Lines Written In Memory of My Grandmother

My grandmother died seven years ago this July.  She was dear to me and I miss her.  These lines are for her:

Hand-tied patchwork quilt

My grandmother’s crooked fingers

Dust in the ground

Seven years hence

Worked the yarn

And turned the scraps into the womb-like warmer

Under which we lie safe in the embrace of her love

Albert O. Hirschman - An Economist We Ought to Know

Malcom Gladwell has a review of Jeremy Adelman's biography of Albert Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher:  The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/06/24/130624crbo_books_gladwell  Prior to reading Gladwell's review, I did not know who Albert Hirschman was.  Now I will probably go out and pick up some of his books to read this economist whose "subject was economics, but whose spirit was philosophical."  Hirschman is an early harbinger of non-conformist approaches to economics, the kinds of alternative approaches to problems that have long vexed neoclassical economists and have landed such original thinkers as Daniel Kahneman, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz Nobel Prizes in economics.

Gladwell notes that Hirschman, an economist by trade, was unique among his peers in that he highlighted the consistency with which economic creativity results from projects gone awry.  In Hirschman's words,

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened.  In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming.  Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is be misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

I find this notion fascinating.  Perhaps this is not surprising since I am drawn to Romanticism and chaos theory, to notions of the lyrical arising out of the indeterminate, to notions of intertextual play.  Although I advocate rationality and pragmatism in matters of policy, it is clear to me that moments of what Hirschman called 'creativity' arise in response to crisis.  Whether it is the environmental crisis that confronted the Karnaphuli paper plant that Gladwell describes in the review or the artistic crisis Bloom identifies in The Anxiety of Influence, creativity represents a departure from the status quo.

The paradox of creativity is that it is inherently unpredictable.  Since creativity depends on the presence of unintended consequences, a creative response is by necessity novel.  Thus, one cannot 'learn' creativity in the sense that one learns grammar or biology or physics.  Though we strive to prepare students and employees to be creative thinkers, we can have little or no foreknowledge of the situations that will arise requiring a creative response and what a creative response might be.  The best we can do is to condition persons to question the assumed parameters of a given problem and to subject her own response to critical analysis, what Hirschman called 'self-subversion.'  Essentially this conditioning would inculcate a mental predisposition to accept uncertainty, vagueness, and ambiguity.  The reason that this may allow for creativity to arise is that creativity is usually plucked from the interstices of convention.

With regard to the necessity of uncertainty as a precondition for creativity, Hirschman was of a mind with his brother-in-law Eugenio Colorni who "believed that doubt was creative because it allowed for alternative ways to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable circles and self-feeding despondency."  Despite the reality that creative solutions arise in the context of unintended consequences, Hirschman was prescient in understanding that the idea runs counter to most people's expectations.  In his own words:

While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian's finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede--in fact we find it intolerable to imagine--that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social, or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning...  Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry:  we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth.

In the words of a psychology, we are prone to a self-serving bias, in which we claim more responsibility for successes than failures.  This was a remarkable conclusion for an economist toiling in a field that über rationalist, neoclassical economists dominated.  We have been conditioned to believe not only in the possibility but also the ascendancy or order.  We have been conditioned to believe, without convincing proof, that humans are rational economic actors who behave predictably.  Hirschman's iconoclasm in challenging the status quo is a refreshing reminder that dogma does not always defeat originality.

Interestingly, Hirschman also addressed school vouchers in response to Milton Friedman's advocacy of them.  Gladwell notes that Hirschman was above all a person of action who volunteered on the side of the republicans in the Spanish Civil War and then was active in the French Resistance during World War II.  Perhaps in line with his idea that creativity is activity in response to unpredictable hurdles, Hirschman apparently viewed with disdain Friedman's position that school vouchers were preferable to engaging the public education system directly.  Hirschman contrasted the Friedman solution to a problem, what he called 'exiting,' or [in Gladwell's words] "voting with your feet, expressing your displeasure by taking your business elsewhere, with his preferred solution which he called 'voice,' or [in Gladwell's words] "staying put and speaking up, choosing to fight for reform from within."  In one of the most succinct and coherent critiques of school vouchers, Hirschman wrote:

In the first place, Friedman considers withdrawal or exit as the 'direct' way of expressing one's unfavorable views of an organization.  A person less well trained in economics might naively suggest that the direct way of expressing views is to express them!  Secondly, the decision to voice one's views and efforts to make them prevail are contemptuously referred to by Friedman as a resort to 'cumbrous political channels.'  But what else is the political, and indeed the democratic, process than the digging, the use, and hopefully the slow improvement of those very channels?

This neatly encapsulates my own suspicion that the corporate sponsors of school vouchers and education reform would like nothing more than to remove education from public debate, control, and oversight.

I am off to the public library to pick up a copy of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.  I for one prefer engaging the seemingly intractable problems of our post-capitalist democracy to running away and hiding my head in the sand.  Perhaps you do too.

The Broken Record - The Spuriousness of School 'Reform'

David Sirota has a piece in Salon about the growing body of evidence demonstrating that school achievement is tied to socioeconomic status.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/03/instead_of_a_war_on_teachers_how_about_one_on_poverty/

Sirota points to a U.S. Department of Education study demonstrating that 20% of American public schools were considered high poverty in 2011 and another U.S. Department of Education study that found, "many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding ... leav(ing) students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers."  He then asks:

Those data sets powerfully raise the question that the "reformers" are so desperate to avoid:  Are we really expected to believe it's just a coincidence that the public education and poverty crises are happening at exactly the same time?  Put another way:  Are we really expected to believe that everything other than poverty is what's causing problems in failing public schools?

 The overwhelming evidence that has been generated in the last three to five years demonstrates that any problems with public education have little to do with public schools or teachers and nearly everything to do with growing poverty and a shrinking social safety net.  Sirota cites an apt example supporting this point:  "America's wealthiest traditional public schools happen to be among the world's highest achieving schools."  To cap it off, he notes that most of those schools are unionized.

The growing achievement gap in American public schools should horrify everyone, regardless of political stripes.  When the evidence irrevocably demonstrates that socioeconomic inequality is driving the growing achievement gap then the discussion ought to center around what we can do as a society to limit socioeconomic inequality.  We should stop listening to the 'reformers' message, which is, as Sirota points out, funded by the major corporations that benefit from "the dominant policy paradigms in America - tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and budget cuts to social services."  Instead we should be listening to the growing chorus of the impoverished that portends social and cultural failure for America and figure out how we can return to a nation in which success was not wholly dependent on the wealth of one's parents.  Whether we like it or not, this will involve sharing.  Unfortunately I fear that many Americans have failed to absorb that kindergarten message.

NY Review of Books on Guns - A Surprisingly Moderate and Reasonable Take

David Cole has an excellent review of three recent books/blogs relate to guns in America.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/20/facing-real-gun-problem/

It is worth reading for anyone who is not reflexive in their response to gun ownership.  Put simply, Cole dispels the myths that sustain both gun rights advocates and gun ownership advocates.  In place of myth, Cole offers a rationale analysis of what causes gun violence and what might be done to limit it without resorting to unconstitutional, unpopular, and unrealistic bans on guns.  In a telling passage, Cole notes

[A]s Nocera's Gun Report and any viewing of the evening news illustrates, the media regularly cover gun violence, and as Diaz (a reflexively anti-gun author) himself demonstrates, the toll of death, injuries, and crime inflicted with guns is no secret.  It's true that gun manufacturer's market their wares, but who would expect otherwise?  Guns have become increasingly lethal, but most gun violence is caused by ordinary handguns, not militarized assault weapons.  Diaz devotes almost an entire chapter to a detailed description of the very powerful Barrett 50-caliber anti-armor sniper rifle.  But he then notes that this weapon has been involved in only about thirty-six criminal incidents nationwide over a twenty-three-year period, or less than two a year.  Civilians may not have any legitimate need for such a rifle, but it is hardly the core of the problem.

In a succinct manner, Cole demonstrates that the problem of gun violence is rather pedestrian.  The vast majority of gun violence, as I noted in an earlier post, is perpetrated with handguns.  However, handguns are not going away.  The Second Amendment protects the rights of Americans to own handguns and the vast majority of Americans do not support their ban (74% oppose banning handguns per a Gallup poll Cole cites).  In Cole's words, we not "to recognize that there are legitimate competing interests on [the gun rights] side of the ledger, and that many Americans value those interests particularly deeply."  If we are to attack the problem of gun violence, we will fail miserably if the only solution involves banning guns that are popular and constitutionally protected.

Instead of the usual anti-gun dogma, Cole proposes a respectful balancing that takes into account the practical reality that gun ownership is here to stay.  First, he proposes revisiting the push for background checks which, as everyone is aware, enjoy strong majority support among even gun owners.  Second, he proposed common sense safety regulations that would make it more difficult for guns to be shot accidentally. Critically, Cole recognizes that gun owners are persons to whom respect is owed and his proposals are not in any way paternalistic.

Most importantly, Cole recognizes that the rate of gun violence is far more pronounced in urban, poor areas. He astutely recognizes that the only way to really reduce gun violence is to reduce the effects of urban poverty.  This means better social safety nets, better schools, and better living conditions.  We may disagree with the best manner of achieving the goal of reducing urban poverty, but as Cole makes clear, if we want to reduce the number of persons killed or injured with guns, the the only way to do so substantially is to stop poor urbanites from shooting each other.

  

Father Andrew Greeley - A Voice of Reason in the Catholic Church

Father Andrew Greeley passed away yesterday.  I am not sure how many are familiar with him, but he is an interesting character who played an important role in the Catholic church in the last half of the twentieth centuries.  To me, he is a reminder that religion does not require prudishness, that the ecclesiastical polity is not sacrosanct simply because it is ecclesiastical, and that ethical conviction flouts dogma at every turn.  An apt summary of Father Greeley's beliefs are summarized in his New York Times obituary:

Before religion became creed or catechism, he said, it was poetry: images and stories that defy death with glimpses of hope, and with moments of life-renewing experience that were shared and enacted in communal rituals. 

“The theological voice wants doctrines, creeds and moral obligations,” Father Greeley wrote. “I reject none of these. I merely insist that experiences which renew hope are prior to and richer than propositional and ethical religion and provide the raw power for them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/us/andrew-m-greeley-outspoken-priest-dies-at-85.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

 The obituary is worth reading in its entirety to get a more complete picture of the man.  Noteworthy to me is that Father Greeley was an early advocate for investigating the crimes priests in the Catholic Church committed against children, punishing the offenders, and changing the organizational culture that allowed the criminal abuse to occur.  I was unaware that he contributed substantial funds to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) when it was just getting off the ground, demonstrating that Father Greeley understood that the strength of the Church as moral agent in the world requires transparency and contrition rather than opacity and misdirection.  All who share Father Greeley's conviction that "experiences which renew hope" are primary and form the nexus toward which all right behavior ought to be directed have lost a formidable and pugnacious ally.

Writer's Block

Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite--
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."

Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, I.12-14.

While the general purpose of creating this blog was to address the social nature of being and the implications this has for determining ethical behavior and policy, the blog is a product of me.  Hence, I deviate from the stated purpose when my mind wanders over other territories that require its attention.  At present, I am wrestling with the problem of inaction or what otherwise might be called writer's block.  

I have always found the above-quoted words to be an apt manner of describing the state I feel when I am desperate to write but seemingly bereft of the ability to do so.  Sidney also does well to have that fanciful and ephemeral notion of inspiration, personified in the guise of "Muse" reject the idea that writing is an outside-in process.  I suspect any person who writes for writing's sake experiences moments of inspiration in which the words seem to take on a life of their own, flowing from a place that feels preternatural and external.  The metaphor that comes to mind is the writer as vessel.  In some ways, the experience of inspiration is detrimental because, as a preternatural feeling, inspiration seems wholly other and suggests that the writer is not an independent source of creativity.  This feeling of inspiration as other tends, in me at least, to lead to disappointment and lassitude.  When the inspiration vanishes, I sulk and stop writing.  I search for things that might aid inspiration's return:  poignant music, lyrical writing, intense physical activity, etc.

Oddly, the one thing I tend not to do when feeling bereft of inspiration is write.  As Sidney marvelously demonstrates, the feeling of inspiration is, despite seeming to be other, a product of the self.  While inspiration will visit the writer now and again for reasons that are not always clear, waiting to write for inspiration will lead to little writing and much frustration.  The question is:  how does one overcome the lassitude and frustration?

This presents something of an existential question for me.  For reasons I can only intuit loosely, I am cursed (or blessed) with a tendency to imbue the simplest states of mind with significance.  Thus, Sidney's admonition seems less like hyperbole to me than it probably does to others.  In these moments of lassitude and frustration, the desire to get the words out gnaws at me as if it were alive, trying desperately to escape.  Sidney's admonition feels urgent and the self-loathing that follows lassitude is real.  Writer's block hurts.

To overcome the lassitude and frustration requires daring and faith.  Daring because I must write without inspiration, seeking meaning in the act of writing itself, trusting that the very act of writing will give me access to a reservoir of connections and images and thoughts that will free my mind from the paralyzing frustration.  Faith because writing is necessarily an exposure.  To write when the words do not come easily is to trust that they will eventually flow properly.  To write when the words do not come is to risk failure and ineptitude.  To write when the words do not come is to leap into the yawning abyss and trust that the words will illuminate the darkness and carry one safely to wherever it is the words lead.   And so I write, exposed but free.

Inequality in Education - It's Not About the Schools

Sean F. Reardon, a professor of education and sociology at Stanford, has a provocative and well-thought out piece on the New York Times website on the impact income inequality is having on education.  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/?ref=opinion  The gist of the article is that the two main culprits in growing educational inequality in America are growing income inequality and a disparity in the ways that the upper class allocates its resources to foster early cognitive development compared to the middle- and lower-class.  Noteworthy is Reardon's conclusion that the quality of American schools has little to do with the widening education gap.  He writes,

The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline.  In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation's Report Card, have been rising - substantially in math and very slowly in reading - since the 1970's.  The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation.

One positive note from the article is that "the widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement..."  While it is a small silver lining, it is an indication that the educational policies that have been pursued since Brown v. Board of Education have worked to reduce gaps in achievement between historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities.  Put succinctly, "[i]f we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we wee in the population as a whole."

Reardon points to one factor that largely explains the growing income gap in academic achievement:  the time and resources high-income families spend on activities to prepare children for kindergarten.  "The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed than middle class students.  The difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school."  Reardon reports that educational success has become important even for rich families, so they "are increasingly focusing their resources - their money, time, and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school - on their children's cognitive development and educational success."  Research demonstrates that high-income families have increased the amount of resources they spend of enrichment activities significantly more than low-income families since the early 1970's (150% increase v. 57% increase).  In addition, college-educated parents have been spending increasingly more time with their children than those without degrees since the mid-1970's.

Striking is the fact that the achievement gap is tied to cognitive development that occurs prior to a child even setting foot into school.  Certainly, the public schools can bear no blame for this phenomenon.  In Reardon's words, "much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits:  we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich."

Reardon poses a number of possible fixes that can help reduce the income achievement gap that focus on enabling low- and middle-income families to emulate or copy the behavior of high-income families.  He writes, "[m]aybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children's educational opportunities from the day they are born."  He proposes specific means of doing this:

1. Invest "in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children;
2. Invest in parents to improve "the quality of our parenting and our teacher's earliest environments;" and
3. Increased support for maternity/paternity leaves.

Ultimately, Reardon demonstrates that we need to rethink "our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone."  This is a powerful message that all should embrace.  The surest way to reduce income inequality and the size of the welfare rolls is to prepare children for success so they can land a competitive job in the marketplace and never land on welfare in the first place.  This involves giving middle- and low-income parents adequate resources so that they can spend the time and effort necessary (and be taught how) to prepare their children for entering school.  As the proverb goes, teach a man to fish ...

One final note - for an interesting and harrowing read about American day care see this recent New Republic article. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112892/hell-american-day-care