I didn’t mean only memorising poetry or prose passages, but anything that requires memorisation.
Two instances to chew on.
1. To me the most crippling side-effect of “modularisation” in education — i.e. self-contained courses, no terminal examinations etc. — is that it obviates what is actually a principle purpose of exams based on several years’ work, forcing the transfer of information from short- to long-term memory. Students who take only end-of-semester course exams or write final papers retain far less of the data than those who undergo old-fashioned final exams. Methodological competence can certainly be learned in modularised systems, but detailed memory is not fostered.
2. I will never forget the candidate for Cambridge admission (15+ years ago) who had done O-level modules (9th and 10th grade) on the English Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but did not know which came first. Honest to Betsy; didn’t have a clue and couldn’t work it out either. Even before that I made my own undergrads learn a regnal list, from at least Richard III to Elizabeth II with dates, so that they had at least one continuous historical frame to which they could attach other dates they learned or came across. I wasn’t bigoted about it — it could be a list of popes, archbishops of Canterbury, or Dalai Lamas (Dalais Lama?) if they wanted, though English monarchs are more useful in English literature — but they had to know something that gave accurate chronological depth to their grasps of history, not just sit grinning ignorance on a jumble of impressions and quasi-factual fragments. They used to moan about it loudly … for a while and then start being grateful. Heh.
Memorising poems is dandy, and there’s no reason it has to be the saccharine and long-line stuff that was the pedagogic legacy of late C19 tastes and pieties — lots of good strong stuff out there that anyone’s better off knowing than not knowing — but there are bigger issues at stake.
(Excerpt from a much longer discussion on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list)
John Lennard, MA DPhil. (Oxon.), MA (WU)
General editor, Humanities-E-Books Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs
January 14, 2012
QotD: In praise of memorization
January 12, 2012
QotD: When a figure is too high to be repaid, it won’t be repaid
It’s hardly news anymore that public-sector pension promises will be made good (or not) on the backs of taxpayers, but I still think that the average private-sector packmule has no idea of the amount they’re going to have to pony up to vouchsafe the various municipal, state, and federal pension promises. The amount required over the next several decades beggars the imagination. In fact, the amount is preposterous: there’s no way the money is ever going to be paid out as promised. Even if it were mathematically possible (which it isn’t), taxpayers would revolt over the massive increases that would be required. If I were a public-sector worker, I’d be making a point of saving every dime of my own money that I could, because that fat public sector pension is unlikely to ever be paid out in full. (And I’m not even getting into the healthcare benefits, which are even more onerous than the pension benefits.) Basically, the bedrock truth is this: money that can’t be paid out, won’t be, no matter what agreements were signed or what the courts say.
Monty, “The Daily DOOM”, Ace of Spades HQ, 2012-01-12
January 7, 2012
QotD: Is Disappearing
To be or not to be? That remaining the question, the answer increasingly clear. The verb “to be” dying out, and the culprit? None other than TV news channels. Taking the place of such cherished words as “is,” “are,” “am,” even “were” and “was”: a new verb form that you might call the one-size-fits-all past, present, and future participle. Or you might call it the one-size-fits-all past, present, and future gerund. One of these right and one of them wrong, but which which? Nobody really knowing the difference between a participle and a gerund. Anyone claiming to understand the distinction probably bluffing. So calling it what you wish: Either label doing.
Michael Kinsley, “Is Disappearing: What TV news doing to our precious verbs”, Slate, 2001-11-01
December 25, 2011
QotD: The Prince Regent’s Christmas story
Edmund: So, shall I begin the Christmas story?
Prince: Absolutely! As long as it’s not that terribly depressing one about the chap who gets born on Christmas Day, shoots his mouth off about everything under the sun, and then comes a cropper with a couple of rum-coves on top of a hill in Johnny Arabland.
Edmund: You mean Jesus, sir?
Prince: Yes, that’s the fellow! Just leave him out of it — he always spoils the X-mas atmos.Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1988
December 20, 2011
QotD: Inside the world of Kim Jong-Il
Kim Jong-il enjoyed the life of a spoiled playboy — fast cars, fast women, cellars of vintage French wines and a passion for Rambo and Daffy Duck videos. He was also said to take pleasure in caviar, Hennessy Cognac and his troupe of 2,000 dancing girls, recruited from the country’s high schools as teenagers to perform in “pleasure groups” in the dictator’s 32-odd villas and palaces — before being pensioned off at 25. Each pleasure group was composed of three teams: a “satisfaction team,” which performed sexual services; a “happiness team,” which provided massage; and a “dancing and singing team.” Visitors were treated to choreographed stripteases, though only Mr. Kim was allowed to avail himself of the other services.
Ian Vandaelle, “Inside the world of Kim Jong-il: The Glorious General and his ‘pleasure groups’”, National Post, 2011-12-20
December 16, 2011
Reason.TV: Christopher Hitchens – Bah, Humbug on Christmas
Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011.
I’m saddened to write that the great essayist and writer Christopher Hitchens is dead at the age of 62. He had been weakened by the cancer of the esophagus that he disclosed publicly in 2010 and the treatments he had undertaken to fight his illness. Reason extends its condolences to his wife, family, and friends.
As is clear to anyone who has read even a sentence of his staggeringly prolific output, Hitchens was the sort of stylist who could turn even a casual digression into a tutorial on all aspects of history, literature, and art. As a writer, you gaze upon his words and despair because there’s just no way you’re going to touch that. But far more important than the wit and panache and erudition with which he expressed himself was the method through which he engaged the world.
The Toronto Star has a small collection of quotations which do give a sense of the man’s range and wit:
5. About Sarah Palin: “She’s got no charisma of any kind, [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”
6. “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
[. . .]
8. About Mother Teresa: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
9. “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”
[. . .]
12. About Michael Moore: “Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.”
December 11, 2011
QotD: Alcohol
It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring. Kingsley grasped this essential fact very early in life, and (so to speak) never let go of the insight. This does not mean that there are not wine bores, single-malt bores, and people who become even more boring when they themselves have a tipple. You will meet them, and learn how to recognize them (and also how to deal with them) in these pages.
In my opinion Kingers — which I was allowed to call him — was himself a very slight cocktail bore. Or, at least, he had to affect to be such in order to bang out a regular column on drinks for the pages of a magazine aimed at the male population. In “real” life, Amis was a no-nonsense drinker with little inclination to waste a good barman’s time with fussy instructions. However, there was an exception which I think I can diagnose in retrospect, and it is related to his strong admiration for the novels of Ian Fleming. What is James Bond really doing when he specifies the kind of martini he wants and how he wants it? He is telling the barman (or bartender if you must) that he knows what he is talking about and is not to be messed around. I learned the same lesson when I was a restaurant and bar critic for the City Paper in Washington, D.C. Having long been annoyed by people who called knowingly for “a Dewar’s and water” instead of a scotch and water, I decided to ask a trusted barman what I got if I didn’t specify a brand or label. The answer was a confidential jerk of the thumb in the direction of a villainous-looking tartan-shaded jug under the bar. The situation was even grimmer with gin and vodka and became abysmal with “white wine”, a thing I still can’t bear to hear being ordered. If you don’t state a clear preference, then your drink is like a bad game of poker or a hasty drug transaction: It is whatever the dealer says it is. Please do try to bear this in mind.
Christopher Hitchens, Introduction to Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.
December 10, 2011
QotD: G.K. Chesterton on waiting for a train
[. . .] And most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences — things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys’ habit in this matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen. Their meditations may be full of rich and fruitful things. Many of the most purple hours of my life have been passed at Clapham Junction, which is now, I suppose, under water. I have been there in many moods so fixed and mystical that the water might well have come up to my waist before I noticed it particularly. But in the case of all such annoyances, as I have said, everything depends upon the emotional point of view. You can safely apply the test to almost every one of the things that are currently talked of as the typical nuisance of daily life.
G.K. Chesterton, “On running after one’s hat” (1908), republished in Quotidiana, 2007-12-10.
December 3, 2011
November 23, 2011
QotD: How the sequester is a symptom of political cowardice
Those who can do. Those who can’t form a supercommittee. Those who can’t produce a majority vote in a supercommittee sequester. Those who can’t even sequester are telling the world something profound about American inertia.
As Veronique points out [. . .], the “automatic” sequestration cuts would over the course of ten years reduce US public debt by only $153 billion. Which boils down to about a month’s worth of the current federal deficit.
Yet even slashing a pimple’s worth of borrowing out of the great oozing mountain of pustules will prove too much for Washington.
Mark Steyn, “Happy Sweet Sequester’d Days”, National Review Online, 2011-11-21
November 12, 2011
QotD: The uses of junk science
The Sierra Club campaign against coal is motivated by a desire to reduce CO2 emissions to prevent global warming. But since global warming skepticism and global warming fatigue are widespread, the club has opted for a junk science approach to reach its goals. The club tells people that their babies will die, or at least get asthma, if coal plants continue to operate. Although the cause of asthma is not known, it is suspected that it is related to the high levels of cleanliness in advanced countries that denies children and their immune systems exposure to the dirt and filth found in primitive places. This is known as the hygiene hypothesis. The incidence of asthma is about 50 times higher in developed countries compared to rural Africa. For all the Sierra Club knows, coal plants may prevent asthma. Given the hygiene hypothesis, that seems plausible.
With junk science, it is easy to scare people. There are many things that are bad for us that are present at low levels in the environment — for example, mercury, lead, radiation, or tobacco smoke. The junk science approach to trace toxins is to claim that if a high level of the bad thing would cause X people to get sick, then a level 10,000 times smaller must cause 1/10,000 as many people to get sick. Given 300 million people in the country, this math can give you thousands of people getting sick from low levels of mercury, lead, radiation, or secondhand tobacco smoke. This approach is known as the linear no threshold hypothesis.
The Sierra Club and its ally, the Environmental Protection Agency, lean on the small emissions of mercury from burning coal to work up a calculation of deaths from coal. They minimize the fact that much of the mercury falling on the U.S. comes from China, volcanoes, or even from burning dead bodies with mercury-based fillings in their teeth. Mercury pollution becomes an excuse to get rid of coal. Arguing the science behind such claims often degenerates into a paper chase about statistics and what studies are good or bad. From the bureaucratic point of view, the linear no threshold hypothesis is wonderful because it means that problems are never solved and there is always a need for more bureaucratic activity.
Norman Rogers, “Sierra Club at the Metropolitan Club”, American Thinker, 2011-11-11
November 6, 2011
QotD: The Occupy movement
There are lessons in this history for the leftist protester. The Occupy movement is bristling with changes it wants made (I’m told we’re not supposed to call them “demands”); these changes won’t, and shouldn’t, happen outside the ballot box. The goal of protest in a liberal-democratic society must therefore be to advance one’s pet issue further ahead on the agenda of the sympathetic, for when they do attain power, and to weaken the morale of moderates on the other side. One must locate specific injustices rather than nebulous cosmic ones, confronting them and defying their perpetrators directly. Deeds will accomplish more than any amount of eloquence. And it should not be necessary to claim to be a majority (let alone a majority of 99-to-one); one individual suffices, where he has a true claim to our attention.
It’s not really clear, anyway, how an “Occupation” that is meeting no serious resistance from authorities anywhere is supposed to elicit sympathy. The main effect of the movement so far seems to have been an elaborate proof-by-demonstration that Canadian municipalities are incredibly respectful of political protest and fawningly deferential to the Charter of Rights. So . . . hooray?
Colby Cosh, “Want political change? Talk to a farmer”, Maclean’s, 2011-11-06
November 2, 2011
QotD: The evolution of the public sector
The public-sector workplace has become a kind of artificial Eden, whose fortunate inhabitants enjoy solid pay and 1950s-style job security and retirement benefits, all of it paid for by their less-fortunate private-sector peers. Some on the left have convinced themselves that this “success” can lay the foundation for a broader middle-class revival. But if a bloated public sector were the blueprint for a thriving middle-class society, then the whole world would be beating a path to Greece’s door.
Our entitlement system, meanwhile, is designed to redistribute wealth. But this redistribution doesn’t go from the idle rich to the working poor; it goes from young to old, working-age savings to retiree consumption, middle-class parents to empty-nest seniors. The Congressional Budget Office’s new report on income inequality points out that growing Medicare costs are part of the reason upper-income retirees receive a larger share of federal spending than they did 30 years ago, while working-age households with children receive “a much smaller and declining share of transfers.” Absent reforms, this mismatch will only grow more pronounced: by the 2030s, Medicare recipients will receive $3 in benefits for every dollar they paid in.
Then there’s the public education system, theoretically the nation’s most important socioeconomic equalizer. Yet even though government spending on K-to-12 education has more than doubled since the 1970s, test scores have flatlined and the United States has fallen behind its developed-world rivals. Meanwhile, federal spending on higher education has been undercut by steadily inflating tuitions, in what increasingly looks like an academic answer to the housing bubble. (If the Occupy Wall Street dream of student loan forgiveness were fulfilled, this cycle would probably just continue.)
The story of the last three decades, in other words, is not the story of a benevolent government starved of funds by selfish rich people and fanatical Republicans. It’s a story of a public sector that has consistently done less with more, and a liberalism that has often defended the interests of narrow constituencies — public-employee unions, affluent seniors, the education bureaucracy — rather than the broader middle class.
Ross Douthat, “What Tax Dollars Can’t Buy”, New York Times, 2011-10-30
November 1, 2011
QotD: The unnatural prolongation of adolescence
OWS: Lawless, selfish, disrespectful, and mean. They are overgrown children, in other words — not adults in any real sense of the word. It is an oddity about modern Americans that always strikes me: many seem so . . . unformed. I’ve seen pictures of my grandfather and grandmother when they were in their early 20′s (married and with 2 kids already, and another on the way) and they seemed like fully-formed adults already. They looked like adults; they dressed like adults; they behaved as adults. Yet now I see people at 30, 40, 50 years old who seem little more than self-obsessed adolescents — smug, directionless, angry but inchoate, lavishly educated but not particularly intelligent, entitled without being industrious or deserving. They even groom and dress like children: slovenly, unwashed, unbarbered, sneakers, t-shirts, sweatpants, looking like unmade beds. I look at the OWS protests and I see a crowd of ill-behaved, unsupervised toddlers, but no adults willing (or perhaps able) to call them to order. My grandparents had much more difficult lives in any way you can measure than these spoiled brats, and yet they were better people — and happier people, on the whole.
“Monty”, “DOOM: I like that Doom Doom Pow”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2011-10-31
October 31, 2011
QotD: Economics is not a “hard science”
The problem at base is that economics is not a branch of mathematics or statistics, no matter how much economists wish it was. Never forget that the economics equations you see, the pretty graphs and charts, are just educated guesses that are wrong more often than not — economists love the gloss of the hard sciences, but the truth is that the field is firmly placed among the philosophical and sociological disciplines. Economics is a study of human behavior more than anything else, with all the uncertainties and confusion that entails.
“Monty”, “DOOM: I like that Doom Doom Pow”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2011-10-31
