Is Fundamental
By Steven J. Grisafi, PhD.
As freakish as it may seem, I like to write essays. Although we have come to call them blog posts, I consider my blog posts to be essays written in the tradition of the gifted essayists of yore. Having just finished reading the essay, ‘The Case for Basic Education’ written by one of the gifted essayists of yore, Clifton Fadiman,1 my mind is led to ponder, as he did, basic education. Concomitant with this contemplation of what is basic I suppose we also need to ponder what tradition is.
In his essay Mr. Fadiman asserts his belief that his generation was the last American generation to receive an undiluted basic education. Mr. Fadiman graduated from high school within the New York City public school system in 1920 before attending Columbia College. While I myself noticed a perplexing transformation occurring within the public high school that I attended during the 1970’s, I wax apoplectic at the notion that my education was watered-down. At issue here appears to be the notion of tradition juxtaposed against the notion of utility.
Before dissecting what basic education should be Mr. Fadiman dissects what we Americans are. He argues that we are more than an adaptive creature seeking to accommodate oneself to the world at large; but instead we are contemplative creatures that strive to modify and control the world in which we live. Having first established who we are, Mr. Fadiman then directs us toward the curriculum appropriate for our nature and not for our mere subsistence. He urges us toward (or perhaps back towards) a curriculum of basic education that seeks, not to adapt to changes in the marketplace for its graduates, but a curriculum that enables its graduates to grow intellectually beyond the level of knowledge provided by the curriculum. I have no argument with Mr. Fadiman in this regard yet I feel one needs to examine more closely the notion of what is tradition.
In any society, with each passing generation, tradition modifies. This is a natural process as any society reevaluates its heritage and history. Yet the modifications that do occur should not take any tradition far from the basic culture of the people. It is when the culture of a society transforms much, for any of myriad possible reasons, traditions can be reevaluated such that they would become unrecognizable to previous generations of the society. Within America such transformations become commonplace as we continue to refuse to recognize that at some time in their history all nations were once immigrant countries. Failing to recognize this, we continue to allow our culture to evolve to please the current generation giving them full possession of all that is American.
Four decades after graduating from an American public school system Clifton Fadiman returned to observe the performance of students and teachers within a middle school situated in New England. He reported his observations in his essay ‘My Day in School’ and one might say that his verdict was favorable. He judged the teachers to be superior to those who had taught him and he found the physical plant of the school to be more hospitable than the schools he had to inhabit. It seems to me that his most incisive observation was the recognition that the students exuded self-confidence and poise yet spoke so poorly as to be unable to express themselves properly. The school succeeded in teaching confidence within students who lacked ability.
This confidence is readily apparent among our political leaders. Indeed, it is through this self- assurance that such persons achieve the status of leader. Yet confidence does not impart true ability but instead the illusion projected to others that one can perform as one suggests. Voters have often fallen from such disillusionment. Having thus been burned, one might think that the American people would seek to reconcile the confidence-ability gap and design a school system that rewards performance and not persuasion. The reader may at this moment question whether the author of this essay, having suffered a diluted education as Mr. Fadiman would suggest, also exudes self-assurance inconsistent with his abilities. If the reader knew the anxiety the author endured as he perceived the flaws that led to the writing of his first two science monographs, Resonance Universe Theory and Peculiar Velocity in Action, the reader should be convinced of the author’s lack of self-confidence even if the reader doubts the author’s abilities.
I have commented upon what I perceive to be a lack of breadth in the education of the most recent generation of scientists and engineers. Even the generation of Mr. Fadiman recognized the trend toward specialization within our professions and lamented its consequences. The real harm I find in this is that the self-confidence of the ignorant can cause others to become misinformed. Nowhere was this made more evident to me than when I was confronted with the ignorance of a reviewer who asserted that a velocity could be a second order tensor. The reviewer was an astronomer who apparently had no understanding that peculiar velocities occur beyond the field of astronomy. A narrowly educated professional is a dangerous thing.
So if we are to hear the concerns of Mr. Fadiman and address the drift in our education system such that it provides American students with an undiluted basic education, how are we to reconcile tradition with utility and provide our students with the specialized expertise they will need to perform in the market place and the breadth of education they will need to perform as citizens? Clearly, first, we need to divert the focus upon building self-confidence to a focus that demands perfection. Unfortunately, this will be far easier said than done because we a led almost exclusively by those persons who persuade us through the demonstration of their self-confidence than through their actual ability to perform. We need not repudiate but we need to correct.
It may be a thankless task, but I believe I have done my part to correct the wayward among us despite the strong hold they have on the American people that they are the experts. Mr. Fadiman quotes Elbert Hubbard who said: The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher. If this is taken as the measure of a good teacher then I have had great teachers. I have corrected the astronomers with my book Peculiar Velocity in Action and I have corrected Einstein (and also Boltzmann) with my book Resonance Universe Theory. I am sure that the reader can understand my anticipation of a counter-attack.
1. Clifton Fadiman, Enter, Conversing Cleveland & New York: The World Publishing Company 1962.