more Kant

I read a blog called Miscellanea by Gloria Origgi. She's an Italian intellectual who teaches philosophy in Paris. Origgi writes her posts variously in Italian, French, or English.[1] I did a blog post on her back in August, '09. She has a current post on a topic that needs more attention than it's getting. Maybe you saw Malcolm Harris's Bad Education which appeared toward the end of April in N + 1 mag. Harris complains, with great effect, about the problem of student loans in the United States. He says: "Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting." If you haven't read the article, I suggest that you do so.

A couple of weeks ago, Timothy Burke, who's another blogger I read, did a post on the Harris article. He says "I think the N+1 essay is fairly on-target. The basic thrust of Harris’ argument is that demand for higher education is strongly inelastic, that students have been willing to incur almost any debt load in pursuit of the credentials offered in higher education because those credentials appear to be the only way to secure a middle-class life, and hence, higher education ratcheted up tuition rates well above inflation for decades." Burke believes that the bursting of this bubble will bring down some schools that give little return for the high prices they charge. He's thinking of unaccredited schools and for-profit degree mills where teaching is done online and not face-to-face, but he's also thinking of expensive schools that train students narrowly for jobs in professions that are already saturated with workers and schools where educational priorities are skewed away from classroom and lab toward the less academic features of a college education. He worries that the burst will damage schools that succeed in giving their students an indisputably high-quality education — ones where the high prices charged produce excellent teaching in an environment where the students' experience in the classroom, lab, and library is given highest priority.

In this latter group are schools like Swarthmore College, which is where he teaches. He notes that there are some weaknesses in these prestigious schools — they spread themselves too thinly (he says they have struggled to meet the expectations of "students and their families that highly selective institutions should be full-service institutions") and they have a tendency to nurture specialization, preparing students for graduate school and not helping them gain a broad understanding of the world in which they live. Tim fears that when schools like Swarthmore are put on the defensive their faculties will become even more specialized, walling themselves off from specialists in other fields, and that not just students, but the whole institution will suffer.

Specialists must understand and be able to explain the broad context of the disciplines in which they work: "In a highly selective liberal arts institution, a specialist has to be able to explain what the intellectual, abstract, normative value of specialization is, and that requires valid models for other choices of how to live and know and think in the world." He concludes:

If students at an allegedly liberal arts institution are confronted by a landscape of curricular rivalry and enrollment capture, not only will they not learn how to make judicious choices about what to know and interpret and how to do so, but they will quickly regard institutional rhetoric about the liberal arts as an insincere atavism. Under those circumstances, the only reasonable choices for those students who happen to end up in such a place will be those choices which most mimic or resemble vocational or pre-professional pathways. At which point, many students may reasonably ask why they shouldn't just cut to the chase and leave for an openly vocational institution, selective or otherwise. Maybe that only gets you a job for a few years after graduation, but that might be preferable to a program which offers no vision at all besides "choose a discipline, become an apprentice academic in that discipline, go on into academia". At that point, do not ask for whom the bubble pops: it pops for thee.

Gloria Origgi has different worries about the bubble in higher education. She fears that students and their families will come more and more to demand a measurable, and short-term, return on their investment in education. Burke mentions this "vocational training" as a target of cost-conscious families but it's not his main focus. Origgi runs through some studies showing that prosperity is not so closely linked with possession of an undergraduate degree as formerly and says it's less and less true that higher education is a good investment. In the end, however, she concludes, much as Burke does, that higher education does not and should not be seen as producing a product that can be measured solely in dollars and cents. She cites Martha Nussbaum's excellent book, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities and says the value of higher education lies mainly in preserving and extending cultural values. As Burke said in an earlier post, the value of the liberal arts curriculum must be justified, but not in narrow economic terms. Rather, it must be measured by its success in preparing students to achieve a fully successful life — in every meaningful sense of the term.

Schools should show that their graduates are capable of achieving this broadly-defined type of success and should demonstrate that these graduates credit, at least partly, "the content of their education [that] produced ways of thinking about the world that led to that success." I've a friend who might be a good choice as spokesperson for the value of a high-quality liberal arts education. She graduated from Swarthmore in the same class I did and, after trying out some jobs that she didn't find satisfying, eventually got a position with Intel, the giant microprocessor company. They hired her at least partly because she was not a specialist — not an engineer, not an MBA, not an accountant, not a financial whizz — and hiring her paid off for the company as well as my friend. By the time she retired, she'd become head of logistics, a huge job, involving extremely complex operations. This executive position suited her very well. I've also done some posts on five men who could attest to the value of a liberal education. During the 1840s they attended Germany's colleges and universities and later, as prominent American citizens, showed themselves to be cultured and humane as well as politically and economically powerful individuals.[2]

It's Origgi who has the last word on this topic: "Insomma, più Kant e meno account dovrebbe essere lo slogan per salvare i campus dal nonsenso in cui si sono cacciati." Put tersely: if they are to survive the education bubble, schools should adopt more Kant and less accounting as their slogan.

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This image comes from flickr.


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Some sources:

Perché andare all'università? by Gloria Origgi

On the Bubble, by Timothy Burke

Liberal Arts Poster Children by Timothy Burke

Project on Student Debt

Student Debt, a Pew Foundation report

Institute for College Access and Success

The Thiel Fellowship: 20 Under 20

10 More Reasons Why Parents Should Not Send Their Kids to College

Living Life is better than Dying in College

Don’t Send Your Kids to College

8 Alternatives to College

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Notes:

[1] I don't read Italian and my French is pitiful so I rely on Google Translate for my understanding of Origgi's posts.

[2] These are posts on five of the men called Forty-Eighters who were forced to leave Germany as a result of their actions during the Revolutions of 1848. To skim them click the label 1848 in the side bar at right. Note that their wives tended also to be poster children for the value of high-quality, non-specialist education. And note also that one of them, my great-grandfather, was too poor to attend university but did attend the Gymnasium Carolinum, one of the best (and most ancient) high schools in the country.

the war effort

It was while I was looking at photos taken by Ann Rosener that memories of Roald Dahl's Gremlins came to mind. Rosener worked for the Office of War Information which, in 1942, had succeeded the Farm Security Administration as FDR's domestic photographic agency. OWI's main role was to document mobilization within the US to fight the Axis powers. Unabashedly propagandistic, the agency's photos showed Americans doing good things to help the country gear up for war alongside ones reminding Americans what to do or not to do to help the war effort. All in all, OWI can be seen to have achieved some very straight-forward home-front morale-building.

Ann Rosener, who was in its stable of photographers, produced thousands of workmanlike images to further this work.[1] Her speciality, if she had one, was documenting the contributions made by women, members of minority groups, and people with disabilities. She showed these folks at work in defense industries and in their homes busy conserving, recycling, and making do so that consumer resources could be diverted to military production.

I was especially taken with a set of photos showing a nun of the Roman Catholic faith who came to be known as "The Flying Nun."[2]

{Washington, D.C. Field trips for the "flying nun" pre-flight class, including inspection tours of hangars at the Washington National Airport. Here, Sister Aquinas is explaining engine structure to her students, 1943 June}

As the caption says, the photo shows Sister Aquinas and students in 1943 at DC's commercial airport. To take it, Rosener used an elevated camera location and single-source artificial light. Although she normally posed her subjects, this appears to be at least partly candid. She obviously set up the shot, but it's also pretty obvious that Sister Aquinas is instructing the class while a guy in the background does some maintenance work on a radial engine.

Sister Aquinas belonged to Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity. She'd graduated from the Catholic University of America and Notre Dame with majors in mathematics and physics. She'd also gotten her flying license in 1938 and, as a teacher at Catholic U, taught military and civilian pilots as well as the nuns which the photo shows. A former student says she went by the nickname "Spike" though no one told him why.[3]

She continued to fly after the war, mostly small commercial aircraft like this one.

{This photo shows Sister Aquinas piloting a Piper Cherokee. It was taken much by an anonymous photographer some time in the 1960s. The caption reads: "The real flying nun, Sister Mary Aquinas Kinskey, arriving at Sheboygan County Airport with two Franciscan sisters in a Cherokee C airplane. Sister Mary Aquinas, whose mother house was in Manitowoc, learned to fly during World War II in order to teach her students. Later she was involved with pre-flight instruction for the military. After the war she continued to fly, and she introduced aviation into the science curriculum in schools in Wisconsin and elsewhere. This photograph is part of the collection of Wisconsin author Tere Rio Versace concerning an unpublished book about Sister Mary Aquinas. Confusingly, Versace was also the author of the 'The Fifteenth Pelican,' from which the fictional 'Flying Nun' was adapted." Source: wisconsinhistory.org}

This caption alludes to the TV series, The Flying Nun, which may have been "inspired" by Sister Aquinas's passion for aviation, but took nothing at all from the story of her life.

Here's are some more of Rosener's session with the Sister in June, 1943.

{Washington, D.C. Sister Aquinas, "flying nun," exchanging trade secrets with an engineer at the Washington National Airport, 1943 June.}

{Washington, D.C. The "flying nun" from Ironwood, Michigan, walking down the field at the Washington National Airport after taking her class through the hangars. Sister Aquinas holds a student pilot's license and has many flying hours to her credit, 1943 June.}

{Washington, D.C. Sister Aquinas teaching a lesson in practical radio operations to the Sisters attending her Civil Aeronautics Authority course for instructors at Catholic University, 1943 June.}

{Washington, D.C. Sister Aquinas, "flying nun," in her laboratory at Catholic University checking the grease job on one of the airplane engines, 1943 June.}

{Washington, D.C. Sister Aquinas, "flying nun", with model planes in hands walking toward the aeronautics laboratory at Catholic University where she gives a daily three-hour preflight Civil Aeronautics Authority course for instructors, 1943 June.}

{Washington, D.C. Sister Aquinas, "flying nun," applying a little glue to the model P-38 which hangs from the ceiling of her classroom at Catholic University. A veteran of fifteen years' teaching experience, the Sister is giving a summer Civil Aeronautics Authority course for instruction, 1943 June.}

{There's no caption on this photo of Sister Aquinas and model airplane enthusiasts. It's found with the photos of the June 1943 shoot and presumably was taken then.}

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Here are photos of Ann Rosener by an anonymous photographer from OWI collections at the Library of Congress.

{Washington, D.C. Portrait of Ann Rosener, United States OWI (Office of War Information) photographer}

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Here are a few examples of Rosener's other OWI work.

{Women in industry. Tool production. Pioneers of the production line, these two young workers are among the first women ever to operate a centerless grinder, a machine requiring both the knowledge of precision measuring instruments, and considerable experience and skill in setting up. In this Midwest drill and tool plant, manned almost exclusively by women, centerless grinders have been efficiently operated by women for more than a year, and company production figures have continued to soar. Republic Drill and Tool Company, Chicago, Illinois, 1942 Aug.}

{"How do I look?" Attractive playsuits for daughter can be made from that old housedress with the splitting seams, and junior's first long pants (no cuffs) can be cut from father's old overcoat. With shortage of wool and other materials needed by the armed forces, it's a wise mother who conserves clothing by altering and remodelling used garments for other members of the family, 1942 Feb.}

{Production. Aircraft engines. Negro women with no previous industrial experience are reconditioning used spark plugs in a large Midwest airplane plant. Despite their lack of technical knowledge, these women have become expert operators of the small testing machines. Melrose Park, Buick plant, 1942 July.}

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Some sources:

Women Photojournalists, Prints and Photos Div., Library of Congress

Sister Mary Aquinas, obituary in the NYT, October 23, 1985

Flying Nun in a B-52

Sheboygan Airport and Flying Nun

All Saints Academy School, Ironwood ("Sister Mary Aquinas, who was on the faculty of St. Ambrose High School, learned how to fly a plane so she could teach aeronautics. She was the original 'flying nun!'")

Flying Nun (1941), The Home Front - Manitowoc County in World War II, Manitowoc Local History Collection, The State of Wisconsin Collection

The Flying Nun TV series, article in wikipedia

The Flying Nun (TV Series 1967–1970) on imdb

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Notes:

[1] The photos can be found in the OWI collections at the Library of Congress. I'd provide a bio link for Rosener if I could find one. I've her birth date (1914) and virtually nothing else.

[2] Unless otherwise indicated, all photos come from the OWI collections of the Prints and Photos Division, Library of Congress.

[3] The student's reminiscence comes from the web site of Silver Lake College. It's Sister Aquinas taught — and flew an airplane — with strength and authority (pdf). Here's the text:

Remember your favorite teacher in high school? Was it a softspoken woman who gave you extra help after hours? Or perhaps it was the gym teacher who wouldn’t let you quit. Maybe it was a teacher who didn’t give homework and told a lot of jokes in class. For Bill Sullivan, a former student of St. Ambrose High School in Ironwood, Michigan, it was a Sister from the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity, who honed her affinity and talent for teaching at what was the forerunner of today’s Silver Lake College. Her degree work (undergraduate and graduate) was taken at Catholic University of America and Notre Dame in mathematics and physics.

Now, Sister Aquinas Kinskey did not fit into the stereotypical mold of what you may think a Sister might be like. In fact, Sullivan recounts that Sister Aquinas had a nickname: “Spike.” “Nobody ever told me why, but we all understood. It reflected her personal strength, her dynamics, and her take-charge image.” Sister Aquinas received her flying license in 1938, and eventually provided classroom instruction for prospective WWII pilots. She received a special citation of honor in 1957 from the US Air Force Association for her “outstanding contributions to the advancement of air power in the interest of national security and world peace.”

The nation remembers Sister Aquinas as the original “Flying Nun,” and although her work teaching for the US Air Force was incredibly important, Sullivan remembers Sister Aquinas for different reasons. His life was changed by his personal experience with her in high school.

Sullivan’s first class with Sister Aquinas was Chemistry in his junior year at high school. Before that, he knew her by reputation — and by how she took charge on an important feast day at the school. Sullivan, a trained altar boy and second tenor, recalls, “There was much going on at the altar in the church, with priests and altar boys all over the place. Spike [who directed the school choir] found herself short of second tenors. She looked up at the altar and saw me there. She marched right up to the altar, grabbed me by the collar and dragged me back to the choir loft, telling me loudly that they needed second tenors more than they needed altar boys.”

Stories about “Spike” abound at St. Ambrose High School reunions. Sister Aquinas had the stride and presence of a military general and the smile of one who was true to the person God created her to be and to the vocation God called her to follow. She inspired others to live their vocation as well. Under Sister Aquinas, Sullivan fell in love with the logic of science. As Sullivan excelled in Chemistry, he began to admire her expertise in the field of science. Sullivan recalls, “It was during this time that Sister Aquinas introduced me to someone, saying, with her hand on my shoulder, ‘This is my little chemical engineer.’ I truly did not know what a chemical engineer was at that point, but from that time on I set out to become one. I was afraid not to. I was sure she would call me to account.” Inspired, or perhaps driven, by Sister Aquinas, Sullivan went on to earn a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He attained a job at Abbott Laboratories where he helped to create medicinal chemicals. Most notably, he worked with a team that helped to mass-produce the new “wonder drug” penicillin. Later, in 1962 , Sullivan received a research award for Outstanding Advances in Arythromiacin, another antibiotic.

Even a small pebble when thrown in a still pond will make a ripple, changing that pond. Those who influence the lives of others in subtle, and sometimes not so subtle ways, can spur immeasurable good during our earthly existence. We can all attest that there have been certain people who have changed the course of our lives.

More information about the life work of Sister Aquinas is available in the Holy Family Convent Archives, 920-682-772 8.

written by hand

This week Anne Trubek tells us that Handwriting Is History but we should already have known this fact. Not many weeks ago Umberto Eco told us the art of penning was lost and he was not alone in noting the death of the art of handwriting. A century and a quarter past, Cassell's family magazine joined not a few others* in saying much the same.

Our great grandparents were told to watch out that the typewriter did not destroy penmanship and their much greater grandparents were told that the printing press would do the same.

So it goes. I haven't yet seen complaints that ten-finger qwerty keyboarding is giving way to text-thumbing and writing via touch-screen, but of course it is and I'll not be surprised when a complaint is made of it.

Just to show there's no trend without its counter, a new service called celery is trying to entice the fountain-pen generation to subscribe to a service that converts their scrawls to tweets.

All this is mere excuse for an opportunity to show off some artful writing of the seventeenth century.

Here's the signature of a man named John Collins, who taught writing before making himself indispensable as a disseminator of mathematical advances in the time of Newton.



And here a bit of clerkly writing in which Collins petitions for recovering of a long-overdue government pension.



This is Isaac Newton addressing a complimentary letter to Collins in which he answers some thorny mathematical questions.



These are some anonymous samples, respectively, from 1623, 1653, 1667, 1670, and 1675..











This is a detail from the example of 1667.



Although seventeenth-century folk might learn to read when young, they weren't likely to take up writing until years later. When the time came, there were many pen-men to give them instruction and some of these men prepared elegant teaching texts to smooth the way. One of the best was Martin Billingsley, whose book, The Pens Excellencie or the Secretaries Delighte, of 1618 became a model for most that followed. He described the principal hands, including Secretary, Bastard-Secretary, Roman, Italian, Court, Chancery, with their variations (e.g., sett, facill, and fast Secretary). He gave their principal uses and then, of course, showed how they were made.







The English Renaissance Electronic Service of Cambridge University gives both the preceding page scans and the following re-creations from Billingsley's plates:

{This is in the Italian hand}

{This shows the Court hand}

While at all times there are those who write with elegance and clarity and those who scrawl with varying legibility, there seem to have been more who wrote with pride, like Collins and Newton, in the seventeenth and more who wrote less artfully, like Boswell whose hand is shown below, in the eighteenth and onward.

{Example of Boswell's handwriting; source: http://beineckeearlymodern.wordpress.com/}

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Note:

* for example:
The theory and practice of handwriting, a practical manual for the guidance of school boards, teachers, and students of the art, with diagrams and illustrations, by John Jackson (W.B. Harison, 1894)

The reign of the manuscript by Perry Wayland Sinks (R. G. Badger, 1917)

Year Books of Richard II: 12 Richard II, 1388-1389, Volume 6 of Year Books of Richard II, edited by George Feairheller Deiser (Harvard University Press, 1914)

The origin and progress of the art of writing, a connected narrative of the development of the art, by Henry Noel Humphreys (Ingram, Cooke, 1853)

Pitman's journal of commercial education, Volume 66 (1907)

getting ahead

A member of my family recently graduated from college. She got herself an excellent liberal arts education, achieving a GPA high enough to qualify for Cum Laude and getting Honors in her major as well. She made the right choice of school and right choice about balancing academic work with the rest of her life. In both cases she succeeded -- to her credit and for her benefit -- in avoiding an environment of hotly-competitive over-achievement.

The commencement program lists all the honors and awards which the seniors attained. Although my daughter has lots of friends in disciplines outside her major, there are a few in her class whom she never got to know even well enough to pick out in a crowd. One or two of these are the students with double majors, receiving honors in one or both, graduating summa cum laude with an award or two. She suggests she didn't know them because -- studious as they were -- they were invisible.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has a nice piece today on the inevitable hyper-attention that's given this time of year to the rising high school juniors and seniors and their quest to get accepted at top-tier colleges and universities. She says the pressure-cooker lives that these stories depict exists in fact, but the children that suffer so much to shine in the eyes of admittance committees are actually a pretty small group out of the population at large. Nobody, not Applebaum even, says they are an elite, but that's what they are.

She does relate this frenzy to the competition among families in places like the UK and Korea where a single exam determines the fate of those who seek high academic prestige. This makes me think of soul-destroying competition in the top French lycées which we hear about from time to time.

You have to wonder what this intense focus on a single goal does to kids and their parents. Applebaum links to a front-page article in the New York Times about one small indicator: how many high school students skip lunch because, as one says, “I would never put lunch before work.”

This quoted young person, it turns out, attends the high school from which I graduated close to 50 years ago. In my day we thought we knew what mix of subjects, taken at Advanced-Placement level, with what level of success, and what combination of sports and extracurricular activities would give us the most acceptances in the colleges and universities to which we applied. I don't recall much if any parental pressure in my own home or those of my friends (one excepted). And, I don't recall that (a) we actually agonized over getting the highest grades in the most difficult subjects, or (b) made sure we had some exactly ideal mix of other credentials (though we did do lots of miscellaneous stuff). We certainly never sacrificed a lunch hour to any kind of work unless we were late with required assignments and totally frantic. Of course my memory about these things could be wrong. From the occasional reunion weekend I know that my high school classmates have quite different memories of the short period of life we shared together.

I do also recall thinking of myself as landing at "the bottom of the top" which is to say I found myself at the low end of an imaginary scale that showed the attainments of gifted kids in my own environment and (so it seemed from my scores on nation-wide aptitude and achievement tests) across the country. In all the turmoil of that period of my life (hormonal, emotional, social, above all simply transitional) I think that actually felt a pretty comfortable place to be.

Having said all that, I wonder why the New York Times (et al) do annual scare stories about over-stressed high school students and not college undergraduates. Why focus so much on the scramble for the small number of places in classes at the best of the best schools of higher education? Maybe it's because of the parents. They can and often do have pretty much total control over the lives of kids at home. (And this means, where I live now, that many compete for their kids' admission to schools at all levels, right down to kindergarten and even pre-school.) Parents have traditionally been less intensely involved in the undergraduate lives of their children.

There's been a change in the amount of this involvement in my lifetime I think. I recall next to none myself and believe it's been growing over the years since I attended college. But I expect the media focus on high schools is probably parent driven because I expect it's as much their ambitions which the children are supposed to fulfill as it is the kids' own and because they have the ability to act on their mania for vicarious success while the kids are still living at home full time.

I suspect this is not good for parents or kids, not at the time it occurs and not in the long run. Applebaum suggests there's a conflict between the societal quest for immediate gratification and the work discipline for an anticipated gratification in later life: two opposing ways of attempting to enact the American-dream "pursuit of happiness." I think there might be too much of both in our lives: too much focus on living happy and not enough on a good life lived well.

Here's a link to the Applebaum column with a brief extract:

The Busiest Generation, by Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Thus our kids are both stupider than we were and harder working -- though perhaps this makes sense. America is, after all, the industrialized country with the fewest paid vacations, as well as the only nation, as far as I know, that considers the "pursuit of happiness" a fundamental right. We invented both the assembly line and the modern notion of "leisure." So welcome back to work today, if you even bothered to take yesterday off: Spring is here, the beaches beckon -- and you've got only a few weeks left to find an impressive summer job for your high school junior.

And here's a link to the NYT article, also with brief extract:

Busy Students Get a New Required Course: Lunch, by Winnie Hu, New York Times, May 24, 2008

At Briarcliff High School in Westchester County, many students eat in class. Others, citing heavy workloads, don’t eat at all.

High school students in this well-to-do Westchester suburb pile on four, five, even six Advanced Placement classes to keep up with their friends. They track their grade-point averages to multiple decimal places and have longer résumés than their parents.

But nearly half the students at Briarcliff High School have packed their schedules so full that they do not stop for lunch, prompting administrators to rearrange the schedule next fall to require everyone to take a 20-minute midday break. They will extend each school day and cut the number of minutes each class meets over the year. Briarcliff currently does not require students to have a lunch period.