enable distinct forms of excellence.

Chapter 10: Comparative Analysis: The Structure of Exceptional Education

Identifies recurring educational practices and major differences across the cases.

Chapter 11: What Counts as Educational Success?

Compares parental and child definitions of success and examines achievement, autonomy, emotional development, motivation, and retrospective judgment.

Chapter 12: Conclusion: Educating for Excellence

Develops a historically grounded model of exceptional education while identifying the limits and ethical problems of attempting deliberately to create exceptional children.

Provisional Title

Educating the Exceptional Child: Parental Educational Theory, Practice, and Autobiographical Retrospect

Alternative titles include:

Educating Genius: Parent-Pedagogues and Their Children's Accounts of Exceptional Education

Making the Exceptional: Parents, Children, and the Deliberate Cultivation of Excellence

The Education of Excellence: Parental Theory and the Autobiographical Experience of Exceptional Children

Central Argument in Brief

The dissertation will argue that exceptional education can best be understood not merely by examining exceptional outcomes but by comparing the purposes and methods of the educator with the subsequent testimony of the educated person.

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

PhD Idea - Literacy, Oracy, and Numeracy in Ancient Mesopotamia

For a long time I've known that modern education isn't any better than ancient Rome. This is obvious for two reasons: one, their educational texts ranging from Quintilian on rhetoric to Cato the Elder on agriculture to Vitruvius on architecture and more; two, their results in all of these fields of study and industry that we still have evidence for today. Then, you think about ancient Greece before that and come to a similar conclusion. Then you start thinking, "How far does this go?" Now, most of history is lost to us, but we can go back to ancient Sumer about 5,000 years ago. And guess what? We have educational and school records from ancient Sumer. It's amazing how similar learning and schools from 5,000 years ago are to today, because humans and learning work the same way even though technology has changed significantly.

Basic PhD Proposal

Working Title

The Development, Transmission, and Transformation of Educational Techniques for Literacy, Oracy, and Numeracy in Ancient Mesopotamia

Alternative title

Learning to Read, Speak, and Calculate: Educational Techniques in
Ancient Mesopotamia

1. Research Problem

Ancient Mesopotamia provides the earliest substantial written evidence for organized education. Beginning with the emergence of writing and numerical notation in late fourth-millennium BCE Sumer, and continuing through later Mesopotamian scribal cultures, surviving materials provide unusually direct evidence of what learners were expected to know and, in many cases, how they learned it.

Much scholarship has examined Mesopotamian scribes, schools, lexical texts, mathematics, literature, and the edubba tradition. This project proposes a somewhat different organizing question: What educational techniques can be reconstructed from the surviving evidence, and how did those techniques develop, spread, and change over time?

The dissertation will organize these practices around three fundamental domains of learned competence:

Literacy: reading and writing.

Oracy: listening and speaking.

Numeracy: quantitative interpretation and calculation.

Rather than imposing a modern educational theory upon Mesopotamian evidence, the project will attempt to reconstruct an implicit Mesopotamian theory of learning from educational practice itself.

2. Central Research Question

How did educational techniques for developing literacy, oracy, and numeracy originate, develop, and transform within the scribal cultures of ancient Mesopotamia?

The dissertation would investigate several subsidiary questions:

1. What techniques were used to teach reading and writing?
2. What techniques were used to teach mathematical and quantitative competence?
3. What evidence exists for deliberate training in listening, speaking, recitation, disputation, oral performance, and related forms of oracy?
4. In what sequences were skills taught?
5. What roles did modeling, imitation, copying, repetition, memorization, recitation, dictation, correction, retrieval, classification, progressive difficulty, problem solving, and independent performance play?
6. Which techniques appear earliest, and which appear to be later developments?
7. Which techniques remained stable over long periods?
8. How did educational techniques change when they crossed linguistic, political, and cultural boundaries?
9. To what extent can a coherent philosophy or theory of learning be reconstructed from these practices even when Mesopotamian writers did not formulate such a theory explicitly?

3. Central Hypothesis

The provisional hypothesis is that ancient Mesopotamian education developed a remarkably sophisticated practical technology of learning.

Its central architecture may be reconstructable approximately as: model, imitation, repetition, memorization, retrieval, correction, increasingly difficult practice, application, independent performance.

Different subjects employed variations of this architecture.

For literacy, this could include signs, lexical lists, copying, dictation, vocabulary, model texts, composition, and increasingly complex literary or administrative writing.

For numeracy, it could include number systems, metrology, tables, memorized numerical relationships, calculation procedures, increasingly complex mathematical problems, and practical application.

For oracy, the evidence may reveal recitation, memorized oral reproduction, teacher-pupil exchanges, listening and dictation, dialogue, disputation, performance, and other forms of verbal competence.

The larger hypothesis is therefore that Mesopotamian scribal culture did considerably more than invent or develop writing. It developed methods for systematically transmitting complex symbolic knowledge from one human mind to another.

4. Chronological and Geographical Scope

The study could begin with the emergence of writing and numerical systems at Uruk in the late fourth millennium BCE, then follow educational practices through Sumerian and subsequent Mesopotamian scribal cultures.

Rather than treating "Sumerian education" and "Babylonian education" as isolated subjects, the dissertation would examine continuity, transmission, and transformation.

A provisional trajectory would be: Uruk and early Mesopotamia, Early Dynastic Sumer, Ebla and other early transmission environments, Old Babylonian scribal education, selected later Mesopotamian and cuneiform traditions.

Ebla is especially useful as a comparative transmission case because it potentially allows the dissertation to examine what happened when Mesopotamian scribal techniques were transplanted into a different linguistic and cultural environment.

The exact terminal date should remain open during preliminary research. There is no reason to extend the dissertation into Greece or Rome merely to make it longer. If the Mesopotamian evidence supplies a coherent developmental story, the dissertation can end there.

5. Three Educational Domains

A useful conceptual framework is:

Literacy:
Receptive/Input Capacity: Reading.
Productive/Output Capacity: Writing.

Oracy:
Receptive/Input Capacity: Listening.
Productive/Output Capacity: Speaking.

Numeracy:
Receptive/Input Capacity: Quantitative interpretation.
Productive/Output Capacity: Calculation.

These categories are modern analytical tools rather than claims about Mesopotamian terminology.

One particularly interesting question will be whether the evidence actually supports such a threefold division. Mesopotamian education may instead reveal that literacy, numeracy, and oracy were deeply integrated. A student might, for example, see, hear, recite, copy, memorize, retrieve, and apply the same material.

That possibility should be allowed to emerge from the evidence rather than excluded by the initial framework.

6. Primary Evidence

The dissertation would prioritize surviving educational artifacts rather than relying principally upon later descriptions of Mesopotamian education. Evidence could include:

- lexical and sign lists;
- numerical and metrological lists;
- multiplication, reciprocal, and other mathematical tables;
- student exercises;
- teacher models and student copies;
- mathematical problem texts;
- administrative exercises;
- bilingual lexical materials;
- proverbs and wisdom compositions;
- dialogues and disputations;
- literary compositions used within scribal education;
- texts concerning scribes, schools, teachers, and students;
- archaeological evidence concerning possible instructional environments.

This creates an important methodological advantage: the educational method can sometimes be reconstructed from what students actually did rather than merely from what someone said students should do.

7. Methodology

The principal method would combine historical textual analysis, comparative education, history of education, and reconstruction of educational practice.

For each body of evidence, the study would ask:

Task: What was the learner being required to do?

Competence: What capacity was the exercise intended to develop?

Technique: What method was being used to develop that capacity?

Sequence: What did learners apparently encounter before and after it?

Feedback: How was successful or unsuccessful performance recognized or corrected?

Mastery: What constituted competent independent performance?

Transmission: Does the technique appear elsewhere, earlier or later?

Transformation: When transmitted into another context, what remained constant and what changed?

This would permit individual tablets and compositions to contribute to a much larger reconstruction of Mesopotamian pedagogy as a system of techniques.

8. Possible Article-Based Dissertation Structure

This subject fits unusually well with the article-stacking approach.

Article 1: The Origins of Systematic Learning: Literacy and Numeracy in Early Mesopotamia

The first article would examine the earliest evidence from Uruk onward and ask what educational techniques accompanied the emergence of writing, numerical notation, lists, classification, and administration.

Article 2: From Signs to Scribes: The Development of Literacy Education in Sumer and Babylonia

This would reconstruct the progression by which novices became competent readers and writers, concentrating particularly on sequencing, copying, memorization, lexical learning, correction, and composition.

Article 3: Learning Number: The Development of Mesopotamian Numeracy Education

This article would reconstruct mathematical pedagogy: metrology, tables, memorization, procedures, problems, progression, calculation, and application.

Article 4: Learning by Hearing and Speaking: Oracy in Mesopotamian Education

This would investigate the comparatively neglected oral dimension: listening, recitation, dictation, memorized performance, dialogue, disputation, and the relationship between written and spoken learning.

Article 5: Transmission and Transformation: The Movement of Mesopotamian Educational Techniques Across Languages and Cultures

Ebla and potentially other cuneiform centers would provide cases for determining what happened when an educational technology developed in Mesopotamia encountered different languages and societies.

Article 6 / Integrative Dissertation Essay: The Mesopotamian Technology of Learning

The synthesis would bring literacy, oracy, and numeracy together and reconstruct the underlying educational architecture.

That final paper asks the largest question: What did the world's earliest extensively documented educational tradition discover about how human beings learn?

9. Potential Original Contribution

The project's strongest contribution may not be the discovery of an unknown educational practice. Specialists already know about lexical lists, copying, mathematical tables, scribal exercises, and edubba literature.

The originality could instead come from reassembling evidence normally divided among Assyriology, Sumerology, history of mathematics, literacy studies, and history of education into a systematic reconstruction of educational technique.

The dissertation could consequently distinguish three historical developments that are easily conflated: the invention of symbolic systems, the creation of curricula for transmitting them, the development of techniques for reliably producing competent new practitioners.

The third is the particular concern of this dissertation.

10. Potential Larger Argument

The research may ultimately support a stronger historical thesis:

One of ancient Mesopotamia's most consequential innovations was not simply writing, mathematics, or schooling, but the development of a reproducible technology for teaching complex symbolic knowledge.

That would help explain why certain practices proved extraordinarily durable. Lists, models, copying, repetition, memorization, recitation, graduated exercises, correction, retrieval, worked problems, and independent application remain recognizable educational techniques thousands of years later.

The dissertation would not need to claim direct historical descent from Mesopotamia to Kumon, modern mathematics instruction, handwriting practice, language learning, or contemporary schools. That would require evidence of transmission that probably cannot be established.

The more defensible and potentially more interesting claim is that the earliest extensively documented educational tradition already contains many of the basic solutions humans have repeatedly used to solve the problem of how to make another person capable of doing something that he or she initially cannot do.

That gives the project both a tightly bounded ancient subject and a much larger significance for the history of education.

Find more at https://t.co/fER26OXnPk or https://t.co/WugXzBMQC5

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

Jeffrey Alexander Martin: PhD Idea - Literacy, Oracy, and Numeracy in Ancien... https://t.co/3vibDsoiVu

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

PhD Idea - Literacy and Oracy in American Autodidacts

I like autobiographies, and I like education, and I like self-education. I've been thinking about doing a PhD and combining those subjects in some way. I came up with five autobiographies of Americans who largely taught themselves in advanced literacy and oracy. I went back and forth with an AI to see what that research and writing might look like. This is what I came up with.

Basic PhD Research Proposal

Working Title

Making Themselves in Words: Autodidactic Education and the Self-Explanation of Self-Formation in American Autobiography

Possible subtitle:
Literacy, Oracy, and Self-Directed Education from Benjamin Franklin to Louis L'Amour

Proposed Field

The project could be situated within History of Education, American Studies, Intellectual/Cultural History, or Education, and is particularly suitable for a cumulative PhD or PhD by publication.

Research Topic

This project examines how prominent American autodidacts explained their own education and self-formation in autobiography, with particular attention to the roles they attributed to literacy and oracy.

The principal subjects are:

1. Benjamin Franklin: the runaway apprentice.
2. Frederick Douglass: the fugitive from slavery.
3. Andrew Carnegie: the immigrant worker.
4. Malcolm X: the prisoner.
5. Louis L'Amour: the itinerant worker and wanderer, or hobo.

(I like the archetypal list of: runaway, fugitive, immigrant, prisoner, hobo. Then compare that with all they accomplished later, what a unique and interesting set of people.)

Each followed a substantially nontraditional educational path and later produced an autobiographical account in which learning played an important role.

Rather than attempting to reconstruct a complete objective history of each person's development, the dissertation focuses primarily upon how each person retrospectively explained his own formation.

The autobiographies are therefore the principal primary texts.

Other historical sources and scholarly biographies will be used selectively to provide context, clarify important issues, and evaluate the interpretation of the texts, rather than to construct five comprehensive biographies.

Central Research Question

How did prominent American autodidacts explain their own self-formation, and what roles did literacy and oracy play in those autobiographical explanations?

Secondary Questions

The project will examine how each autobiographer explains his initial educational circumstances; why he began educating himself; what roles he assigns to reading and writing; what roles he assigns to listening, conversation, debate, storytelling, teaching, and public speaking; what educational experiences he identifies as turning points; what changes he attributes to self-education in knowledge, character, identity, agency, vocation, and social position; how private learning becomes public communication; and what similarities and differences appear across the five accounts.

A further question concerns autobiography itself:

How does the later narrator transform a complex life into a coherent explanation of how he became himself?

Core Concepts

Autodidactic Education

Autodidactic education refers to learning substantially directed by the learner outside, beyond, or in place of conventional formal schooling.

It does not imply that the learner receives no help from other people. Books, libraries, mentors, coworkers, friends, debating partners, workplaces, and other institutions may all contribute to an autodidactic education.

Self-Formation

Self-formation refers to the development of knowledge, abilities, character, identity, ambitions, agency, and ways of acting that the autobiographer associates with his education and experience.

Self-Explanation

Self-explanation refers to the autobiographer's retrospective account of why and how he believes he became the person he became.

This distinction is central to the project.

The dissertation does not need to prove that an autobiographer's explanation is objectively correct. Instead, it asks what the person himself regarded as formative and how he constructed a causal explanation of his life.

Literacy

Literacy will include reading, writing, vocabulary development, copying and imitation, correspondence, books, newspapers, libraries, and other uses of written language.

Oracy

Oracy will include listening, conversation, questioning, argument, debate, recitation, storytelling, teaching, lecturing, and public speaking.

The project will investigate whether literacy and oracy play different but complementary roles in autobiographical accounts of self-formation.

Principal Primary Corpus

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man

Other autobiographical works by the subjects may be consulted where useful, but they will remain supplementary rather than becoming additional principal texts.

Source Strategy

The autobiographies will constitute the principal evidence.

Secondary scholarship will provide historical and intellectual context.

Supplementary primary sources such as letters, speeches, interviews, contemporary newspaper accounts, or records will be consulted selectively when necessary to clarify an important autobiographical claim or educational episode.

The project will explicitly not attempt comprehensive archival reconstruction of all five lives.

This limitation is intentional because the dissertation studies autobiographical self-explanation rather than attempting to produce five intellectual biographies.

Method

The project will use comparative qualitative textual analysis informed by the history of education, intellectual and cultural history, American Studies, and life-writing scholarship.

Each autobiography will first be analyzed independently according to a common framework: starting circumstances, motivation for self-education, literacy, oracy, formative experiences, perceived transformation, agency/mobility, retrospective self-explanation.

The five cases will then be compared to identify recurring patterns and historical differences.

Particular attention will be given to passages in which the narrator explicitly or implicitly constructs causal relationships, such as:

"I read this, and therefore..."

"This person taught me..."

"This experience changed me..."

"From that point..."

"I realized..."

"I determined..."

"I learned..."

Such passages reveal the autobiographer's own theory of his formation.

Proposed Cumulative Publication Structure

The ideal project would consist of five individual case-study papers and one comparative paper.

Paper 1: Benjamin Franklin
The Runaway Apprentice Educates Himself: Literacy, Conversation, and Self-Formation in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography

Paper 2: Frederick Douglass
Learning Freedom, Finding a Voice: Literacy, Oracy, and Self-Formation in Frederick Douglass's Narrative

Paper 3: Andrew Carnegie
The Immigrant Worker as Autodidact: Reading, Work, Communication, and Self-Formation in Andrew Carnegie's Autobiography

Paper 4: Malcolm X
Reading into a New Life: Literacy, Debate, and Public Voice in The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Paper 5: Louis L'Amour
The World as Classroom: Reading, Listening, Work, and Wandering in Education of a Wandering Man

Paper 6: Comparative Study
Explaining the Self-Taught Life: Literacy, Oracy, and Autodidactic Self-Formation in American Autobiography

The exact number of papers could be adjusted to the requirements of the university. A German cumulative doctorate might require only a subset of the strongest papers plus an integrative dissertation essay, while the complete six-paper portfolio could also support a later retrospective PhD-by-publication application in the UK.

Preliminary Thesis

The project will test the proposition that autobiographical accounts of autodidactic education frequently assign related but distinguishable roles to literacy and oracy.

Literacy may be narrated primarily as expanding access to knowledge, ideas, reflection, and intellectual possibilities.

Oracy may be narrated as allowing the developing individual to test ideas, interact with others, persuade, teach, lead, and exercise public agency.

The project will also examine whether autobiographers retrospectively transform complex, socially dependent processes of development into relatively coherent narratives of individual self-making.

The likely pattern to investigate is: literacy and oracy, self-directed learning, self-formation, increased agency, autobiographical self-explanation.

This is a hypothesis to be tested rather than an assumed conclusion.

Expected Contribution

The project's principal contribution would be to combine several areas that are usually treated separately.

It would examine autodidactic education rather than schooling alone; study oracy alongside literacy; distinguish self-formation from retrospective self-explanation; treat autobiography as the principal object of historical analysis rather than merely as imperfect biographical evidence; and compare five important American autobiographical traditions over roughly two centuries.

The comparative project may also illuminate a larger American idea: How does someone who begins outside the conventional path explain becoming capable of entering, changing, or influencing the wider world?

Scope and Limitations

The project does not claim that these five individuals represent all autodidacts.

It does not assume that autobiographical memories are objectively accurate.

It does not equate Franklin's apprenticeship, Douglass's enslavement, Carnegie's immigration, Malcolm X's imprisonment, or L'Amour's wandering.

Rather, those differences make the comparison valuable.

The common object of study is the autobiographical explanation of learning and becoming.

Significance and Feasibility

The project is unusually feasible for a cumulative or distance-compatible doctorate because its principal corpus consists of five readily available texts.

It does not depend upon extensive archival travel, foreign-language research, experiments, surveys, or human participants.

Each individual study can be completed and submitted for publication independently while simultaneously contributing to the larger doctoral argument.

This makes the project suitable both for a prospective cumulative PhD and, if the publications are completed first, a retrospective PhD by publication.

One-Sentence Proposal

This project examines how Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Andrew Carnegie, Malcolm X, and Louis L'Amour retrospectively explained their autodidactic self-formation, focusing particularly on the roles they attributed to literacy and oracy in acquiring knowledge, agency, mobility, and public voice.

Find more at https://t.co/fER26OXnPk or https://t.co/WugXzBMQC5

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

Jeffrey Alexander Martin: PhD Idea - Literacy and Oracy in American Autodidacts https://t.co/Yq1D95R1lt

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

To Abigail in the Distant Future

It's difficult to write a letter about someone you've only known for a year, for them to read many years later, especially because you're a baby but I'm writing to you as an adult. Yet, this is exactly what I shall do.

You are an oddly happy baby. I've spent half of your life so far being away on trips to Central and South America by myself, and to Alaska and Europe with your grandmother. Even now I'm preparing to leave in a week for China. Yet, each time I return you still like me.

This is probably the most interesting story I have with you so far. After you had started to crawl, but before you started to walk, you had been getting over to the stairs but couldn't get up them. I've taught all of your siblings how to climb stairs at granny's house because it's a good spot with just two carpeted stairs between walls.

Most people were outside this particular day. I was sitting on the couch. Your mother handed you to me as she headed out as well. Your mother had been complaining about how much you were crawling around and it was getting harder to keep up with you. So I thought, "Well, this would be a decent time to learn stair climbing. Abigail is probably up to it."

I took you over to the stairs and started working on it. You pulled yourself up to the first stair and used it to steady yourself. The key to stair climbing is to get the knee on top and use that to push. So I helped you bend your knee, and then we worked together to get you on the first step. As we were working on the second step your mother came back in the door. We both turned and looked back at her and she said, "Really Jeff!?", because being able to climb stairs would make it even harder to keep up with you, nevertheless it's an important skill to learn and things should be learned when the learner is interested.

Learning stair climbing is a good example of learning in general. A person with a natural proclivity and interest tries and experiments with objects while imitating more knowing others in their own zone of proximal development and getting limited help on progressive and increasing abilities. Something to consider when learning or teaching anything. (A couple of these key terms come from Lev Vygotsky, who is interesting, but if you're interested in learning more about learning and teaching I suggest going through the dozens of reviews I've done on works from the history of education and then deciding what most interests you at the time.)

It's important to remember your natural tendency toward happiness. That means, at this later reading, that if you're not often happy then you've moved away from your natural state. Juvenal talks about having a healthy mind in a healthy body, and that's a good place to begin to set things straight. The larger quote in 'Satire X' is:

You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death,
and deems length of days the least of Nature's gifts
that can endure any kind of toil,
that knows neither wrath nor desire and thinks
the woes and hard labors of Hercules better than
the loves and banquets and downy cushions of Sardanapalus.
What I commend to you, you can give to yourself;
For assuredly, the only road to a life of peace is virtue.

Do not believe whatever medical propaganda about health is popular at the time. The best things I have found in recovering from severe mental and physical difficulties are all disdained alternatives from both the medical industry and the general public: chiropractic, fasting, keto, meditation, joint mobility, carnivore, etc. The pragmatic truth is in the consequence and result, and if you study the history of the medical industry for both physical and mental health you will see that's not the path to follow.

Also, mental health, which includes emotional health, isn't as limited as many people think and believe. For instance, the work of John B. Calhoun showed clearly across decades of research, if you actually read his work instead of summaries of his work, that lack of a socially meaningful role leads to a first death, which is a social and spiritual death, which results in behavioral sink across generations. Therefore, to have mental and emotional health it's required that you have a meaningful social role. It's obvious, but many people miss this. (A good place to start to understand this is his January 1973 article: 'Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population'.)

Another which I would be remiss if I failed to mention it is 'On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man' by Curt P. Richter from 1957. It's easy to interpret his experiments as showing that hope is necessary for life, and in a simple way that's true, but there is a more true statement: that hope is necessary to put forth the required effort to live. Without hope people and animals give up to the point that their body shuts down. So, whether you feel like it or not, you must always find something to have hope in. It's a necessity.

If you're doing well, good. Pursue what interests you. If your struggling, as Jocko Willink says, "Good." It's an opportunity for you to get a healthy mind in a healthy body with a meaningful social role and hope.

Find more at https://t.co/fER26OXnPk or https://t.co/WugXzBMQC5

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

Jeffrey Alexander Martin: To Abigail in the Distant Future https://t.co/RhYhVHTy3J

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

My Opinion on 5 Works about Education, Teaching, and Learning - Volume 14

In this article we'll see the differences and similarities between medieval and modern concerns in education from Charlemagne and King Alfred, to Leo Tolstoy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Hannah Arendt.

'Admonitio Generalis' by Charlemagne 789 AD

Charles the Great, King of the Franks, was the first ruler to conquer and unite much of Europe as the Carolingian Empire after the fall of the Roman Empire 300 years earlier. He worked on sorting out problems in the church, including dealing with education.

The 'Admonitio Generalis' reforms helped spur the first medieval renaissance, called the Carolingian Renaissance. It consists of 82 chapters. Many of the chapters are only one sentence each, and deal with what priests can and cannot do. Chapters 71 through 74 are about education:

"Capitulum 71

That bishops and abbots carefully correct the canonical and catholic books, and that the priests read and understand them and preach according to their meaning.

Capitulum 72

Let schools be established for boys who are to learn reading. In every single monastery and every bishopric let them learn the psalms, the neumes, the chant, computus, and grammar, and let them correct the books, because often, while they wish to serve God well, they do so badly through ignorance.

Capitulum 73

That priests have books and read them and preach according to their meaning, and that they do not allow their boys to destroy the books but have them corrected.

Capitulum 74

That well-corrected books be kept in the churches, and that the priests read them and preach according to their meaning."

Notice the motivation and the method. The motivation is the correct understanding and teaching of the religious tradition. The method is through the correct reading, understanding, copying, teaching, and preaching based on books. Charlemagne's religious reform that sparked the first European renaissance, helped start what eventually became the university system, and was an early step toward modern civilization, was all founded on a focus on books.

This helped me realize that times of flourishing like a renaissance don't just happen, someone purposefully causes that to happen.

King Alfred's 'Introduction' to 'Pastoral Care' by Pope Gregory the Great 890 AD

This introduction is only five paragraphs, but it is very interesting. For us Alfred is an old historical figure, and in these five paragraphs he touches on both the recent history of England for his time, and ancient history across parts of Europe. It's worth noting that Alfred's knowledge of history was important for him making these decisions, which he learned through reading.

Alfred notes that England was once known for its knowledge and learning and people would travel there for that reason, and that knowledge led to wealth and prosperity, but then the Danes plundered and conquered parts of England as part of the Great Heathen Army. Alfred stopped them and made a deal so that Danelaw ruled parts of the island, but the Vikings left Wessex and peace held for many decades. Alfred the Great was King of Wessex from 871 to 899, and had beaten the Danes at the Battle of Edington in 878. This allowed him to make the Treaty of Wedmore, and the Viking Guthrum even converted to Christianity, taking the name Aethelstan and ruling as the King of East Anglia.

Alfred makes note that religious works have been translated into the current language of a time and place over and over in history, and that they should now be translated into Anglo-Saxon English, because as things stood they had books, but very few people who could read them. Alfred translated the book 'Pastoral Care' by Pope Gregory the Great from Latin to Anglo-Saxon himself.

With more books being translated in Anglo-Saxon English, Alfred then encouraged the learning of reading. Here he is talking about it, translated to modern English: "Therefore it seems better to me, if it seems so to you, that we also translate certain books, which are most needful for all men to know, into that language that we all can understand, and accomplish this, as with God's help we may very easily do if we have peace, so that all the youth of free men now in England who have the means to apply themselves to it, be set to learning, while they are not useful for any other occupation, until they know how to read English writing well. One may then instruct in Latin those whom one wishes to teach further and promote to a higher rank."

There are many interesting themes and connections here. This is one, a culture of knowledge and prosperity can lose both by losing in war, but by winning in war can reestablish knowledge through books and then grow in prosperity once again. Not all people realize this insight, and very few are able to accomplish it. Alfred the Great was able to win both in war and peace.

This helped me realize that in societies that have succeeded and then fallen, if the memory of the history remains in even a part of that society, there is yet hope that it can regrow.

'The School at Yasnaya Polyana' by Leo Tolstoy 1862

Tolstoy is considered one of the greatest writers in human history. He also operated a free and experimental school for a few years. This is from an article I've previously written on his school:

"By 1859 Tolstoy was already a famous writer in Russia. He was a wealthy noble with peasants living on his lands. He was a decorated Russian artillery officer in the Crimean War. He started a free school for peasant children at his home, both called Yasnaya Polyana. He trained the students to be teachers because the teachers he brought to the school didn't work out well. It was just a small school with a dozen students. The students weren't required to do things, they were allowed to do things. He also had a sister and her kids and an aunt living with him. This is in Czarist Russia long before the Communist Revolution in 1917. As part of the school he also published a journal or magazine that included stories written by the children, and articles from Tolstoy on the school. Other people were inspired and started to copy his private and non-governmental school, and he would advise them."

In 1862 the police raided his school and home while he was away, including arresting the children, stealing his food, harassing his family, and threatened to come back until he shut it down, which he did. His educational philosophy and experiments inspire people to this day.

You can see the oddity of his teaching philosophy in these two statements from his article:

"I am convinced that the school ought not to interfere in that part of the education which belongs to the family; that the school has no right and ought not to reward and punish; that the best police and administration of a school consist in giving full liberty to the pupils to study and settle their disputes as they know best. I am convinced of it, and yet, in spite of it, the old habits of the educational schools are so strong in us that we frequently depart from that rule in the Yasnaya Polyana school."

"The teacher always involuntarily strives after selecting that method of instruction which is most convenient for himself. The more convenient the method is for the teacher, the more it is inconvenient for the pupils. Only that manner of instruction is correct with which the pupils are satisfied."

Naturally Tolstoy did well at teaching reading and writing, and did some unique experiments with that, some of which inspired later important reading and writing teachers like Sylvia Ashton-Warner. They also did the other usual subjects in school, including science experiments, which the students quite liked. The observations I find most interesting from Tolstoy in this article are on history. Here are four quotes on it:

"I finally came to the conclusion that, in respect to history, there is not only no need of knowing the dull Russian history, but that Cyrus, Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Luther are not necessary for the development of any child. All these persons and events are interesting for the student, not to the extent of their importance in history, but to the extent of the artistic composition of their activities, to the extent of the artistic treatment of them by the historian, and even more so - not by the historian, but by the popular tradition."

"Tell them well how matches were invented, and they will never agree with you that the inventor of matches was a lesser man than Gutenberg; in short, for the child, for the student in general, who has not yet begun to live, there does not exist the historical interest, let alone the interest of universal humanity. There is only the artistic interest. It is said that when all the material has been worked out, it will be possible to give an artistic exposition of all the periods of history, — I do not see it."

"In order to make history popular, the artistic exterior is not sufficient; the historical phenomena have to be personified, just as tradition, sometimes life itself, sometimes great thinkers and historians, personify them. Children like history only when its contents are artistic. There is no historical interest for them, nor ever can be, consequently there can be no such a thing as history for children. History sometimes serves only as material for an artistic development, and so long as the historical interest is not developed, there can be no history."

"I have also made other experiments in teaching modern history, and they have been very successful. I told them the history of the Crimean campaign, and the reign of Emperor Nicholas, and the year 1812. All this I told almost in a fairy-tale tone, as a rule, historically incorrect, and grouping the events about some one person. The greatest success was obtained, as was to have been expected, by the story of the war with Napoleon."

I find this fascinating, because Tolstoy is correct. Adults realize that it would be useful for kids to know history, but the kids have no experience of life and can't comprehend what learning history would mean for them or how to connect to it. Adults learn history because they are interested in it, but the kids judge it purely on entertainment value. For them history and fantasy hold the same weight and importance.

History is also largely taught backwards. Anyone who has dealt with children to any extent knows they often ask, "Why?" Most of the time adults dismiss the kids which limits the child's learning in the moment and their desire to learn in the future. But, it can easily be used for learning. The difficulty is taking the time and knowing the answers. For history it also means it should be taught from the present to the past, rather than starting in the far past and working forward. Working backward from the present means that children have a connection to it. It's obvious once you think about it, but history is still generally taught as separated from the present.

Tolstoy's note about focusing on a person rather than the general context is important too. Humans are made to tune into individual humans. The dramatic story of a single person is more compelling than some general tale of a society or civilization. Plus, reading memoirs and autobiographies you learn things that people won't say in history books because they are politically incorrect, and you hit on specific details that are interesting and are skipped in history books. It's more interesting to work on understanding a specific person and their context than just the general situation.

This helped me realize that education is always an exploration which is in itself interesting and instructive.

'The American Scholar' by Ralph Waldo Emerson 31 August 1837

This is a speech that Emerson gave at Harvard College. It ended up being famous and influential. The U.S. was still a fairly new country at this point and he makes the case that American scholars should think independently of Europe, and that scholars in general should be independent thinkers.

Emerson makes a few interesting points. One is the case that there is a hierarchy of learning. The first is from nature itself. The second is from the past, best done through books. The third is through personal action and experience.

I think Emerson is correct when he states, "The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart." The point is unique insight is the goal.

On the other hand, I ponder the correctness of this statement, "In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be,—free and brave." I've made the case for many years that courage is the foundational virtue because no other virtue can exist without it. I can make the same case here, that self-trust requires courage. But, is Emerson correct that self-trust is a more encompassing virtue and includes courage? I'm unsure.

There's one line that I could write an entire essay on easily, "Life is our dictionary." That succinctly includes so much of epistemology (the nature of knowledge) about how experience, perception, and conceptualization work that the speech is worth reading just for that sentence. I've explained the importance of ostensive definitions and how social construct theory applied metaphysically (the nature of reality) is delusional, but "Life is our dictionary." does it even better once you understand it.

It's not obvious to me that there is a key takeaway from this speech. This helped me realize that what's considered important often comes down to the context of the right person saying the right thing at the right time in the right place.

'The Crisis in Education' by Hannah Arendt 1954

Arendt is a unique thinker. She was a German Jew who fled the Nazis, wrote extensively on totalitarianism and coined the phrase "the banality of evil" based on the Eichmann trials. Since I've liked some of her other thinking I searched for her thoughts on education and found this article. By the time she wrote this she was an American citizen.

Read this set of quotes from the article and see what stands out to you:

"The disappearance of common sense in the present day is the surest sign of the present-day crisis. In every crisis a piece of the world, something common to us all, is destroyed."

"Thus the crisis in American education, on the one hand, announces the bankruptcy of progressive education and, on the other, presents a problem of immense difficulty because it has arisen under the conditions and in response to the demands of a mass society."

"There exist a child’s world and a society formed among children that are autonomous and must insofar as possible be left to them to govern. The authority of a group, even a child group, is always considerably stronger and more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person can ever be. By being emancipated from the authority of adults the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical authority, the tyranny of the majority."

"The children have been so to speak banished from the world of grown-ups."

"In education this responsibility for the world takes the form of authority. The authority of the educator and the qualifications of the teacher are not the same thing. Authority has been discarded by the adults, and this can mean only one thing: that the adults refuse to assume responsibility for the world into which they have brought the children."

"Conservatism, in the sense of conservation, is of the essence of the educational activity, whose task is always to cherish and protect something—the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new."

"Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world."

"Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world."

To me these insights don't seem surprising, but rather reasonable, and yet they are odd in our society, which I think shows the change that Arendt is talking about. For instance, the society has largely replaced teacher authority with child bullying. A bad decision, but politically correct in the modern western culture. I think what we're seeing, and maybe this is common to empires that have peaked and are beginning to fall, is a failure to preserve and transmit cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. Which means that basic lessons will have to be relearned the hard way over the next few centuries as the society degrades before it can potentially rebuild. The last paragraph of Arendt's that I quoted is very powerful. Many people, probably the majority in the U.S., Europe, and the rest of the western world have decided during their education that their culture is not worth assuming the responsibility for saving from ruin, so the ruin has become inevitable.

This article reinforces my ideas about education as the steering mechanism for the rise and fall of civilizations.

Conclusion

Charlemagne, King Alfred, Tolstoy, Emerson, and Arendt. That's an impressive list of influential thinkers and doers. It might be interesting to put their basic insights into chronological order. Charlemagne: have accurate books and teach kids how to read them. King Alfred: have accurate books in English and teach kids how to read them. Tolstoy: let kids voluntarily learn and experiment with what they are interested in and works. Emerson: think independently and learn from nature, the past, and taking action. Arendt: modern education has broken the link of children to the past and to adults.

I wonder if the next renaissance will be caused by a ruler issuing a decree to have accurate books and teach kids how to read them.

Find more at https://t.co/fER26OXnPk or https://t.co/WugXzBMQC5

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

Jeffrey Alexander Martin: My Opinion on 5 Works about Education, Teaching, a... https://t.co/rdBzvZc2gA

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

An Alternative to Potions and Incantations

Depression and anxiety are a normal part of the human emotional experience. If someone says they haven't been sad or worried, they are exaggerating or lying, to you and maybe to themselves. The real question is, how do we deal with them? How do we recover from them and not get stuck?

There are two normal answers to how to deal with negative emotions. These have been called different things throughout history. We might think of them from older civilizations as potions and incantations. In a more modern sense they are often called medicine and counseling, or pharmaceuticals and therapy. In the most basic sense, it's drugs and words.

Drugs and words are powerful things. They change how we feel, think, perceive, and behave.

The problem with drugs is that they have side-effects. Drugs often cause worse problems than they are even intended to solve, and people often realize that too late. The names of the drugs change. New ones are invented. But the same patterns keep repeating. This is true if it's a natural drug or a synthetic drug, if it's administered by a doctor or a witch doctor, or a person is self-medicated, if it's a drink, smoke, injection, cream, food, or pill. You can go on a good trip or a bad trip, take a small dose or a large dose. But, since it doesn't change the fundamental reality of the problem, you have to take it again, and again. It doesn't deal with the emotions directly, only indirectly.

The problem with words is that they don't go deep enough. Words are concepts. They are ideas. This means that specifics are removed from reality to come up with the concept, which is an abstracted generalization. The word "chair" is fundamentally different than an actual chair. Reality is not a concept, it is the thing itself. The cells of your body are made to react to reality, not a disembodied concept. Words are not reality, they are a disembodied representative symbol of conceptual reality. That is something very different.

In trying to use words to change feelings people are trying to talk themselves and others out of and into feelings. They are working at two different levels. The basic formula is, if you feel anxious or depressed, then say these words, and you'll feel happy, calm, and confident. It's the same as a sales process where you have a person that doesn't want to buy, the sales person says these words, then the person wants to buy. Both are types of persuasion. There's a lot of skill that goes into that, and it does work to a certain extent. But, there's a high failure rate because you're dealing with emotions indirectly rather than directly.

When people can't save themselves from their depression and anxiety they appeal to a higher authority to come save them and solve their problems for them. When people are children this is normally a parent. When people are adults this is normally a government or a god. This too can sometimes work. The parent certainly can comfort the child, and god often comforts adults. Again, this deals with the emotions indirectly instead of directly, which is why the limitations often become apparent over time.

People take a chemical solution to a spiritual problem, a word solution to a feeling problem, an other solution to a self problem. That's why these work in a limited way, if at all.

Life, soul, spirit, is an embodied awareness. Our awareness is a direct sensational connection with reality. A depressed soul, an anxious spirit, can transform and save themselves through direct experience of their own sensations.

Perception and awareness are emergent. Each of our cells has life and senses the world. Together these sensations add up to a point that we become aware of them consciously when they cross a minimum threshold quantity.

Some experiences are so intense for us that they go beyond our maximum threshold. Then we experience residual cellular emotional reactivity. We haven't fully experienced the reality of our perception at the time, so we keep experiencing it a little bit over time, and it haunts us. We can rid ourselves of these demons by fully experiencing our reality, and we do that by fully feeling our sensations. This present moment contains the past that has added up to now, and the future that will unfold before us.

We're made to feel. It is life itself. It's part of our natural human ability. To feel better, we must feel more.

Find more at https://t.co/fER26OXnPk or https://t.co/WugXzBMQC5

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

Jeffrey Alexander Martin: An Alternative to Potions and Incantations https://t.co/OSp0G0JeoI

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

https://t.co/A4QmuzHYRO

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

Jeffrey Alexander Martin: My Teaching Origin Story - Try One https://t.co/i5HlY6MqAr

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

My Opinion on 5 Works about Education, Teaching, and Learning - Volume 13

People assume that education has changed a lot over the last couple thousand years. Some things have changed, but for the most part, people are wrong and education and learning have stayed quite similar through the ages. In this article we'll look at things that are very modern, things that are very old, and things in-between, and see that as things change they often stay the same.

'Edict of Maximum Prices' by Diocletian 301 AD

In ancient Rome there were price controls. This included teaching fees. I've taken a section of those prices here so we can see the value hierarchy of different types of teaching. These prices are in denarius communis, which was an accounting currency at the time. The prices are per pupil per month. Attorneys happen to be included in this same section and instead of removing that I included it.

Gymnastic instructor 50
Pedagogue 50
Elementary teacher 50
Teacher of arithmetic 75
Teacher for shorthand 75
Teacher of manuscript writing or palaeography 50
Teacher of Greek or Latin literature and of geometry 200
Teacher of rhetoric or public speaking 250
Attorney for opening a case 250
Attorney for pleading a case 1,000
Teacher of architecture 100

It's an interesting comparison. You can see a teacher of architecture, and think about the amazing architecture in ancient Rome, makes twice as much as an elementary, gymnastics, or writing teacher. But, a teacher of Greek or Latin literature, as well as a teacher of geometry, makes twice as much as the teacher of architecture. And a teacher of rhetoric makes even more. This shows a clear value hierarchy.

First tier: rhetoric and public speaking
Second tier: Greek and Latin literature and geometry
Third tier: architecture
Fourth tier: arithmetic and shorthand
Fifth tier: gymnastics, general education, elementary education, manuscript reading and writing

Setting price controls is different than having government funded and controlled schools. A couple hundred years before Diocletian there was the emperor Vespasian. In 'The Life of Vespasian' in 'The Lives of the Twelve Caesars' by C. Suetonius Tranquillus he writes about Vespasian in 69 to 79 AD paying teachers from tax money. "He was the first to establish a regular salary of a hundred thousand sesterces for Latin and Greek teachers of rhetoric, paid from the privy purse." Again we see rhetoric as the highest priority in education. And many hundreds of years before that Solon and Draco in ancient Athens had strict laws about education, so government control of education is very old.

The 'Edict of Maximum Prices' helped reinforce a couple of things I already knew. One, the highest priority in ancient education was rhetoric, which is a different priority than our society, and I'm not sure we're better on that account. Two, government control over education is ancient.

Chapter 11 'Saved' from 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X' as told to Alex Haley by Malcolm X 1965

I haven't read this entire book yet. Eventually I'm sure I will. But I was curious how Malcolm X became the intellectual that he became with very little schooling, and this chapter covers that.

Malcolm X only went to school through the 8th grade. He was a street hustler and ended up in prison. While in prison he wrote a letter to Elijah Muhammad, a religious leader his family had encouraged him to contact. Malcolm X could barely read and write, so he rewrote the letters over and over again, the first one 25 times before he sent it. Elijah responded, and Malcolm X became an odd version of Muslim, which he was later moving away from toward a more traditional Islam when the Nation of Islam killed him. Malcolm X says it took him a week of trying to convince himself to pray, and it was the hardest thing he ever did. After his conversion he became devoted, and prison ended up with him being something like a religious hermit. (His original name was Malcolm Little.)

Malcolm started writing two letters per day, one to Elijah and one to various other people he knew. He was frustrated with his bad letters and wanted to improve, and started what he called a "homemade education." He states, "Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies."

Pay attention to this, we can learn a lot about education and learning here in just a few paragraphs.

"It really began back in the Charlestown Prison, when Bimbi first made me feel envy of his stock of knowledge. Bimbi had always taken charge of any conversations he was in, and I tried to emulate him. But every book I picked up had few sentences which didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said.

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship. It was sad. I couldn’t even write in a straight line. It was both ideas together that moved me to request a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison school.

I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.

I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words—immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I’d written words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn’t remember. Funny thing, from the dictionary first page right now, that “aardvark” springs to my mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a long-tailed, long-eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites caught by sticking out its tongue as an anteater does for ants.

I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary’s next page. And the same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary’s A section had filled a whole tablet—and I went on into the B’s. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed. Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.

I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammad’s teachings, my correspondence, my visitors, and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life."

(It's amazing, but I've introduced the idea of looking up the meaning of words to be able to understand what they're reading to college students, and they thought it was a great idea.) For Malcolm, there was a good library at the prison that he used. There were debate groups and the prisoners that excelled at knowledge through knowing trivia, reading a lot, and debating were looked up to and respected. Even after lights out there was a little stream of light in his cell that Malcolm would sit in and read at night. He would have to jump back in bed and pretend to be asleep every hour during the guard patrols.

Wanting to write led to reading, and then his reading led to participating in the weekly debating group. Look at that development, reading and writing as a foundation for rhetoric, the highest educational value of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Now, Malcolm used all of his learning in history and philosophy, and his skill in rhetoric, to teach hate of white people, and I don't like that, but there is so much to learn here about learning.

You may think that anyone who was forced to do what Malcolm was, reading and writing the entire dictionary, would become intelligent. But that's not correct. It first started with motivation. Malcolm was motivated to emulate an intelligent friend. Then he was motivated to be able to write well to a mentor. He himself choose the method of his learning. Without the seed of motivation nothing else would have grown. With the motivational seed, and the access to books and the opportunity to write and debate, he grew into a uniquely powerful intellect. Those are the keys that I took away from this chapter.

'The Afterlife of Big Ideas in Education Reform' by Michael Hobbes 15 August 2017

This is a quite interesting article. Nathan Hale High School in Seattle, Washington was a failing school. The Principal Eric Benson had the idea, inspired by some other success stories, of breaking the school into smaller school units. This started in 1998. By 2006 the school was doing well. During this same time period the Gates Foundation and governments put a ton of money into this same type of experiment all over the country. The powerful elites with plans to help everyone even if it hurts everyone, even if they have to take people's tax money under threat of force, give them no real choice, and then damage their children with their own money. The elites know that they can just lie afterward and most people will believe the propaganda. This is one of an endless number of those examples. Nathan Hale became a failing school once again. So, why did it uniquely succeed for that limited time in that limited place?

Hobbes makes the case that it wasn't really the restructuring that was key, it was how it was done. Leading up the the restructuring of the school Benson had prepared and involved the school faculty and staff in the plan. The teachers and staff actually designed the change for four years before it was implemented. At the same time, because Nathan Hale was a failing school, the state gave budget control to Benson. Benson used that control to cut non-teaching staff and add more teaching staff.

But, it's a contradiction to have freedom in government schools, which are implemented to limit freedom, so after a number of years the autonomy of the principal to control the budget and staff was once again taken away. Instead of the work sessions that the teachers had organized there are normal performance evaluations. The class sizes have grown. The school can spend millions on having a nice building and sports fields, but can't increase the budget for operations, like things that actually help learning.

It turns out that you can get schools to pretend and appear to do anything by offering them money. Then when the money incentive goes away the facade of a fake or half reform also goes away, and things are back to what they were before or worse. Not every time, but commonly.

At one time Seattle even tried giving all of the principals of the schools independence and autonomy over budgets and staff. Some schools succeeded and some failed. But, because it's a government, the failing schools weren't shut down and the failing principals weren't fired, the government just took back control in response to the failures, meaning the failures were able to keep failing and the successes had to start failing. The government response to successful freedom is always to stop it. The government can always trick the majority of people into believing that's a good thing.

Hobbes makes some conclusions: "Over and over again, studies investigate exciting new models and come to the same pedestrian conclusion: School reforms work when they are implemented by good leaders, empowered teachers, and adequately funded administrators. When they aren’t, they don’t." and "Maybe when it comes to education reform, big ideas don’t matter. There will never be a structure or a technology or a method that is more powerful than the environment in which it is applied. Big ideas are, at their best or their worst, simply a mirror—an amplified or diminished reflection of the leaders, the institutions, and the people expected to carry them out."

I get the feeling though that he's still in support of government school reform, when the actual answer is obvious: there shouldn't be government schools. Yet, there almost always have been, and there always will be, because the goal of government schools isn't education and learning, it's government control, and it's a very easy thing to sell to the public. That's the key takeaway here, the government school reforms will always fail on a large scale, but the real solution of eliminating government schools will never be implemented. It comes down to the parents deciding or not deciding to save their own children.

'Dialogue between a School-Master, and School-Committee' in 'The Columbian Orator' by Caleb Bingham 1797

This book was hugely influential in the development of the United States because it impacted so many people and so many important people. Frederick Douglass was famously self-educated on this book. From what I understand, most likely Abraham Lincoln as well. Maybe that's part of why the two of them got along well once they met.

Bingham states in an introduction to this short story that he hopes only few of these schools continue to exist, but they do. The basic idea is the school had a good teacher, but he was run out of town. A Master Ignoramus wanders into town and talks with the bar-keep about getting a job as a teacher. The school board meets in the bar and has an interview with the Master and a discussion about hiring him. One speaks against hiring him, the others like that he's cheap and don't mind that he's stupid.

The Parson, probably an Anglican minister, gives this statement against the hire: "I protest against your proceeding, and withdraw myself forever from the committee. But I must tell you, your children will reap the bitter consequences of such injudicious measures. It has always been surprising to me, that people in general are more willing to pay their money for any thing else, than for "the one thing needful," that is, for the education of their children. Their taylor must be a workman, their carpenter, a workman, their hair-dresser, a workman, their hostler, a workman; but the instructor of their children must - work cheap!"

This is an interesting criticism. To a large extent schools are often used for babysitting, and that seems to be what the actual value of the majority of the school board is in this story, and they want a cheap and nice babysitter. It's somewhat similar in government schools today. Education and learning are supposed to happen to some limited extent, but to a great extent the parents need and use the school as a babysitter, and since it already has to be paid for by taxes whether you use it or not, it's a cheap or free babysitter. I'm not sure what fully to take away from this little story, but it does hit on the frustrations in education quite well, and Bingham obviously had some experience with such boards himself.

'De Litteris Colendis' letter from Charlemagne to Baugaulf of Fulda, 780-800 AD

This is fascinating. I'm going to copy and paste this entire letter from the Fordham University Medieval Sourcebook along with the typos and errors. Pay attention to the problems addressed in this letter, and pay attention to the motivations and reasons.

"Charles, by the grace of God, King of the Franks and Lombards and Patrician of the Romans, to Abbot Baugulf and to all the congregation, also to the faithful committed to you, we have directed a loving greeting by our ambassadors in the name of omnipotent God.

Be it known, therefore, to your devotion pleasing to God, that we, together with our faithful, have considered it to be useful that the bishoprics and monasteries entrusted by the favor of Christ to our control, in addition, in the culture of letters also ought to be zealous in teaching those who by the gift of God are able to learn, according to the capacity of each individual, so that just as the observance of the rule imparts order and grace to honesty of morals, so also zeal in teaching and learning may do the same for sentences, so that those who desire to please God by living rightly should not neglect to please him also by speaking correctly. For it is written: "Either from thy words thou shalt be justified or from thy words thou shalt be condemned." For although correct conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge precedes conduct. Therefore, each one ought to study what he desires to accomplish, sc) that so much the more fully the mind may know what ought to be clone, as the tongue hastens in the praises of omnipotent God without the hindrances of errors. For since errors should be shunned by all men, so much the more ought they to be avoided as far as possible by those who are chosen for this very purpose alone, so that they ought to be the especial servants of truth. For when in the years just passed letters were often written to us from several monasteries in -which it was stated that the brethren who dwelt there offered up in our behalf sacred and pious prayers, we have recognized in most of these letters both correct thoughts and uncouth expressions; because what pious devotion dictated faithfully to the mind, the tongue, uneducated on account of the neglect of study, was not able to express in the letter without error. Whence it happened that we began to fear lest perchance, as the skill in writing was less, so also the wisdom for understanding the Holy Scriptures might be much less than it rightly ought to be. And we all know well that, although errors of speech are dangerous, far more dangerous are errors of the understanding. Therefore, we exhort you not only not to neglect the study of letters, but also with most humble mind, pleasing to God, to study earnestly in order that you may be able more easily and more correctly to penetrate the mysteries of the divine Scriptures. Since, moreover, images, tropes and similar figures are found in the sacred pages, -no one doubts that each one in reading these will understand the spiritual sense more quickly if previously he shall have been fully instructed in the mastery of letters. Such men truly are to be chosen for this work as have both the will and the ability to learn and a desire to instruct others. And may this be done with a zeal as great as the earnestness with which we command it. For we desire you to be, as it is fitting that soldiers of the church should be, devout in mind, learned in discourse, chaste in conduct and eloquent in speech, so that whosoever shall seek to see you out of reverence of God, or on account of your reputation for holy conduct, just as he is edified by your appearance, may also be instructed by your wisdom, which he has learned from your reading or singing, and may go away joyfully giving thanks to omnipotent God. Do not neglect, therefore, if you wish to have our favor, to send copies of this letter to all your suffragans and fellow-bishops and to all the monasteries. [And let no monk hold courts outside of his monastery or go to the judicial and other public assemblies. Farewell.]"

Over and over in history the importance of reading and writing have been emphasized because of religious study. This letter helped me realize that part of the push in medieval Europe, by none less than Charlemagne himself, was to have proper religious understanding, learning, transmission, and teaching. Slowly the university system arises in Europe out of this push over the next few hundred years.

Conclusion

In this article we see a wide range of times, places, people, races, and religions. Always there are patterns that emerge in the problems of education and learning, and in how education and learning actually happen. The struggle is real, and the solutions are too, but the solutions are for the people that choose them independently instead of waiting for them from without.

Find more at https://t.co/fER26OXnPk or https://t.co/WugXzBMQC5 or https://t.co/BHQEpUEbKZ

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

Jeffrey Alexander Martin: My Opinion on 5 Works about Education, Teaching, a... https://t.co/qXTZGp1rwR

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

Ten Lessons on Continual War

Many great men in history have told the truth and warned about government and war many times, yet people don't know history and whatever the current government war propaganda is always works. We're going to cover a lot quickly.

Richard (Dick) Marcinko was a Navy SEAL who fought in the Vietnam War. He received one Silver Star, four Bronze Stars, a Legion of Merit, two Navy Commendation Medals, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and reached the rank of Commander. Then in 1980 he formed SEAL Team Six. After that he formed Red Cell to test the Navy's defenses against terrorism. There's a documentary on it. He was very successful at infiltrating the US military installations. He was able to place fake bombs on Air Force One and kidnap Naval officers. He was so good at it, or the Naval defenses are so weak and didn't like being exposed, that they placed him in prison for awhile. First lesson, the most powerful military force ever created in the history of humanity is vulnerable and doesn't want to fix it.

David Hackworth is one of the most heavily decorated US soldiers in history for his service in the Korean and Vietnam wars. He formed Tiger Force during the Vietnam War and reached the rank of Colonel. He received 2 Distinguished Service Crosses, 10 Silver Stars, 4 Legion of Merits, a Distinguished Flying Cross, 8 Bronze Stars with V, 8 Purple Hearts, 34 Air Medals with V, 4 Army Commendation Medals with V, and a few more. He declined going to the Army War College to become a General, twice. He criticized the Vietnam War saying that the US couldn't win and should withdraw. He was investigated. Then he left the US and lived in Australia for a number of years. He wrote a number of books on war, including heavy criticisms such as in his book 'Hazardous Duty' where he says that the military is too political, has sold out, is captured by the Military Industrial Congressional Complex of corruption, and would need a complete top to bottom restructuring to even be effective. Second lesson, the military institutions are weak, bloated, ineffective, and corrupt.

Dwight Eisenhower was the US General of the Army, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, 1st Military Governor of the American-occupied zone in Germany, 16th Chief of Staff of the Army, 13th President of Columbia University, 1st Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, and 34th President of the United States. He knew some things. In his Presidential farewell address he warned against the economic, political, and spiritual influence of the military-industrial complex. Third lesson, the military industrial complex has massive influence over politics and propaganda.

Smedley Butler was a Major General in the United States Marine Corps. He received the Medal of Honor twice, the Marine Corps Brevet Medal, the Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal, Distinguished Service Medals from both the Navy and the Army, and the French Order of the Black Star. He served in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Banana Wars, and World War One. In 1933 he stopped the Business Plot conspiracy to overthrow President FDR. He wrote a little book called 'War is a Racket' where he says that the US military is used as muscle for big business and bankers. He proposed adjustments to help correct the corruption, which will never be implemented. Fourth lesson, the US military is used by powerful people for personal benefit rather than anything benefiting the US public, who have little to no influence.

Henry Ford is one of the greatest industrialists in human history. In his autobiography he makes the case that there are people with international influence who purposefully stoke hatred of nations against each other to cause wars so that they can make money. Poor people die, and rich people make money. Ford opposed war. When there was no avoiding it, he helped the US win the war. Ford was one of the most powerful and influential men in the world, which means that the people that want war are even more powerful and influential than that. Fifth lesson, war actually is a massive conspiracy by corrupt people.

William Tecumseh Sherman graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, was the superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, Major General during the U.S. Civil War, and then Commanding General of the U.S. Army under four U.S. Presidents. He warned both the North and the South against having the Civil War, but they wouldn't listen to him. He tried to avoid the war, but failed. When he did join he warned that it would be a long and difficult war, but they wouldn't listen to him. He was instrumental in the North winning the Civil War. In a letter to James Yeatman on 21 May 1865 he said he was sick of war, even winning is bad, and it's only people that haven't actually been in war that want more war. On 11 August 1880 Sherman gave a speech in Columbus, Ohio where he said young men look at war as glory, but really it's hell. Sixth lesson, people who don't actually know what war is want war.

George Washington was Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and first President of the United States. As a Major in Virginia, Washington started the French and Indian War, also called the Seven Years' War, which the British colonies were then taxed for, which they then rebelled against to start the American Revolution, where Washington led the colonial military to defeat the British who were considered the greatest military in the world at the time. After winning the war Washington literally had to stop his own army from overthrowing the congress and installing him as king at Newburgh. He knew some things. In his farewell address as President Washington gave some warnings. One of them was to stay out of foreign wars and to avoid foreign influence, and that the two are connected. Seventh lesson, foreign wars and foreign influence will destroy the republic.

James Madison was the fourth President of the United States and a key figure in creating the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights. He wrote 'Political Observations' on 20 April 1795 and specifically warned against wars as the greatest threat to domestic freedom. With continual wars you get: armies, debts, taxes, consolidated power, corrupt political appointments, seduced minds of the people, subdued force of the people, fraud, degenerate manners and morals, and less freedom. Eighth lesson, wars destroy freedom through many means.

Adam Smith is one of the most influential philosophers in modern history. His book 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' in 1776 started modern economics. In the book he notes that war destroys goods and uses capital for unproductive ends and therefore makes a nation poorer, that to fund wars debt is usually needed which makes a nation poorer, that some manufacturers and financiers make money off of war and therefore don't want wars to end, and that people not close to the wars are entertained by them and also want them to continue. Ninth lesson, even though a country will get poorer through wars there are people that want continual wars for their own benefit and entertainment.

These observations about war and government and corruption aren't new in the last few hundred years. Some people have known these things for a long time. People fight wars for land, money, resources, slaves, obedience of the conquered, honor, prestige, glory, entertainment, survival, and obedience to some god.

“They plunder, they slaughter, they steal, and they call it empire; and where they make desolation, they call it peace.” - 'Agricola' by Tacitus 98 AD

“Avarice destroyed honor, integrity, and all other good qualities; it taught in their place arrogance, cruelty, contempt for the gods, and the habit of considering everything as having its price.” - 'The Conspiracy of Catiline' by Sallust 40 BC

“The sinews of war are unlimited money.” - 'Philippics' by Cicero 44 BC

"...war is a matter not so much of arms as of money, for it is money alone that makes arms serviceable..." - 'History of the Peloponnesian War' by Thucydides 411 BC.

Tenth lesson, money and war cannot be separated because money is needed for war, so there will always be people that want war to make money.

The people have been warned. The people will not listen. As General Sherman said in a letter to his wife on 2 June 1863, "Vox populi, vox humbug."

Find more at https://t.co/fER26OXnPk or https://t.co/WugXzBMQC5

[Jeffrey Martin @__JeffreyMartin]

Jeffrey Alexander Martin: Ten Lessons on Continual War https://t.co/ZCyhvYGHa3