Four Quick Book Notes

The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet's Surprising Future, by Fred Pearce.

I have found books about population and demographics very interesting in the past, so I grabbed this one at the library. I thought I might be hitting the point of diminishing returns on the topic; I already know a lot about the declining birthrates we're seeing all over the world, and suspected I might end up skimming this because it was all too familiar. What Pearce does that made this worthwhile for me, though, is devote chapters to exploring the cultural forces that drive lower birthrates in various parts of the world. For instance, I was interested in his discussion of industrial ghost towns in the former East Germany. For reasons I can't quite remember, young women are more likely than young men in these areas to leave for cities in the west, seeking education and professional employment. So Germany has a demographic skew, with 120 or more women for every man [edit: I of course mean for every hundred men. Oops.] in some cities, and the opposite in these depressed former industrial areas. The men left behind are lost in an epidemic of alcoholism, and educated single professional women have low chances of finding a man they consider worth marrying. This leaves a surprisingly large proportion of Germans child-free.

Pearce did a great discussion of forces in India and Singapore, as well. One kind of throw-away line caught my attention because we hear so much about the high academic achievement of children in Singapore, who often attend school for 8-10 hours a day, and have tutoring and enrichment classes on top of that. Pearce mentions a woman who, in an interview, suggested that one reason she and her friends had chosen not to have kids was that, having lived through that experience, they didn't think childhood was worth it. They didn't want to have kids only to push them along that same path, but they didn't think it was realistic to think they could opt out.

This is a book that reminded me, through both historical and present-day examples, that human hunger is rarely caused by actual food production shortages, but is almost always caused by political decisions made by people in power. I have ancestors (supposedly) who came to the US during the Irish potato famine, and I was fascinated and appalled to learn that many poor people in Ireland were forcibly relocated, forced onto crowded ships on which many (do I remember half? That might be too high) would die on the passage, and the rest would simply be dumped on a wharf in the New World with no money or resources. I knew people migrated because of hunger; I had not known they were ejected from their homes en masse and forced out under such circumstances.

His stuff on current-day patterns of migration, and the forces driving it, are very interesting, too. He says Europe's birth rates are so low that Europe finds itself in the ridiculous position of turning away and deporting immigrants it would have to go looking for if they weren't coming on their own. A good read.

A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America, by Patricia Cline Cohen.

I love this kind of history, that points out ways that what we take for granted--like our assumption that a well-educated person will know mathematics--are actually historically-bound. Turns out it wasn't until well into the 19th Century that anyone thought math should be part of a well-rounded liberal education; it had always been seen as something only merchants and traders needed to know, and they only provisionally. Math was treated as a brute-force process of memorization of rules; people weren't even expected to understand, say, multiplication as a concept. Books called "Ready Reckoners" were published for the use of clerks; they were nothing but tables of calculations, so that a clerk selling X yards of cloth at Y price could look it up in a table, rather than be expected to perform the math.

To be sure, this was partly driven by the incredibly complex non-decimal money system, and by a system of measures that seems insane to the modern reader: a gallon of, say, milk had a different number of ounces than a gallon of beer, while a barrel of wine might have 4 more gallons in it than a barrel of maple syrup. There were three or four differing "ounces" used to measure different commodities. The spread of the idea that people should be able to perform math was partly made possible by Thomas Jefferson's drive to standardize measures and convert America to a decimal money system: at that point, ordinary people could figure this stuff out.

When math first became part of a standard education plan, it began as a single course taken during a student's final year of college. As it moved into earlier stages of education, the idea persisted for a long time that boys under 12 were simply not capable of grasping mathematics. We expect so much of elementary-aged children these days that I find it interesting to learn about how different expectations were not really that long ago.

Finally, I love stories of people resisting inevitable change. In the middle ages, as Arabic numbers first came to Europe, they were strongly resisted. Roman numerals had always been good enough, and even though the only thing you could do with them was count and record quantities, who needed to do more? Arabic numerals were seen as dangerous because they lent themselves to fraud: a 0 could easily be changed to a 6, for instance, or 412 to 1412. They evoked so much anxiety that in the late 13th century, the city of Florence actually outlawed their use. Like Canute commanding the tides.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen.

I love spiritual memoirs. Sadly, despite its title, this isn't one. Janzen isn't a very good writer or a very deep thinker, and this book wanders around and skims the surface of what could have been some very interesting and meaty stuff. On the other hand, she can be wickedly funny. I'd be trying to read passages out loud to David and laughing too hard to finish them. A light read, kind of disappointing in some ways (I was thinking so often, "Wow, I'd like to hear more about that," and not getting it.), not too bad for passing an evening. Very glad I got it from the library; I wouldn't have wanted to pay good money for it.

Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto.

I am an old fan of John Taylor Gatto for his essay The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, which has always seemed to me like a valid critique of school systems, and a good reminder that while we think we are teaching children content, our actions and words and expectations and use of time are also teaching them things we may not be aware of and wouldn't like if we were.

Gatto was a teacher in the New York public schools for 30 years, and he resigned in the year he won New York State's Teacher of the Year award, becoming a vocal critic of public schooling. I would like to give him an award, too: crappiest book I've read this year.

First, the book is not coherent. Oh, on the sentence level, it's fine. But I often could not figure out what he thought the connection between two ideas was. He'd talk about X for three paragraphs, and Y for the next three paragraphs, and I'd be mystified about why he put X and Y next to each other, what larger point he thought they made, why a juxtaposition seemed useful. The book is organized into chapters, but their content seems almost random.

But worse, Gatto's argument is founded on two bases, both of which are very weak. The first is anecdote. He loves a good story about a bad teacher, principal, superintendent, or school board. I think such stories can be useful, especially when they come from "good" schools--Gatto himself taught in a school in a very affluent neighborhood, and his students were the children of well-off, highly-educated parents. When he tells a toe-curling story and you know it comes from a school that might be held up as a model rather than a school everybody knows is broken, that does have impact.

But, as the saying goes, "the plural of anecdote is not data." There were 95,726 public schools in the US in the 2003-4 school year and 76.6 million children enrolled in 2006. With that many schools to draw on, it would be astonishing if I couldn't fill a book or six with crap anecdotes. Anecdotes are evocative; they are compelling; they are illustrative; they raise questions. They are not strong enough to support an entire argument about policy.

Fortunately, Gatto does not have only anecdotes in his toolbox. He has one other thing: The Genetic Fallacy. The genetic fallacy is the rejection of an institution or idea because of perceived problems with its origins, and critics of American public schooling have a lot of temptation for falling into this, because the genesis of our system is ugly, ugly, ugly.

You can find philanthropists, education experts, founders of the movement for public education, and even the occasional US president saying in so many words that public education's purpose is to fit the mass of people to accept a life of repetitive manual labor for the benefit of the few who will be allowed a true liberal education; to remove children from the home for so many hours and days that family ties will be weakened, replaced with loyalty to external authority; even to deliberately suppress children's innate genius, because, as one person Gatto quotes says (a president of Harvard, IIRC), we have more statesmen, entrepreneurs, and potential leaders of industry than we need already.

The first time you learn this stuff, it's pretty shocking. And I think it can be worth examining whether, given public education's ugly birth, there are legacies in our system that should be examined, that perhaps continue to work against the kinds of goals we have today, for student achievement and the fulfillment of potential.

But somebody needs to tell Gatto that repeating that one thing Woodrow Wilson said in 1909 in four different places in your book does not actually constitute a critique of public education as it is practiced today. None of his sources were written later than 1920, I don't think--the only time he dips a toe into more modern ideas, it's to compare something to "one of the first laws Hitler passed." Early 20th century eugenicists plus Hitler: a toxic combination, indeed, but not one that any rational person could think had a lot to do with 21st century schools.

[Edit: on re-reading it, I find The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher a bit overwrought as well. The six lessons are worth paying attention to; the rest of the essay, not so much.]