Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter
avalon.law.yale.edu
avalon.law.yale.edu
One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I disagree. Regurgitating the fractured work of others isn't intelligence. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education. Most children not only don't get this, they aren't even being taught the basic building blocks.
I think this is the biggest incentive for the non-school movement, as well as the increase in other alternative [to governmental SOLs] programs. Those parents value an education for what it allows their children to contribute creatively, not just use the tools of others before them.
I have exactly the same problem recruiting programmers. Like many large corporations we are primarily a Java & .Net shop and it is incredibly disappointing when 50% of the candidates can barely do more than drag controls out of the toolbox (<--- slight exaggeration, but not too much. I hire mostly in MX, BR, and IN and skilled folks are hard to come by. Ironically, this is usually because the cream are already working in the US/EU or earning US/EU pay in consulting gigs that are geography independent. Good for them.)
My apologies for the rant, but this struck a nerve.
Can you clarify the relationship of technology and readily accessible information to the downfall of societal values? I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, but I'm curious as to how you came up with that as a hypothesis for the cause.
Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information. Since we are constantly overloaded with information (and we're always connected to those sources of information -- email, IM, SMS, the news, etc.), we have to be extremely selective about the stuff we actually absorb. In the process, we lose absorption of the information that doesn't look good on the surface. For example, I was not very interested in physics until I started reading about Special and General Relativity. I wouldn't be able to understand those topics without learning boring and dry (in my opinion) Newtonian Mechanics first.
In other words, we now usually only truly absorb stuff that looks good in the headline, rather than actually reading about it first. If we actually tried reading about all the stuff that's available, we'd be dead before we even got through a percent of it.
it's a moot point. In the 1700's we wouldn't have had access to the information anyway. Or even the money, time, and opportunities like aristocracy such as Jefferson had to buy books from London and study the smaller amount of knowledge available then.
So rather than not having an incentive to absorb information X, we wouldn't have even known it existed! A large part of knowledge is knowing what you DON'T know. The truly dangerous individuals are idiots that think they know everything.
Hopefully the web is making people realize that there are a lot of things out there they DON'T know. Decreasing anti-intelluctialism, provincialism, and narrow-mindedness.
I would be ecstatic if more people got their news from the web than from television!
One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I disagree.
I believe you're being too fast to dismiss that argument. As is pointed out in http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html, from Jefferson's day to relatively recently, the output in scientific journals increased 10-fold every 50 years.
In Jefferson's day it was truly possible to learn what was known about all fields of science, and keep up with them all. Your knowledge could be broad and deep. But based on the sheer increase of volume, this soon became impossible. Today there are over 100,000 journals devoted to scientific research. Even if you read one page per second, every second, day and night, you would not even be scratching the surface of what is being produced.
Regurgitating the fractured work of others isn't intelligence. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education.
This is a strong argument, but not necessarily for the point you are trying to make. Your argument leads to the point that we don't want students to just memorize random facts and regurgitate them. It does not lead to the point that it is possible to have both deep and broad knowledge about all fields.
The challenge is that, thanks to the advances of science, today we both have more subjects to learn about (the "broad" is broader) and we know about them in more depth (the "deep" is deeper). This has made the ideal of having both broad and deep knowledge much, much harder. Hard enough that most conclude it is simply impossible.
As it is, tons of stuff keeps getting reinvented just because the state of the literature is so bad that you'll never find it, unless it was invented exactly in your sub-sub-specialty, or you serendipitously found it via a colleague who remarked that what you were doing sounded similar to something he once read.
The decline in scientists writing books also doesn't help. It used to be that prominent scientists would gather up their scattered papers and unify them into a magnum opus laying out their theories, or possibly a few different books, one on each major area they worked on. That sometimes happens, especially in areas like cosmology, but it's much less the norm than it was 100 years ago. Today it's quite common to just publish 200+ papers over your career and not really do any summarization of them, even though there is plenty that could often be done, since it's common for papers to supersede or overlap with previous ones.
Actually, on that front, it'd be a big win if scientists with lots of publications simply provided some sort of brief guide to them. Take the 50 papers on lasers, and provide an annotated bibliography explaining which papers are the important ones, which papers are obsolete or superseded, and which ones might be of particular interest to people working on particular topics. A few people do that, but many don't even separate their list of publications by topic, let alone provide a guide.
Or, shorter: There is a lot of stuff published, but it's terribly indexed and summarized, which I think is a bigger problem than the volume alone.
Worse yet, we have not just specialized, we have lost knowledge as well. My favorite example of this is a result I rediscovered. Every mathematician knows that, for instance, sqrt(2)+cube_root(3) must be the root of some polynomial of degree 6. (This one turns out to be x^6 - 6x^4 -6x^3 + 12x^2 - 36x + 1.) I came up with a construction for answering questions like this. I showed it to a number of mathematicians, and none had seen it until I showed an older one who said, "That looks like a very old way to do this. Go to the library, pick up an algebra book from the 1800s, and see if you find it."
I did, it was there, and it turns out that two of the mathematicians I had talked to were in fields that had gotten their start from the very construction I rediscovered! (One was in number theory, dealing with things like algebraic integers. The other was in combinatorics, and did a lot of stuff with symmetric polynomials.)
If you're curious, the observation behind the construction is that any polynomial expression that is symmetric in the roots of a polynomial can be rewritten as a polynomial in the coefficients of that polynomial. So if a1 and a2 are the roots of x^2-2, and b1, b2, b3 are the roots of x^3-3, then (x-a1-b1)(x-a1-b2)(x-a1-b3)(x-a2-b1)(x-a2-b2)(x-a2-b3) is a polynomial in x and the coefficients of x^2-2 and x^3-3, which means that it is an integer polynomial.
All that said, this point doesn't support your argument. It is true that if information were better presented, people could learn more about more subjects than they could otherwise. It is true that trying to do this would have tremendous value. But if you want to learn about multiple subjects then you need to deal with how information actually exists out there in the world, rather than how we'd like it to be organized. The disorganization that you point to is a significant barrier to learning. (This problem does not look like it will improve any time soon.)
We need not limit our knowledge and view of the world to what fits in our brain. We do, however, need to make sure that what we are putting into our brain is useful to ourselves and to humanity; Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-Start.
Jefferson's estimated net worth is $212 million. George Washington's is $525 million. It seems like you are comparing the values of a notably intelligent and published subset of the upper 1% aristocratic crust subset of society to the general population today. Hardly a fair comparison.
You are railing against people for being dumb and yet have really bad proposals as to the cause. "It's the schools fault, let's do away with schools" "It's the kids' VALUES"
You fail to consider that:
1. Intelligence is a distribution. There have always been dumb people and there always will be.
2. Economics. Blacks used to score significantly lower on IQ tests than whites in America. But guess what, the gap was directly proportional to the gap in poverty rate (http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-IQgapgenetic.htm). As the economic status of blacks in America improved the gap has decreased.
If you want to compare the intelligence of groups of people large enough to account for outliers, the difference is always largely socioeconomic. Thus I will argue the OPPOSITE of your hypothesis is true:
The wonders of technology and readily accessible information are the most important factor driving down global poverty, resulting in a higher percentage of the global population fulfilling a "Jeffersonian" ideal of the renaissance man with deep knowledge, whereas it was the time and opportunities and books to achieve that level of study was before confined to the aristocracy.
2. Yes, technology is driving down global poverty, but in the already privileged world I don't think this holds true. Where people want to learn they will find ways to do so. Where they are apathetic, they will find ways to remain ignorant.
Apparently, you missed makerzine, maker faire, 3D printers, harry potter fanfiction, and hackaday.
You also did not get the memo that people are actually becoming smarter over time. It's the Flynn's Effect.
If you're going to whine about how the good old day are better, maybe you should show us some real evidence why this is actually so.
> A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante.
"Sitting up late at night is injurious to the health, and not useful to the mind."
"Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind."
"As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. [snip] Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. [snip] Walking is the best possible exercise."
Aside from that, I'm curious how much of the reading list will be doable these days without a solid grasp of Greek or Latin or French ? I kind of wanna give it a shot.
yep. bird hunting i think.
This would also imply the children took guns to school. Am I the only one who finds this rather insane ? Also, if you happen to have any links on the matter I'd appreciate it.
I believe he lived in a fairly rural area though. I assume things were different in the cities.
It's amazing how strange something can appear when interpreted in a different social or cultural context.
For a "guns-in-school" story just Google "University of Virginia John Davis shot".
The TL;DR; is that on November 12, 1840, a rowdy bunch of college students were drinking and shooting (as usual), and rode up to a professor and shot him. While tragic, this eventually paved the way for really, really entertaining college admissions tours that often feature a full re-enactment of the scene.
Yes. People don't usually shoot rabbits, birds, and squirrels for self defense, you know. :-)
No doubt it's all been translated (and is probably available for free online).
A whole hell of a lot. You could probably download better than 90% from gutenberg.org, though I am not qualified to say how good or bad the translations are. If you want paper, your local Borders probably has 40 percent or more on its shelves. At least, they always seem to have about a foot or more of Herodotus (Landmark, histories, excerpts).
Nowadays we know vitamin D exists so you can take a supplement or consciously eat certain foods (oily fish such as sardines http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/01/alton-browns-sardine-avoc...)
There are basically three methods of hunting. One is to sit quietly and wait for the animals you are interested in shooting to come by; the second is to try and sneak up on them (stalking); and the third is to go out and make noise to flush them out so you can shoot them. This last method is what's used for things like rabbits, squirrels, and birds (although for different reasons -- rabbits and birds typically need to be flushed out from their hiding spots and squirrels will just freeze in place a lot of the time when they hear something, which makes them really easy to shoot). Jefferson is probably referring to this type of hunting, which can often resemble a relaxing walk in the woods with one's dog.
As for horses, face it, the Indians rode when it was convenient. It took the US a while to figure out that it was pointless to send infantry chasing after mounted tribes.
Learning a language is a few years of hard work. I have a friend who is an assistant professor in Germany and he's toying with an idea of learning German, but he mentioned to me that he was wondering whether learning a programming language, say C++, wouldn't be a better use of his time. To which my answer was: By expanding the amount of effort required to learn to speak German, you wouldn't be able to just learn C++; the comparable thing would be to go from knowing nothing about programming, to knowing enough to be able to land a job as a Software Engineer in any company in the Silicon Valley.
Is everything a waste of time unless you can directly make money from it? Learning a language teaches you so many things. Things about your language, gives you insight into other cultures, etc., etc.
Talk to me when you set free the 600 humans that you own. Until then you can fuck off to your castle on the hill and invent silly gadgets, and study plants while your farm loses money every year until your death.
It's possible to do nuanced analysis of that era, Jefferson's beliefs, his treatment of his slaves relative to other slaveowners, the fact that he freed them on his death, and the things he wrote about in his letters to contemporaries - if you read his letters, he constantly questioned slavery and had misgivings about it, but it was the norm for the era.
You could make intelligent points about it. But you haven't done so. This "until then you can fuck off" is petty, it doesn't open anyone's mind - if you wanted to, you could put some thought into it and try to make a more nuanced, intelligent argument. Broadly condemning with profanity, no nuance, it doesn't change anyone's mind or enlighten anyone.
More than 100 of Jefferson's were auctioned off to pay debts.
Including children.
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I should therefore be impertinent, if I attempted to shew... in what sense all men are created equal; or how far life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may be said to be unalienable; only I could wish to ask the Delegates of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, how their Constituents justify the depriving more than an hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in some degree to their lives, if these rights are so absolutely unalienable...
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Evidently, Jefferson doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt simply because lots of people back then had slaves. His positive reputation today rests on a much simpler and sturdier foundation than his intellectual accomplishments or (dubious) moral fiber, namely, military victory. We mustn't forget the lesson contained in the aphorism "The winners write the history books", which is that the winners write the history books. Jefferson (and the Patriots) won; Hutchinson (and the Loyalists) didn't.
[1] Thomas Hutchinson, Strictures upon the Declaration of Independence, 1776. http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&...
Slavery even exists in the USA - it's called the Internal Revenue Code; the only question is what percentage of the time while you are working, that you are a slave.
(Please note, I am not getting into what are usually called "tax protester" arguments.)