"Bill of Rights" I "What Corporate America Cannot Build: A Sentence" I "What Kind of Education is Adequate? It Depends" I "What's Wrong With Writing" I "How to Make it in College Now That You're Here" I "The Maker's Eye" I "The Intellectual Free Lunch" I "Angry Fathers" I "Fear is a Weapon" I "Spooked"
MAGAZINE | May 7, 2006
Freakonomics: A Star Is Made
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
Where does talent really come from?
The Ten Original Amendments to the Constitution of the United States Passed by Congress September 25, 1789 Ratified December 15, 1791
I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
II. A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
III. No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
IV. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
V. No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
VI. In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
VII. In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
VIII. Excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
IX. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
XI. The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.
XII. The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate; The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted; The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President. The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
XIII. Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
XIV. Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
XV. Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
XVI. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
XVII. The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures. When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State hall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.
This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.
XVIII Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
XIX. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
XX. Section 1. The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.
Section 2. The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.
Section 3. If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.
Section 4. The Congress may by law provide for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the House of Representatives may choose a President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them, and for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the Senate may choose a Vice President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them.
Section 5. Sections 1 and 2 shall take effect on the 15th day of October following the ratification of this article.
Section 6. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission.
XXI.Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
Section 2. The transportation or importation into any States, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.
Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
XXII. Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Section 2. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.
XXIII. Section 1. The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct: A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
XXIV. Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
XXV. Section 1. In case of the removal of the President from office or his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.
Section 2. Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take the office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both houses of Congress.
Section 3. Whenever the President transmits to the President pro temper of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.
Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments, or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro temper of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department, or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within 48 hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within 21 days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within 21 days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.
XXVI. Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of age.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
XXVII. No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
"What Corporate America Cannot Build: A Sentence"
By Sam Dillon.
New York Times. Dec 7, 2004. pg. A.23
Database: Proquest
R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student.
''i need help,'' said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. ''i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you''.
Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers' writing pop into Dr. Hogan's computer in-basket each month, he says, describing a number that has surged as e-mail has replaced the phone for much workplace communication. Millions of employees must write more frequently on the job than previously. And many are making a hash of it.
''E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited,'' Dr. Hogan said. ''It has companies tearing their hair out.''
A recent survey of 120 American corporations reached a similar conclusion. The study, by the National Commission on Writing, a panel established by the College Board, concluded that a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training.
The problem shows up not only in e-mail but also in reports and other texts, the commission said.
''It's not that companies want to hire Tolstoy,'' said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, an association of leading chief executives whose corporations were surveyed in the study. ''But they need people who can write clearly, and many employees and applicants fall short of that standard.''
Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.
Here is one from a systems analyst to her supervisor at a high-tech corporation based in Palo Alto, Calif.: ''I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes -- I processed today -- before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'.''
The incoherence of that message persuaded the analyst's employers that she needed remedial training.
''The more electronic and global we get, the less important the spoken word has become, and in e-mail clarity is critical,'' said Sean Phillips, recruitment director at another Silicon Valley corporation, Applera, a supplier of equipment for life science research, where most employees have advanced degrees. ''Considering how highly educated our people are, many can't write clearly in their day-to-day work.''
Some $2.9 billion of the $3.1 billion the National Commission on Writing estimates that corporations spend each year on remedial training goes to help current employees, with the rest spent on new hires. The corporations surveyed were in the mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation, finance, insurance, real estate and service industries, but not in wholesale, retail, agriculture, forestry or fishing, the commission said. Nor did the estimate include spending by government agencies to improve the writing of public servants.
An entire educational industry has developed to offer remedial writing instruction to adults, with hundreds of public and private universities, for-profit schools and freelance teachers offering evening classes as well as workshops, video and online courses in business and technical writing.
Kathy Keenan, a onetime legal proofreader who teaches business writing at the University of California Extension, Santa Cruz, said she sought to dissuade students from sending business messages in the crude shorthand they learned to tap out on their pagers as teenagers.
''hI KATHY i am sending u the assignmnet again,'' one student wrote to her recently. ''i had sent you the assignment earlier but i didnt get a respond. If u get this assgnment could u please respond . thanking u for ur cooperation.''
Most of her students are midcareer professionals in high-tech industries, Ms. Keenan said.
The Sharonview Federal Credit Union in Charlotte, N.C., asked about 15 employees to take a remedial writing course. Angela Tate, a mortgage processor, said the course eventually bolstered her confidence in composing e-mail, which has replaced much work she previously did by phone, but it was a daunting experience, since she had been out of school for years. ''It was a challenge all the way through,'' Ms. Tate said.
Even C.E.O.'s need writing help, said Roger S. Peterson, a freelance writer in Rocklin, Calif., who frequently coaches executives. ''Many of these guys write in inflated language that desperately needs a laxative,'' Mr. Peterson said, and not a few are defensive. ''They're in denial, and who's going to argue with the boss?''
But some realize their shortcomings and pay Mr. Peterson to help them improve. Don Morrison, a onetime auditor at Deloitte & Touche who has built a successful consulting business, is among them.
''I was too wordy,'' Mr. Morrison said. ''I liked long, convoluted passages rather than simple four-word sentences. And I had a predilection for underlining words and throwing in multiple exclamation points. Finally Roger threatened to rip the exclamation key off my keyboard.''
Exclamation points were an issue when Linda Landis Andrews, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, led a workshop in May for midcareer executives at an automotive corporation based in the Midwest. Their exasperated supervisor had insisted that the men improve their writing.
''I get a memo from them and cannot figure out what they're trying to say,'' the supervisor wrote Ms. Andrews.
When at her request the executives produced letters they had written to a supplier who had failed to deliver parts on time, she was horrified to see that tone-deaf writing had turned a minor business snarl into a corporate confrontation moving toward litigation.
''They had allowed a hostile tone to creep into the letters,'' she said. ''They didn't seem to understand that those letters were just toxic.''
''People think that throwing multiple exclamation points into a business letter will make their point forcefully,'' Ms. Andrews said. ''I tell them they're allowed two exclamation points in their whole life.''
Not everyone agrees. Kaitlin Duck Sherwood of San Francisco, author of a popular how-to manual on effective e-mail, argued in an interview that exclamation points could help convey intonation, thereby avoiding confusion in some e-mail.
''If you want to indicate stronger emphasis, use all capital letters and toss in some extra exclamation points,'' Ms. Sherwood advises in her guide, available at www.webfoot.com, where she offers a vivid example:
''>Should I boost the power on the thrombo?
''NO!!!! If you turn it up to eleven, you'll overheat the motors, and IT MIGHT EXPLODE!!''
Dr. Hogan, who founded his online Business Writing Center a decade ago after years of teaching composition at Illinois State University here, says that the use of multiple exclamation points and other nonstandard punctuation like the :-) symbol, are fine for personal e-mail but that companies have erred by allowing experimental writing devices to flood into business writing.
He scrolled through his computer, calling up examples of incoherent correspondence sent to him by prospective students.
''E-mails - that are received from Jim and I are not either getting open or not being responded to,'' the purchasing manager at a construction company in Virginia wrote in one memorandum that Dr. Hogan called to his screen. ''I wanted to let everyone know that when Jim and I are sending out e-mails (example- who is to be picking up parcels) I am wanting for who ever the e-mail goes to to respond back to the e-mail. Its important that Jim and I knows that the person, intended, had read the e-mail. This gives an acknowledgment that the task is being completed. I am asking for a simple little 2 sec. Note that says ''ok'', ''I got it'', or Alright.''
The construction company's human resources director forwarded the memorandum to Dr. Hogan while enrolling the purchasing manager in a writing course.
''E-mail has just erupted like a weed, and instead of considering what to say when they write, people now just let thoughts drool out onto the screen,'' Dr. Hogan said. ''It has companies at their wits' end.''
What Kind of Education is Adequate? It Depends
Archibold, Randal C. “What Kind Of Education Is Adequate? It Depends.” New York Times. 14 January
2001: sec. 1: 33. Lexis/Nexis. Online. 18 January 2001.
_______________
Are you the product of a sound, basic education?
In the eyes of the president of Bard College, Leon Botstein, "a good education teaches you how to ask a question."
"It's knowing what you don't know," Dr. Botstein said, "the skills of critical thought."
The president of the New York Public Library, Paul LeClerc, has a somewhat different take. "Ideally, one should know who Shakespeare was and why Shakespeare was important to us," Mr. LeClerc said. "At the same time, one should know who Toni Morrison is and why her voice and take on America is important to us."
And what might enable you to pass muster with Michael Goldstein, the founder of a charter school in Boston?
"Write and e-mail a persuasive, three-paragraph letter to the editor about voting improprieties in your local district; research online and analyze the statistical differences between Pat Buchanan's vote totals during the '96 and '00 elections; read and comprehend the 'No Cell Phone' sign at restaurants."
Of course, there is no one meter to measure whether you have received a sound, basic education, as required by the constitutions of New York and many other states. But there is a general view that besides practical skills like making change or reading a map, such an education should include critical reasoning and the ability to form judgments and opinions independently and, as Robert Silvers, an editor of The New York Review of Books, said, "to acquire some intellectual curiosity about learning more and exploring the possibilities of science and the understanding you get from literature and the arts."
[. . . .]
Picking up on an earlier court's ruling that such [“a sound basic”] education leaves a citizen competent to vote and to serve on a jury, Justice DeGrasse elaborated:
"A capable and productive citizen doesn't simply show up for jury service. Rather she is capable of serving impartially on trials that may require learning unfamiliar facts and concepts and new ways to communicate and reach decisions with her fellow jurors. To be sure, the jury is in some respects an anti-elitist institution where life experience and practical intelligence can be more important than formal education. Nonetheless, jurors may be called on to decide complex matters that require the verbal, reasoning, math, science and socialization skills that should be imparted in public schools. Jurors today must determine questions of fact concerning DNA evidence, statistical analyses and convoluted financial fraud, to name only three topics."
A former New York State education commissioner, Thomas Sobol, now a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, testified for the plaintiffs, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, and explained why the earlier court ruling had used the jury service example.
"A hundred years ago, the question for the jury was did he steal the horse or didn't he," Dr. Sobol said in an interview. "Nowadays people need to be able to understand DNA evidence a la the O. J. Simpson trial."
New York City's public schools do not necessarily equip students to be able to achieve that understanding, critics have long complained. And Justice DeGrasse found that their complaints have merit.
A survey of 450 employers conducted two years ago for the New York City Partnership and Chamber of Commerce found that only 10 percent of respondents thought a high school diploma meant that students had mastered basic skills.
That, said Augusta Kappner, the president of the Bank Street College of Education in Manhattan, bodes ill for the future as employment and even everyday life demand the ability to sort through information and make sound judgments.
"That takes a lot more knowledge and skill than it used to," Dr. Kappner said. "There are many more sources of information, and one has to be able to sort it and weigh it."
As information and its sources grow more complex, the ability to evaluate information becomes ever more important, said Dr. Botstein, of Bard. "Computers can create the appearance of a good statistical argument when it is not an argument at all," he said. "The capacity to analyze argument is ever more important. Knowing how to distinguish good information from bad information."
And those whose job is to teach such skills say the challenge is more than daunting. "This is a generation that watches a sitcom and gets a problem solved in 20 minutes," said Phyllis C. Williams, the principal of Eleanor Roosevelt Intermediate School in Washington Heights, Manhattan. She said she hoped that the future good citizens at her school would graduate with respect for others and for themselves.
She said that one way in which she steers her students toward that goal is by arranging for them to volunteer at nursing homes and day care centers and by attracting business professionals and artists to visit the school. "The child has to feel they can achieve," she said.
Likewise Mr. Goldstein, who is the executive director of the Media and Technology Charter High School in Boston, also known as Match, suggested that graduating with a diploma should not be the final measure of a student's success at that age..
"The statistic is that two-thirds of kids who start college don't finish -- even fewer from the inner city," Mr. Goldstein said. "So in the long run, the Match School defines by outcome: an educated high school grad must read, compute, persevere, organize and problem-solve well enough not just to attend college, but to graduate from college."
An education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Gerald Graff, said that Justice DeGrasse's ruling and the larger debate over what constitutes a sound education stemmed from the movement to raise school standards, and the inevitable back-and-forth over whether they are too high or too low. A combination of basic factual knowledge along with some ability to think critically is emerging as a compromise of sorts among traditional educators and those who want to experiment with new ideas.
"We still have a long way to go to get across to people in the schools and citizens that the kinds of testing we are doing and the standards we are applying emphasize the ability to think and argue rather than cramming minds with a lot of facts," Dr. Graff said.
The Rev. Joseph Parkes, a Jesuit priest who is the president of Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx, holds up the study of the classics as a route to a sound and relevant education.
"The whole point of a liberal education is freedom," Father Parkes said. "People say, 'Why do students at Fordham Prep study Latin and Greek? It's useless.' And I say it frees the mind and the heart. Jesuits still emphasize the classics, language, expression."
In the end, he said, graduates should go forth with "confidence, compassion and commitment so they can compete in a lot of areas. We want them committed to country, faith and family first, and committed to the world."
Those nurtured on books push them as tools critical to a basic education.
"When I was young, I was one of those people who read everything from 'Huck Finn' to 'The Red and the Black,' to novels like Sinclair Lewis's 'Arrowsmith' and Sherlock Holmes," said Mr. Silvers of The New York Review of Books. "I feel that an enormous part of growing up is to have the appetite for omnivorous reading, trying one book after another."
The goal, Mr. LeClerc of the New York Public Library agreed, should be to instill "a love of lifelong learning."
"The single greatest contribution an educator can make is turning her or him onto more education, more learning," he said. "The first 16 or 20 years is a prelude. We don't stay in the same job all our lives, or the same careers. So you have to have an ability to adapt to rapidly evolving change."
Or as Dr. Sobol at Columbia said: "You need to train the intelligence more than was the case in an agrarian society. We don't clear forest and lay railroad track. We perform complex operations on a computer. You could be comfortable with a lower standard in that older world of my father and grandfather's time. You can't be comfortable with that now in my time."
Justice DeGrasse's ruling in the school financing case may not be the final word, as New York State decides whether to appeal and the State Legislature begins looking at how to come up with another financing formula. And all sides say they expect the debate over a sound, basic education to continue as well.
As Dr. Sobol noted, quoting Winston Churchill: "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
LexisNexis(TM) Academic - Document
The New York Times
May 25, 2003 , Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Title: What's Wrong With Writing
By LEWIS BEALE
A RECENT REPORT by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, a panel of educators organized by the College Board, found that most fourth graders spend only three hours a week on their writing, less than one-fifth the time they spend watching television.
Only about half of all 12th graders ever receive writing assignments of three pages or more in English class, and about three-quarters are never asked to write papers in history or social studies classes, the report says.
And by the time they get to college, nearly 20 percent of students need to take remedial writing courses.
What does this mean for New Jersey's colleges?
"Writing is a complex craft, and because it takes so much effort, students often don't want to do it," said Sanford Tweedie, the freshman writing coordinator at Rowan University.
Kurt Spellmeyer, director of the writing program at Rutgers, added: "Generally speaking, students haven't done the right kind of writing, and they haven't gotten the right kind of feedback. People become better writers through reading and responding in writing to what they read."
It is not that most students are incompetent writers.
"In 20 years at this job I haven't seen the kind of writing where I want to put my head on the desk and cry," said Penny Dugan, the writing program coordinator at Richard Stockton College.
The commission found, however, that more than 50 percent of first-year college students are unable to produce papers relatively free of language errors. "Analyzing arguments and synthesizing information are beyond the scope of most first-year students," it said.
"Students can 'write,"' the commission's report says. "They 'know' language in some sense. The difficulty is that they cannot systematically produce writing at the high levels of skill, maturity and sophistication required in a complex, modern society."
Some people say that students may actually be writing more than ever before because of personal computers and instant messaging.
"But it's a different form of writing," said Bob Kerrey, president of the New School University in New York, who will head a five-year campaign established by the commission to increase awareness of the importance of writing.
The abbreviated word forms and sentence structures used to communicate in the new technologies are said to affect writing ability. But educators also point to an obsession with passing standardized tests and a lack of writing classes in high school. "The high schools have relegated writing to English class, and I don't know why that is," Mr. Tweedie said. "You should be writing in every class."
Secondary school teachers, who may see 200 students a day, in 45- or 50-minute lumps of time, do not have much opportunity to teach the intricacies of writing, a craft not easily learned in bite-size chunks. Many resort to teaching the five-paragraph essay formula: write an introductory paragraph highlighting three points, then argue the points in the next three paragraphs and end with a conclusion. "It's very restrictive, and kind of boring," said Kelly A. Shea, director of the writing center at Seton Hall University. But it is easy to grade, which is why it is used so often.
Partly as a result, many students enter college thinking that writing is not important.
"Kids think it depends what kind of field they're going to go into if writing is important," said Cristina Ramundo of West Caldwell, a senior and tutor at Seton Hall's writing center. "I get business students who think they're never going to have to write, so why should I be here? I have to actually convince people this is a worthwhile thing to do."
The writing commission suggests that schools begin using writing in classes like biology and history; that they use writing as part of standardized tests, instead of simple multiple-choice questions; and that states require teachers to pass a writing theory course before they attain certification.
Meantime, colleges are playing catch-up. Mr. Tweedie says the first thing he does in his freshman composition class at Rowan is have his students write a narrative exploring their own literary history. He then assigns a nonfiction book that the students can connect to - this year it was "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich - and has them write an essay about it.
Mr. Spellmeyer, who oversees a program at Rutgers involving more than 5,000 students, says the key is to move away from the "personal response writing" that teenagers do in high school - writing opinions of literary texts - to analytical writing based on nonfiction readings.
"Most students who come here have a very hard time reading a 20-page article from The New York Times Magazine," he says. "And they have no idea how to make an argument that analyzes and synthesizes this material."
Ah. . . Just what you needed – a guide on how to avoid being a college “zombie” and actually do well in college. After reading, make two lists: the first, three things that you found helpful, interesting, surprising from this essay; the second, a list of the things you need to do this week. Bring them both to class.
Today is your first day on campus. You were a high school senior three months ago. Or maybe you've been at home with your children for the last ten years. Or maybe you work full time and you're coming to school to start the process that leads to a better job. Whatever your background is, you're probably not too concerned today with staying in college. After all, you just got over the hurdle (and the paperwork) of applying to this place and organizing your life so that you could attend. And today, you're confused and tired. Everything is a hassle, from finding the classrooms to standing in line at the bookstore. But read my advice anyway. And if you don't read it today, clip and save this article. You might want to look at it a little further down the road.
By the way, if this isn't your very first day, don't skip this article. Maybe you haven't been doing as well in your studies as you'd hoped. Or perhaps you've had problems juggling your work schedule, your class schedule, and your social life. If so, read on. You're about to get the inside story on making it in college. On the basis of my own experience as a final-year student, and on dozens of interviews with successful students, I've worked out a no-fail system for coping with college. These are the inside tips every student needs to do well in school. I've put myself in your place, and I'm going to answer the questions that will cross (or have already crossed) your mind during your stay here.
What's the Secret of Getting Good Grades?
It all comes down to getting those grades, doesn't it? After all, you came here for some reason, and you're going to need passing grades to get the credits or degree you want. Many of us never did much studying in high school; most of the learning we did took place in the classroom. College, however, is a lot different. You're really on your own when it comes to passing courses. In fact, sometimes you'll feel as if nobody cares if you make it or not. Therefore, you've got to figure out a study system that gets results. Sooner or later, you'll be alone with those books. After that, you'll be sitting in a classroom with an exam sheet on your desk. Whether you stare at that exam with a queasy stomach or whip through it fairly confidently depends on your study techniques. Most of the successful students I talked to agreed that the following eight study tips deliver solid results.
1.Set Up a Study Place. Those students you see "studying" in the cafeteria or game room aren't learning much. You just can't learn when you're distracted by people and noise. Even the library can be a bad place to study if you constantly find yourself watching the clouds outside or the students walking through the stacks. It takes guts to sit, alone, in a quiet place in order to study. But you have to do it. Find a room at home or a spot in the library that's relatively quiet-and boring. When you sit there, you won't have much to do except study.
2. Get into a Study Frame of Mind. When you sit down, do it with the attitude that you're going to get this studying done. You're not going to doodle in your notebook or make a list for the supermarket. Decide that you're going to study and learn now, so that you can move on to more interesting things as soon as possible.
3. Give Yourself Rewards. If you sweat out a block of study time, and do a good job on it, treat yourself. You deserve it. You can "psych" yourself up for studying by promising to reward yourself afterwards. A present for yourself can be anything from a favorite TV show to a relaxing bath to a dish of double chocolate ice cream.
4. Skim the Textbook First. Lots of students sit down with an assignment like "read chapter five, pages 125-150" and do just that. They turn to page 125 and start to read. After a while, they find that they have no idea what they just read. For the last ten minutes, they've been thinking about their five-year-old or what they're going to eat for dinner. Eventually, they plod through all the pages but don't remember much afterwards.
In order to prevent this problem, skim the textbook chapter first. This means: look at the title, the subtitles, the headings, the pictures, the first and last paragraphs. Try to find out what the person who wrote the book had in mind when he or she organized the chapter. What was important enough to set off as a title or in bold type? After skimming, you should be able to explain to yourself what the main points of the chapter are. Unless you're the kind of person who would step into an empty elevator shaft without looking first, you'll soon discover the value of skimming.
5. Take Notes on What You're Studying. This sounds like a hassle, but it works. Go back over the material after you've read it, and jot down key words and phrases in the margins. When you review the chapter for a test, you'll have handy little things like "definition of rationalization" or "example of assimilation" in the margins. If the material is especially tough, organize a separate sheet of notes. Write down definitions, examples, lists, and main ideas. The idea is to have a single sheet that boils the entire chapter down to a digestible lump.
6. Review after You've Read and Taken Notes. Some people swear that talking to yourself works. Tell yourself about the most important points in the chapter. Once you've said them out loud, they seem to stick better in your mind. If you can't talk to yourself about the material after reading it, that's a sure sign you don't really know it.
7.Give Up. This may sound contradictory, but give up when you've had enough. You should try to make it through at least an hour, though. Ten minutes here and there are useless. When your head starts to pound and your eyes develop spidery red lines, quit. You won't do much learning when you're exhausted.
8. Take a College Skills Course If You Need It. Don't hesitate or feel embarrassed about enrolling in a study skills course. Many students say they wouldn't have made it without one.
How Can I Keep Up with All My Responsibilities without Going Crazy?
You've got a class schedule. You're supposed to study. You've got a family. You've got 13 a husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, child. You've got a job. Row are you possibly going to cover all the bases in your life and maintain your sanity? This is one of thetoughest problems students face. Even if they start the semester with the best of intentions, they eventually find themselves tearing their hair out trying to do everything they're supposed to do. Believe it or not, though, it is possible to meet all your responsibilities. And you don't have to turn into a hermit or give up your loved ones to do it.
The secret here is to organize your time. But don't just sit around half the semester planning to get everything together soon. Before you know it, you'll be confronted with midterms, papers, family, and work all at once. Don't let yourself reach that breaking point. Instead, try these three tactics.
Monthly Calendar. Get one of those calendars with big blocks around the dates. Give yourself an overview of the whole term by marking down the due dates for papers and projects. Circle test and exam days. This way those days don't sneak up on you unexpectedly.
Study Schedule. Sit down during the first few days of this semester and make up a sheet listing the days and
hours of the week. Fill in your work and class hours first. Then try to block out some study hours. It's better to study a little every day than to create a huge once-or-twice-a-week marathon session. Schedule study hours for your hardest classes for the times when you feel most energetic. For example, I battled my tax law textbook in the mornings; when I looked at it after 7:00 P.M., I might as well have been reading Chinese. The usual proportion, by the way, is one hour of study time for every class hour.
In case you're one of those people who get carried away, remember to leave blocks of free time, too. You won't be any good to yourself or anyone else if you don't relax and pack in the studying once in a while.
"To-Do" List. This is the secret that single-handedly got me through college. Once a week (or every day if you want to), write a list of what you have to do. Write down everything from "write English paper" to "buy cold cuts for lunches." The best thing about a "to do" list is that it seems to tame all those stray "I have to" thoughts that nag at your mind. Just making the list seems to make the tasks "doable." After you finish something on the list, cross it off. Don't be compulsive about finishing everything; you're not Superman or Wonder Woman. Get the important things done first. The secondary things you don't finish can simply be moved to your next "to do" list.
What Can I Do If Personal Problems Get in the Way of My Studies? One student, Roger, told me this story:
Everything was going OK for me until the middle of the spring semester. I went through a terrible time when I broke up with my girlfriend and started seeing her best friend. I was trying to deal with my ex-girlfriend's hurt and anger, my new girlfriend's guilt, and my own worries and anxieties at the same time. In addition to this, my mother was sick and on a medication that made her really irritable. I hated to go home because the atmosphere was so uncomfortable. Soon, I started missing classes because I couldn't deal with the academic pressures as well as my own personal problems. It seemed easier to hang around my girlfriend's apartment than to face all my problems at home and at school.
Another student, Marian, told me:
I'd been married for eight years and the relationship wasn't going too well. I saw the handwriting on the wall, and I decided to prepare for the future. I enrolled in college, because I knew I'd need a decent job to support myself. Well, my husband had a fit because I was going to school. We were arguing a lot anyway, and he made it almost impossible for me to study at home. I think he was angry and almost jealous because I was drawing away from him. It got so bad that I thought about quitting college for a while. I wasn't getting any support at home and it was just too hard to go on.
Personal troubles like these are overwhelming when you're going through them. School seems like the least important thing in your life. The two students above are perfect examples of this. But if you think about it, quitting or failing school would be the worst thing for these two students. Roger's problems, at least with his girlfriends, would simmer down eventually, and then he'd regret having left school. Marian had to finish college if she wanted to be able to live independently. Sometimes, you've just got to hang tough.
But what do you do while you're trying to live through a lousy time? First of all, do something difficult. Ask yourself, honestly, if you're exaggerating small problems as an excuse to avoid classes and studying. It takes strength to admit this, but there's no sense in kidding yourself. If your problems are serious, and real, try to make some human contacts at school. Lots of students hide inside a miserable shell made of their own troubles and feel isolated and lonely. Believe me, there are plenty of students with problems. Not everyone is getting A's and having a fabulous social and home life at the same time. As you go through the term, you'll pick up some vibrations about the students in your classes. Perhaps someone strikes you as a compatible person. Why not speak to that person after class? Share a cup of coffee in the cafeteria or walk to the parking lot together. You're not looking for a best friend or the love of your life. You just want to build a little network of support for yourself. Sharing your difficulties, questions, and complaints with a friendly person on campus can make a world of difference in how you feel.
Finally, if your problems are overwhelming, get some professional help. Why do you think colleges spend countless dollars on counseling departments and campus psychiatric services? More than ever, students all over the country are taking advantage of the help offered by support groups and therapy sessions. There's no shame attached to asking for help, either; in fact, almost 40 percent of college students (according to one survey) will use counseling services during their time in school. Just walk into a student center or counseling office and ask for an appointment. You wouldn't think twice about asking a dentist to help you get rid of your toothache. Counselors are paid-and want-to help you with your problems.
Why Do Some People Make It and Some Drop Out?
Anyone who spends at least one semester in college notices that some students give up on their classes. The person who sits behind you in accounting, for example, begins to miss a lot of class meetings and eventually vanishes. Or another student comes to class without the assignment, doodles in a notebook during the lecture, and leaves during the break. What's the difference between students like this and the ones who succeed in school? My survey may be nonscientific, but everyone I asked said the same thing: attitude. A positive attitude is the key to everything else-good study habits, smart time scheduling, and coping with personal difficulties.
What does "a positive attitude" mean? Well, for one thing, it means avoiding the zombie syndrome. It means not only showing up for your classes, hut also doing something while you're there. Really listen. Take notes. Ask a question if you want to. Don't just walk into a class, put your mind in neutral, and drift away to never-never land.
Having a positive attitude goes deeper than this, though. It means being mature about college as an institution. Too many students approach college classes like six-year-olds who expect first grade to be as much fun as Sesame Street. First grade, as we all know, isn't as much fun as Sesame Street. And college classes can sometimes be downright dull and boring. If you let a boring class discourage you so much that you want to leave school, you'll lose in the long run. Look at your priorities. You want a degree, or a certificate, or a career. If you have to, you can make it through a less-than-interesting class in order to achieve what you want. Get whatever you can out of every class. But if you simply can't stand a certain class, be determined to fulfill its requirements and be done with it once and for all.
After the initial high of starting school, you have to settle in for the long haul. If you follow the advice here, you'll be prepared to face the academic crunch. You'll also live through the semester without giving up your family, your job, or Monday Night Football. Finally, going to college can be an exciting time. You do learn. And when you learn things, the world becomes a more interesting place.
"The Maker's Eye"
By Donald Murray
When students complete a first draft, they consider the job of writing done – and their teachers too often agree. When professional writers complete a first draft, they usually feel that they are at the start of the writing process. When a draft is completed, the job of writing can begin.
That difference in attitude is the difference between amateur and professional, inexperience and experience, journeyman and craftsman. Peter F. Drucker, the prolific business writer, calls his first draft "the zero draft" – after that he can start counting. Most writers share the feeling that the first draft, and all of those which follow, are opportunities to discover what they have to say and how best they can say it.
To produce a progression of drafts, each of which says more and says it more clearly, the writer has to develop a special kind of reading skill. In school we are taught to decode what appears on the page as finished writing. Writers, however, face a different category of possibility and responsibility when they read their own drafts. To them the words on the page are never finished. Each can be changed and rearranged, can set off a chain reaction of confusion or clarified meaning. This is a different kind of reading which is possibly more difficult and certainly more exciting.
Writers must learn to be their own best enemy. They must accept the criticism of others and be suspicious of it; they must accept the praise of others and be even more suspicious of it. Writers cannot depend on others. They must detach themselves from their own pages so that they can apply both their caring and their craft to their own work.
Such detachment is not easy. Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury supposedly puts each manuscript away for a year to the day and then rereads it as a stranger. Not many writers have the discipline or the time to do this. We must read when our judgment may be at its worst, when we are close to the euphoric moment of creation.
Then the writer, counsels novelist Nancy Hale, should be critical of everything that seems to him most delightful in his style. He should excise what he most admires, because he wouldn't thus admire it if he weren't ... in a sense protecting it from criticism." John Ciardi, the poet, adds, "The last act of the writing must be to become one's own reader. It is, I suppose, a schizophrenic process, to begin passionately and to end critically, to begin hot and to end cold; and, more important, to be passion-hot and critic-cold at the same time."
Most people think that the principal problem is that writers are too proud of what they have written. Actually, a greater problem for most professional writers is one shared by the majority of students. They are overly critical, think everything is dreadful, tear up page after page, never complete a draft, see the task as hopeless.
The writer must learn to read critically but constructively, to cut what is bad, to reveal what is good. Eleanor Estes, the children's book author, explains: "The writer must survey his work critically, coolly, as though he were a stranger to it. He must be willing to prune, expertly and hard-heartedly. At the end of each revision, a manuscript may look worked over, torn apart, pinned together, added to, deleted from, words changed and words changed back. Yet the work must maintain its original freshness and spontaneity."
Most readers underestimate the amount of rewriting it usually takes to produce spontaneous reading. This is a great disadvantage to the student writer, who sees only a finished product and never watches the craftsman who takes the necessary step back, studies the work carefully, returns to the task, steps back, returns, steps back, again and again. Anthony Burgess, one of the most prolific writers in the English-speaking world, admits, "I might revise a page twenty times." Roald Dahl, the popular children's writer states, "By the time I'm nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least 150 times. . . . Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this."
Rewriting isn't virtuous. It isn't something that ought to be done. It is simply something that most writers find they have to do to discover what they have to say and how to say it. It is a condition of the writer's life. There are, however, a few writers who do little formal rewriting, primarily because they have the capacity and experience to create and review a large number of invisible drafts in their minds before they approach the page. And some writers slowly produce finished pages, performing all the tasks of revision simultaneously, page by page, rather than draft by draft. But it is still possible to see the sequence followed by most writers most of the time in reading their own work.
Most writers scan their drafts first, reading as quickly as possible to catch the larger problems of subject and form, then move in closer and closer as they read and write, reread and rewrite.
The first thing writers look for in their drafts is information. They know that a good piece of writing is built from specific, accurate, and interesting information. The writer must have an abundance of information from which to construct a readable piece of writing.
Next writers look for meaning in the information. The specifics must build to a pattern of significance. Each piece of specific information must carry the reader toward meaning.
Writers reading their own drafts are aware of audience. They put themselves in the reader's situation and make sure that they deliver information which a reader wants to know or needs to know in a manner which is easily digested. Writers try to be sure that they anticipate and answer the questions a critical reader will ask when reading the piece of writing.
Writers make sure that the form is appropriate to the subject and the audience. Form, or genre, is the vehicle which carries meaning to the reader, but form cannot be selected until the writer has adequate information to discover its significance and an audience which needs or wants that meaning.
Once writers are sure the form is appropriate, they must then look at the structure, the order of what they have written. Good writing is built on a solid framework of logic, argument, narrative, or motivation which runs through the entire piece of writing and holds it together. This is the time when many writers find it most effective to outline as a way of visualizing the hidden spine by which the piece of writing is supported.
The element on which writers may spend a majority of their time is development. Each section of a piece of writing must be adequately developed. It must give readers enough information so that they are satisfied. How much information is enough? That’s as difficult as asking how much garlic belongs in a salad. It must be done to taste, but most beginning writers underdevelop, underestimating the reader P 1 Ps hunger for information.
As writers solve developmental problems, they often have to consider questions of dimension. There must be a pleasing and effective proportion among all the parts of the piece of writing. There is a continual process of subtracting and adding to keep the piece of writing in balance.
Finally, writers have to listen to their own voices. Voice is the force which drives a piece of writing forward. It is an expression of the writer's authority and concern. It is what is between the words on the page, what glues the piece of writing together. A good piece of writing is always marked by a consistent, individual voice.
As writers read and reread, write and rewrite, they move closer and closer to the page until they are doing line-by-line editing. Writers read their own pages with infinite care. Each sentence, each line, each clause, each phrase, each word, each mark of punctuation, each section of white space between the type has to contribute to the clarification of meaning.
Slowly the writer moves from word to word, looking through language to see the subject. As a word is changed, cut, or added, as a construction is rearranged, all the words used before that moment and all those that follow that moment must be considered and reconsidered.
Writers often read aloud at this stage of the editing process, muttering or whispering to themselves, calling on the ear's experience with language. Does this sound right – or that? Writers edit, shifting back and forth from eye to page to ear to page. I find I must do this careful editing in short runs, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch, or I become too kind with myself. I begin to see what I hope is on the page, not what actually is on the page.
This sounds tedious if you haven't done it, but actually it is fun. Making something right is immensely satisfying, for writers begin to learn what they are writing about by writing. Language leads them to meaning, and there is the joy of discovery, of understanding, of making meaning clear as the writer employs the technical skills of language.
Words have double meanings, even triple and quadruple meanings. Each word has its own potential for connotation and denotation. And when writers rub one word against the other, they are often rewarded with a sudden insight, an unexpected clarification.
The maker's eye roves back and forth from word to phrase to sentence to paragraph to sentence to phrase to word. The maker's eye sees the need for variety and balance, for a firmer structure, for a more appropriate form. It peers into the interior of the paragraph, looking for coherence, unity, and emphasis, which make meaning clear.
I learned something about this process when my first bifocals were prescribed. I had ordered a larger section of the reading portion of the glass because of my work, but even so, I could not contain my eyes within this new limit of vision. And I still find myself taking off my glasses and bending my nose towards the page, for my eyes unconsciously flick back and forth across the page, back to another page, forward to still another, as I try to see each evolving line in relation to every other line.
When does this process end? Most writers agree with the great Russian writer Tolstoy, who said, "I scarcely ever reread my published writings; if by chance I come across a page, it always strikes me: all this must be rewritten; this is how I should have written it."
The maker’s eye is never satisfied, for each word has the potential to ignite new meaning. This article has been twice written all the way through the writing process, and it was published four years ago. Now it is to be republished in a book. The editors made a few small suggestions, and then I read it with my maker’s eye. Now it has been re-edited, re-revised, re-read, re-re-edited, for each piece of writing to the writer is full of potential and alternatives.
A piece of writing is never finished. It is delivered to a deadline, torn out of the typewriter on demand, sent off with a sense of accomplishment and share and pride and frustration. If only there were a couple more days, time for just another run at it, perhaps then . . .
Questions for the reading:
If you haven’t done so already, take out a piece of paper and write down you response to this question: Should the U.S. Government spend more, less, or the same on foreign-aid?
The weekend before President Clinton's State of the Union Address, the Wall Street Journal assembled a focus group of middle-class white male – the demographic group du jour to plumb the depth of their proverbial anger. The results were highly satisfactory. These guys are mad as hell. They're mad at welfare, they're mad at special-interest lobbyists. "But perhaps the subject that produces the most agreement among the group," the Journal reports, "is the view that Washington should stop sending money abroad and instead zero in on the domestic front."
A poll released last week by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland contains similar findings. According to this survey, seventy-five per cent of Americans believe that the United States spends "too much" on foreign aid, and sixty-four per cent want foreign-aid spending cut. Apparently, a cavalier eleven per cent of Americans think it's fine to spend "too much" on foreign aid. But there is no denying the poll's larger finding that big majorities say they think the tab is too high.
Respondents were also asked, though, how big a share of the federal budget currently goes to foreign aid. The median answer was fifteen per cent; the average answer was eighteen per cent. The correct answer is less than one per cent: the United States government spends about fourteen billion dollars a year on foreign aid (including military assistance), out of a total budget of a trillion and a half To a question about how much foreign-aid spending would be "appropriate," the median answer was five per cent of the budget. A question about how much would be "too little" produced a median answer of three per cent-more than three times the current level of foreign-aid spending.
To the International Policy folks at the University of Maryland, these results demonstrate "strong support for maintaining foreign aid at current spending levels or higher." That's just their liberal internationalist spin, of course. You might say with equal justice that the results demonstrate a national wish to see foreign aid cut by two-thirds. It's true that after the pollsters humiliated their subjects with the correct answer to the question about how much (or, rather, how little) the United States spends on foreign aid, only thirty-five per cent of the respondents had the fortitude to say they still wanted to see it cut. But what people will say after being corrected by an authority figure with a clipboard hardly constitutes "strong support."
This poll is less interesting for what it shows about foreign aid than for what it shows about American democracy. It's not just that Americans are scandalously ignorant. It's that they seem to believe they have a democratic right to their ignorance. All over the country-at dinner tables, in focus groups, on call-in radio shows, and, no doubt, occasionally on the floor of Congress-citizens are expressing outrage about how much we spend on foreign aid, with-out having the faintest idea what that amount is. This is not, surely, a question of being misinformed. No one-not even Rush Limbaugh-is out there spreading the falsehood that we spend fifteen per cent of the federal budget (two hundred and twenty-five billion dollars) on foreign aid. People are forming and expressing passionate views about foreign aid on the basis of no information at all. Or perhaps they think that the amount being spent on foreign aid is a matter of opinion, like everything else.
Populism, in its latest manifestation, celebrates ignorant opinion and undifferentiated rage. As long as you're mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore, no one will inquire very closely into what, exactly, "it" is and whether you really ought to feel that way. Pandering politicians are partly to blame, to be sure. So is the development christened "hyperdemocracy" by last week's Time: the way the communications revolution is eroding representative government by providing instant feedback between voters' whims and politicians' actions. But ubiquitous opinion polls are part of the problem, too.
The typical opinion poll about, say, foreign aid doesn't trouble to ask whether the respondent knows the first thing about the topic being opined upon, and no conventional poll disqualifies an answer on the ground of mere total ignorance. The premise of opinion polling is that people are, and of right ought to be, omni-opinionated-that they should have views on all subjects at all times-and that all such views are equally valid. It's always remarkable how few people say they "aren't sure" about or "don't know" the answer to some pollster's question. ("Never thought about it," "Couldn't care less," and "Let me get back to you on that after I've done some reading" aren't even options.) So, given the prominence of polls in our political culture, it's no surprise that people have come to believe that their opinions on the issues of the day need not be fettered by either facts or reflection.
Add opinions to the list of symptoms of the free-lunch disease that blights American politics. First, in the early nineteen-eighties, came the fiscal free lunch: taxes can be cut without cutting middle-class government benefits. Then, with the end of the Cold War, came the foreign-policy free lunch: America can strut as the world's superpower without putting blood or treasure at risk. Now there's the intellectual free lunch: I'm entitled to vociferous opinions on any subject, without having to know, or even think, about it.
All this may sound horribly snooty. But it isn't. It is not the argument that Walter Lippmann made in "Public Opinion," where he advocated relying on elite "bureaus" of wise men to make crucial policy decisions. Lippmann's belief was that modern life had rendered public policy too complex for the average voter. But there is nothing especially complex about the factual question of how much the country spends on foreign aid. It may be too heavy a burden of civic responsibility to expect every citizen-what with work and family and life outside politics-to carry this number around in his or her head. But it is not asking too much to expect a citizen to recognize that he or she needs to know that number, at least roughly, in order to have a valid opinion about whether it is too large or too small. Americans are capable of making informed, reflective decisions on policy questions. But they often seem to be under the impression that they needn't bother.
We need a new form of democratic piety. It shows respect, not contempt, for "the people" to hold them to something approaching the intellectual standard you would apply to yourself or a friend. By contrast, it is contemptuous, not respectful, to excuse "the people" from all demands of intellectual rigor or honesty on the ground that their judgments are wise by definition. We honor our friends by challenging them when we think they're wrong. It shows that we take them seriously. Believers in democracy owe "the people" no less.
Kinsley, Michael. “The Intellectual Free Lunch.” The New Yorker 6 Feb. 1995: 4-5.
“Daddy's going to be very angry about this,” my mother said.
It was August 1938, at a Catskill Mountains boarding house. One hot Friday afternoon three of us — 9-year. old city boys — got to feeling listless. We’d done all the summer-country stuff, caught all the frogs, picked the blueberries and shivered enough icy river water. What we needed, on this unbearably boring afternoon, was some action.
To consider the options, Artie, Eli and I holed up in the cool of the “casino,” the little building in which the guests enjoyed their nightly bingo games and the occasional traveling magic act. Gradually, inspiration came: the casino was too new, the wood frame and white Sheetrock walls too perfect. We would do it some quiet damage. Leave our anonymous mark on the place, for all time. With, of course, no thought as to consequences.
We began by picking up a long, wooden bench, running with it like a battering ram, and bashing it into a wail. It left a wonderful hole. But small. So we did it again. And again.
Afterward the three of us, breathing hard, sweat- mg the sweat of heroes, surveyed our first really big-time damage. The process had been so satisfy- mg we’d gotten carried away there was hardly a good square foot of Sheetrock left.
Suddenly, before even a tweak of remorse set in, the owner, Mr. Biolos, appeared in the doorway of the building. Furious. And craving justice: When they arrived from the city that night, he-would-tell- our-fathers!
Meantime, he told our mothers. My mother felt that what I had done was so monstrous she would leave my punishment to my father. “And,” she said, “Daddy’s going to be very angry about this.”
By 6 o’clock Mr. Biolos was stationed out at the driveway, grimly waiting for the fathers to start showing up. Behind him, the front porch was jammed, like a sold-out bleacher section, with indignant guests. They’d seen the damage to their bingo palace, knew they’d have to endure it in that condition for the rest of the summer. They, too, craved justice.
As to Artie, Eli and me, we each found an inconspicuous spot on the porch, a careful distance from the other two but not too far from our respective mothers. And waited.
Artie’s father arrived first. When Mr. Biolos told him the news and showed him the blighted casino, he carefully took off his belt and — with practiced style — viciously whipped his screaming son. With the approbation, by the way, of an ugly crowd of once-gentle people.
Eli’s father showed up next. He was told and shown and went raving mad, knocking his son off his feet with a slam to the head. As Eli lay crying on the grass, he kicked him on the legs, buttocks and back. When Eli tried to get up he kicked him again.
The crowd muttered. Listen, they should have thought of this before they did the damage. They’ll live, don’t worry, and I bet they never do that again.
I wondered: What will my father do? He’d never laid a hand on me in my life. I knew about other kids, had seen bruises on certain schoolmates and even heard screams in the evenings from certain houses on my street, but they were those kids, their families, and the why and how of their bruises were, to me, dark abstractions. Until now.
I looked over at my mother. She was upset. Earlier she’d made it clear to me that I had done some special kind of crime. Did it mean that beatings were now, suddenly, the new order of the day?
My own father suddenly pulled up in our Chevy, just in time to see Eli’s father dragging Eli up the porch steps and into the building. He got out of the car believing, I was sure, that whatever it was all about, Eli must have deserved it. I went dizzy with fear.
Mr. Biolos, on a roll, started talking. My father listened, his shirt soaked with perspiration, a damp handkerchief draped around his neck; he never did well in humid weather. I watched him follow Mr. Biolos into the casino. My dad — strong and principled, hot and bothered — what was he thinking about all this?
When they emerged, my father looked over at my mother. He mouthed a small “Hello.” Then his eyes found me and stared for a long moment, without expression. I tried to read his eyes, but they left me and went to the crowd, from face to expectant face.
Then, amazingly, he got into his car and drove away! Nobody, not even my mother, could imagine where he was going.
An hour later he came back. Tied onto the top of his car was a stack of huge Sheetrock boards. He got out holding a paper sack with a hammer sticking out of it. Without a word he untied the Sheetrock and one by one carried the boards into the casino.
And didn’t come out again that night. All through my mother’s and my silent dinner and for the rest of that Friday evening and long after we had gone to bed, I could hear — everyone could hear — the steady bang bang bang bang of my dad’s hammer. I pictured him sweating, missing his dinner, missing my mother, getting madder and madder at me. Would tomorrow be the last day of my life? It was 3 A.M. before I finally fell asleep.
The next morning, my father didn’t say a single word about the night before. Nor did he show any trace of anger or reproach of any kind. We had a regular day, he, my mother and I, and, in fact, our usual sweet family weekend.
Was he mad at me? You bet he was. But in a time when many of his generation saw corporal punishment of their children as a God-given right, he knew “spanking” as beating, and beating as criminal. And that when kids were beaten, they always remembered the pain but often forgot the reason.
And I also realized years later that, to him, humiliating me was just as unthinkable. Unlike the fathers of my buddies, he couldn’t play into a conspiracy of revenge and spectacle.
But my father had made his point. I never forgot that my vandalism on that August afternoon was outrageous.
And I’ll never forget that it was also the day I first understood how deeply I could trust him.
Lazarus, Mell. "Angry Fathers." The New York Times Magazine. 28 May 1995: 20.
February 16, 2003, New York Times
“The Smart Way to Be Scared”
T By GREGG EASTERBROOK
THURSDAY, I walked into a hardware store in suburban Maryland to buy de-icing crystals in advance of a predicted weekend snowstorm. Lines of customers waiting to pay snaked through the aisles, dozens of men and women with shopping carts full of duct tape and plastic rolls. Needless to say, I left without de-icing compound. I also left thinking, What's the point of this?
Flashing "threat level" warning boxes on newscasts. Police officers with shotguns wandering Times Square, antiaircraft missiles near the Washington Mall. Federal instructions to stockpile water and batteries and obtain plastic and tape for a "safe room." Yet it's far from clear that this security rush will help anyone.
Government cannot, of course, know what will happen or when. During the 1960's, when the menace was missile attack by the Soviet Union, citizens were urged to do both the useful (stock fallout shelters) and the useless (crouch under the desk at school). Officials suggested such things because it was what they were able to think of.
Today, with no sure defense against terrorism in a free society, officials concerned about chemical or biological attack are suggesting the things they are able to think of. But this may only distract attention from the more likely threat of conventional bombs — and the ultimate threat of the atom.
Consider the mania for duct tape. As Kenneth Chang and Judith Miller reported in The New York Times last week, experts view the taped-up room as mainly a psychological benefit. Moreover, many now rushing to buy duct tape may have exaggerated, media-pumped fears of chemical or biological weapons.
If terrorists use chemical weapons, they will probably affect a tiny area at worst, because terrorists would have chemical agents in relatively small amounts. Though any amount of chemical agent might seem ghastly, in actual use chemicals have proved no more deadly, pound for pound, than conventional bombs.
The British and Germans used one ton of chemical weapons per fatality caused during World War I. The 1995 release of the nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subways by the Aum Shinrikyo sect killed 12 people, fewer than a small, standard bomb might have killed in that crowded, enclosed area. An estimated 5,000 Kurds died in Saddam Hussein's chemical attack on Halabja, Iraq, in 1988, but this involved dozens of fighter-bombers making repeated low passes over the town. It's hard to imagine that terrorists could pull off such a coordinated heavy military maneuver.
A terrorist release of chemical weapons in an American city would probably have effects confined to a few blocks, making any one person's odds of harm far less than a million to one.
Your risk of dying in a car accident while driving to buy duct tape likely exceeds your risk of dying because you lacked duct tape.
Last week, a Washington talk radio host discussed what listeners should do if "a huge cloud of poison gas is drifting over the city." No nation's military has the technical ability to create a huge, lingering gas cloud: in outdoor use, chemical agents are lethal only for a few moments, because the wind quickly dilutes them. Chemical agents are deadly mainly in enclosed circumstances — subways, for example, or in building ventilation systems. The duct-taped room in a home is of little use in such a scenario.
A 1993 study by the Office of Technology Assessment found that one ton of perfectly delivered sarin, used against an unprotected city, could kill as many as 8,000. But the possession by terrorists of a ton of the most deadly gas seems reasonably unlikely, while perfect conditions for a gas attack — no wind, no sun (sunlight breaks down nerve agents), a low-flying plane that no one is shooting at — almost never happen. Even lights winds, the 1993 study projected, would drop the death toll to about 700.
Seven hundred dead would be horrible, but similar to the harm that might be inflicted in a crowded area by one ton of conventional explosives. Because these explosives are about as deadly as chemicals pound for pound, but far easier to obtain and use, terrorists may be more likely to try to blow things up. Almost all recent terrorist attacks around the world have involved conventional explosives.
The image of millions cowering behind plastic sheets as clouds of biological weapons envelop a city owes more to science fiction than reality. The Japanese use of fleas infected with bubonic plague against Chinese cities in World War II was the only successful instance of bioattacks in contemporary warfare. In 1971, "weaponized" smallpox was accidentally released from a Soviet plant; three people died. In 1979, an explosion at another Soviet site released a large quantity of weapons-grade anthrax; 68 people died.
In 1989, workers at an American government laboratory near Washington were accidentally exposed to Ebola, and it was several days before the mistake was discovered; no one died. A coordinated anthrax attack in the fall of 2001 killed five people, a tiny fraction of the number who died of influenza during the time the nation was terrified by the anthrax letters.
None of this means bioweapons are not dangerous. But in actual use, biological agents often harm less than expected, partly for the simple evolutionary reason that people have immune systems that fight pathogens. Also, as overall public health keeps improving, resistance to bioagents continues to increase.
Conceivably, being in a duct-taped room could protect you if a plane dropping anthrax spores were flying over. Smallpox, on the other hand, must be communicated person to person. Those in the immediate area of an outbreak might be harmed, but as soon as word got out, health authorities would isolate the vicinity and stop the spread. By the time you knew to rush to your sealed room, you would either already be infected or the emergency would be over.
Another point skipped in the public debate: smallpox is awful and highly contagious, but with modern treatment usually not fatal. Anthrax doesn't necessarily kill, either, as the nation learned in 2001. Only in movies can mists of mysterious bioagents cause people to drop like stones. In reality, pathogens make people ill; medical workers rush in and save most of the exposed.
If germs merely leave sick people whom doctors may heal, terrorists may favor conventional explosives that are certain to kill.
While government officials now emphasize improbable events involving chemical or biological arms, less is being said about how to be ready for two macabre threats the public is unprepared for: atomic explosion, and the radiological, or "dirty," bomb.
The chance that a crude atomic device will someday detonate on American soil is, by a large margin, the worst terror threat the nation faces. Yet the new Department of Homeland Security has said little about atomic preparedness.
To think the unthinkable, if an atomic device bearing about the yield of the Hiroshima weapon went off outside the White House, people for roughly a mile in each direction might die. But most people in the District of Columbia would survive, while the main effect on Washington's suburbs would be power failures and broken windows. So the majority of people in Washington and its suburbs who would not die would need to know what to do. But do they? Generally not, because there has been scant discussion.
(Here's what to do: Remain indoors at least 24 hours to avoid fallout; remain on ground floors or in the basements of buildings; if you are upwind of the explosion stay put; if downwind, flee by car only if roads are clear since buildings provide better fallout protection than cars.)
Perhaps more likely than an atomic detonation would be a "dirty bomb," in which conventional explosives spread radioactive material. Since this has never been used, effects are hard to project. Most likely, even an extremely large dirty bomb (say, an entire truck converted to one) might kill only those within a city block. Fallout would probably threaten only those a few hundred or thousands of yards downwind.
Yet if people heard on the radio that a dirty bomb had exploded — if they so much as heard the word radiation — panic might set in. In Manhattan or Washington, mass chaos to escape might result in more deaths than the bomb itself.
But is the government explaining to the public how to react if a dirty bomb goes off? (Stay indoors; if upwind do nothing; if downwind, drive away only if roads are clear; take potassium iodide pills to prevent some effects of fallout.) The Department of Homeland Security Web site, for one, has loads of information about anthrax, but offers essentially zero on what to do in the event of radiological explosions.
Increased presence of police and military units in cities may help deter terrorists, and by being more visible and waving bigger weapons, law enforcement is doing what it can think of. But government officials who are advising people to buy plastic sheets create unnecessary anxiety while achieving little beyond helping hardware stores. The advice people need to hear concerns the atomic threat — and why potassium iodide matters more than duct tape.
TGregg Easterbrook, a senior editor of The New Republic, writes regularly about science and government. His latest book is "The Here and Now." T
By FREDRIC ALAN MAXWELL
April 27, 2003New York Times Magazine
The whole strange thing began nearly two years ago, when an acquaintance e-mailed me, wondering why the Secret Service had contacted him to ask if he thought I was a threat to George W. Bush. Me? A pretzel is more of a threat to Bush than I am. At the time, I was writing an unauthorized biography of Microsoft's C.E.O., Steve Ballmer. I fully expected the Beast from Redmond to keep tabs on me -- which, of course, it did and which, of course, Ballmer publicly denied -- but the Secret Service?
Private investigators have been known to intimate that they're T with the government T, so I called the Secret Service's Seattle office to report that someone might be impersonating one of their agents. No, the officer responded, they had wanted to contact me for the past eight months but couldn't find me. Weird -- my name and number were in the Seattle phone book. I went to their office to find out what was going on.
After a couple of pat-down searches, I sat in a small room with the good cop, Steve, and the bad cop, whom I'll call Cruella. Steve said they had received a report that, on Oct. 12, 2000, I was overheard in a D.C. bar saying, ''I have friends in the C.I.A. who will make sure Bush doesn't enter the White House.'' I responded that except for the facts that I don't have any friends in the C.I.A. (that I know of) and that I've never thought, let alone said, something like that, I was in Philadelphia that day. Unfazed, Cruella opened an inch-thick file. Everything I've ever done wrong in my life flashed before me. (Took about a nanosecond.) She then said, firmly, ''You've been arrested for trespassing on federal property in Washington.''
The jig was up. Brilliant police work. As was widely reported, in 1986 this son of a librarian was convicted of a petty misdemeanor, having been caught red-handed studying after hours in the Library of Congress. Seriously. I helped lead a successful civil disobedience action protesting evening-hours reductions by not leaving when the new hours went into effect.
''We want your medical records,'' she continued, sliding a paper across the table, ''and want you to sign this release.'' She paused. ''You were in the military, you use the V.A. We can get those records.'' They can? So why do they need a release?
''I'd like to talk with my attorney first,'' I said. ''May we continue this tomorrow?''
Cruella said, ''Yes, but you'd better come back,'' ominously adding, ''I don't want to have to come looking for you.'' I expected her to continue, ''And your little dog, too.''
My attorney relayed the sobering news that, in a rare First Amendment exception, the simple utterance of a threat against a major presidential candidate can get you five years in prison and a fine -- and what I reportedly said qualified.
Sitting in the interrogation room the next afternoon, I gave the agents a copy of my Philadelphia hotel bill from the day in question and again refused to sign the release. (Cruella had been replaced by another, nicer agent.) I told them that I realized that this was a serious charge and said I'd answer any questions they had.
''When was the last time you were in the White House?''
''In the early 90's, for a press conference in the East Room,'' I said. ''Hillary looks far better in person.'' They later confirmed my visit.
''What do you think of George W. Bush?''
''He's grammatically challenged, verbicidal,'' I said. ''I made plans to attend the Gore inaugural.''
I came to believe that it was an investigation in search of a crime. Eventually, they ran out of questions. I left. Steve and Cruella might have been inept, but still, I started looking over my shoulder.
Later, I submitted four Freedom of Information Act requests. The Secret Service ignored them all until my attorney filed suit in federal court. That got their attention, and my Secret Service file recently appeared in the mail. Along with the 85 pages they sent, there was a cover sheet noting, ''In addition . . . 97 pages were withheld in their entirety.'' Much of what I got was blanked out. They spelled my name five different ways, gave my weight variously as 173, 220 and the correct 190 and listed three different birthdays; my height was either 5-foot-9 or my actual 5-foot-11. The report also revealed: ''There is no indication that he has ever behaved violently toward anyone. . . . Most importantly, the subject has no interest in Potus. . . . The subject is focused on and consumed by his book. . . . Case closed.''
Recently, as I sat in a tavern, talking with a few strangers, the subject of George Bush came up. ''He's an idiot going to war for oil,'' said one. ''He's doing his daddy's dirty work,'' said another. ''He looks like Alfred E. Newman,'' said a third. But I didn't say a word.
Fredric Alan Maxwell is the author of ''Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft.''