Author: Ophelia Benson

There’s a dreary little story in today’s Guardian. Chris Woodhead, former head of the Office of Standards in Education, wants to question the assumption that more and more education is a good thing. He opposes raising the school leaving age to eighteen or nineteen. “Such proposals have more to do with massaging unemployment figures than the needs of the economy.” All right, but while we’re at it, let’s also question the assumption that education is a tool of the economy and not, say, the other way around. Let’s question the assumption that the only question to ask about more schooling is whether it trains the student for a job. Let’s question the assumption that education is an instrumental good and not an intrinsic one, and even more let’s question the assumption that people are the equivalent of tools or bits of machinery. Let’s think about what education is good for besides providing drones for the economy.

But the economy is the government’s business, and education as a good in itself is not, people will say. But it is not self-evident why this should be so. Questions of value are mixed up in all these areas, so we might as well make them explicit and address them. If education is not a good in itself but only a fancy name for job training, then what of critical thinking, clarity, getting it right, accuracy, truth? Why worry about them at all, unless we need them for our jobs? Perhaps we should decide that engineers and doctors and chemists should be trained to think well and the rest of us can just muddle along in a blur, believing whatever makes us feel good. But Butterflies and Wheels is dedicated to the proposition that that is not the case, and that surely entails thinking that education is an inherent good and that fourteen is too young to abandon it.

An interesting article in the Guardian discusses the paradoxical way the discoveries of ultra-elitist Newton were found by Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, Jefferson and Adams and Franklin, Saint-Simon and Fourier, to be full of progressive implications. Gravity affects all people everywhere, which made Newton the supreme philosopher of equality during the French Revolution. Fourier connected the gravitational principle of “passionate attraction” with the free love of his Utopian communities. And oddest of all, “in the debate between John Adams and Benjamin Franklin over a unicameral or bicameral legislature, it was an appeal to Newton that resolved the dispute. Adams argued that only a system with both a House of Representatives and a Senate conformed to Newton’s third law of motion: that to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” A fascinating detail, that. One thinks wistfully of the is-ought gap and wonders if Franklin (the friend of Hume, after all) thought to mention it.

But even more one wonders, not for the first time, what it is that people mean by “elitism”. It’s a handy term of abuse that gets thrown around a lot but seldom defined. In some circles it is quite popular, even mandatory, to call scientists elitist. But what does it mean? Does it just mean knowing something? Does it mean exclusion and exclusiveness? A belief that an elite (of whatever kind) should be in power and run things? Do we mean a Platonic belief in Guardians and Philosopher Kings? Or a belief that leadership in various kinds of organisations (hospitals and clinics, schools and universities, learned societies and businesses) should be allocated on the basis of merit or proven ability (however defined and tested and measured) rather than at random or by a popularity or beauty contest? Is it a belief that good things are better than bad things? That there are such things (however defined and chosen) as good books, ideas, paintings, theories, arguments, inventions, products, and also bad ones, and that it makes sense to prefer the good ones? Is it the belief that good books and ideas are better than bad ones but not (for instance) the belief that good athletes or rock stars or models or film stars or sitcom actors are better than bad ones? Or the belief that good books and ideas matter more than good film stars or sitcom actors? Is it the belief that a thing can be popular, even very popular, even almost universally popular, and still not be very good? Is it a sense of superiority to people who don’t share one’s elevated tastes? Is it some of these and not others? Is it all of them but at different times? Or is it all of them at all times. It is a word that could do with some defining, it seems to me.

There is a story in today’s Guardian about US newspapers competing to attract the ever-popular 18 to 34 year old “market”. Apparently they are crashing into one another and banging heads in a foolish way in Chicago, as each tries to be dumber than the other. The whole subject gives one a feeling of despair. It is so taken for granted that the point of the enterprise is for newspapers to insinuate their way into everyone’s wallets. It is made so drearily obvious that the actual dissemination or clarification of news and knowledge and understanding is just a kind of pretext for or prettification of the real work of delivering customers to advertisers. Is it any wonder that alien abductions and crop circles and energy-healing go down a treat while science and reason are looked on as killjoys and dull plodding wonder-challenged literalists.

SciTech Daily Review currently has a link to this highly interesting 1996 article from the Skeptical Inquirer. It cites studies by George Gerbner and others that say people who watch a lot of television are more likely (than those who don’t) to be hostile to science and friendly toward pseudoscience, including after controlling for education and other variables. It then goes on to detail the way science and skepticism are the bad guys in several movies and tv shows, while nice, regular, credulous people are the goodies. Of course, this has been true as long as the ghost story has existed (which is probably as long as humans have), because it’s such an excellent device, to have a lot of skeptics around scoffing until the Monster comes along and bites they tiny heads off and nibbles on they tiny feet. Think of Horatio in Hamlet, saying “Tush, tush, ‘twil not appear,” when of course it does. It’s all part of the game of the flesh-creeper, the hair-raiser, the spooky story. But all the same, things that are just part of the game can have consequences.

It’s hard to imagine what to do about the problem though. Perhaps everyone who watched one hour of Alien Abducters Are Coming up the Stairs could be required to follow it with an hour of Critical Thinking Skills for X-Files Fans. But who would enforce such a thing? Perhaps all the tv sets in the world could be so programmed. But then what of Magic Realism? Every time Salman Rushdie put a radio up someone’s nose or Harry Potter learned a new game, would we all have to read a corrective? And then would we all have to listen to an army of literary critics and novelists and therapists telling us why imagination is essential? No, it’s unworkable. And yet it probably is true that all the Dumb Skeptics stories do shape people’s attitudes to skepticism. What can one do, other than start a new website…

This is an exhilarating article in the Guardian about the six books on the shortlist for the British Academy prize, “launched last year to celebrate the best of accessible scholarly writing within the humanities and social sciences.” What an excellent idea for a prize. Two words that don’t normally seem to go together–accessible and scholarly–joined up and rewarded. Accessible scholarly writing is perhaps my favorite kind of reading, there is a lot of it about, and more attention should be paid to it. It always strikes me as odd how much more glory there is in writing fiction, even (all too often) quite mediocre fiction, than there is in writing good or even brilliant history or biography or sociology or philosophy for an educated but broad public. Simon Blackburn’s Ruling Passions, Richard Jenkyns’ Virgil’s Experience, Terry Pinkard’s Hegel, just to take three examples more or less at random that I (more broad than educated perhaps) have found illuminating as well as inspiring, should all be better known than the latest memoir of house-hunting in Tuscany or novel of angst in Hampstead.

The article gives a summary and brief discussion of each of the six, and I want to rush out and read each one of them. Long live books for the general reader, and prizes for those who write them.