A Practical Arts Paradigm

This is Part 2 of Rule 5, Teach More Practical Arts.

Add to your mental toolbox; sample the world's wisdom at a very high level; take a quick peek at some practical applications...Repeat until you are sick of it, you have run out of tuition money, or you have knocked up your girlfriend. Then apply your massive mental toolbox to the career of your choice. And it's truly your choice! You get full information before you ever even have too think too much about a career. With that broad sampling of wisdom you can make an informed choice. With that full mental toolbox you can adapt already mastered tools to the needs of your new career. It's about freedom, baby!

Or, at least it is if you aren't buried in student debt, if you don't have to live on an intern salary while raising a toddler, your boss has the patience to let you learn the particulars of the business that you didn't learn in school, and you haven't forgotten 80% of those mental tools you supposedly learned.

Who in the audience remembers how to use what they learned in Algebra 2? Can you speak the foreign language you "learned" in high school? Knowledge not applied is knowledge soon forgotten. The standard path of academic learning is incredibly wasteful.

In order to come up with something better, let's take at the existing liberal arts model from a high level perspective. Have a look at the flowchart below:

Admittedly, I'm going to beat up a straw man to some degree. Real world schools deviate from this model to varying degrees. Back in the day I spent some class time learning boating safety, forestry, welding, and typing, for example. Still, this model forms the backbone of the liberal arts academic learning path. Now for some explanations of the diagram

• By mental tools I mean such skills as grammar, arithmetic, algebra, logic, higher mathematics, and the ability to read hard material.

• By arcane wisdom I mean subjects that are either very general, high in abstraction, have limited direct application, and/or are obscure. Pure science wins over engineering. Fine art over commercial art, even if "fine art" means appreciating ugly splotches of paint. Analyzing the crap out of a Shakespeare play wins out over being able to write a newspaper article, corporate memo, or technical spec. And then there is philosophy -- no focusing on your career until you've had at least a short wrestling bout with questions which haven't been answered in 2500 years.

• By sampled arcane knowledge I mean that the system encourages going shallow until you choose a major. The purpose of that high school language class is to think more about language itself, not to actually learn enough of that language to fluently speak it. (And yes, this can be useful. For the children of parents who cannot properly conjugate a verb, rigorous instruction in a foreign grammar might be the more respectful option.)

• Those curved arrows have two meanings. First, the mental tools are used to learn the arcane knowledge, and the arcane knowledge is used as exercises in applying the mental tools. Second, the arrows imply an iterative process. Instead of completely teaching any subject in depth in one fell swoop, the system teaches the same subjects again and again and again and again with a bit added with each iteration. I was introduced to Set Theory in second grade! The textbook was entitled Sets, Numbers, Numerals. I actually used set theory for its intended purpose my junior year of college. And then there were the repeated reading classes. I read my first word while sitting in a high chair. I was still subjected to twelve years of reading classes. Arrrrgh! I admit that multiple iterations of some subjects are indeed needed, but the system can be outright ridiculous at times.

Here's a wacky notion: teach more practical skills and knowledge early in the curriculum. Use practical applications instead of arcane wisdom to provide some of the exercise of the mental skills. And when practical, go deep early. Have some classes which are valuable in and of themselves. "You will need this for Nth Grade" and "You will need this for college" gets old.

For example, do go all in with an intense focus on reading skills—including phonics—during early elementary school. The ability to read is largely useless and uninteresting at the Hop on Pop level. So maintain a laser like focus on reading skill until reading is useful. Then back off for a while! Just give the kids books to read and a safe comfortable environment to read them. Let them read what they want to read and don't destroy the joy by requiring book reports or other testing. Many students will want to discuss the books that they read. Let them; don't push them.

I shudder at the memories of excess literature classes. Do not force me to understand why Hamlet is great literature. It isn't. To me, Hamlet stank like unflavored yogurt. I am utterly uninterested in the rantings of a dithering gamma male who uses his brain as a waffle iron. And thanks to modern medicine, iambic pentameter can now be cured.

Admittedly, studying Julius Caesar was fun. There were lots of cool pithy quotes, and assassinating out of control dictators is a useful life skill. But when it comes to studying the mechanics of literature, I'd rather go deep picking apart L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth. By almost every metric Battlefield Earth is absolutely terrible: the science is stupid and the social commentary is stupider, the characters are cartoonish and their names are laughably corny, and the book even came with a soundtrack album which had an awfulness coefficient of 8.7 Shatners. Despite all these flaws, thousands of people with IQ's higher than the average US. President have found Battlefield Earth hard to put down. The action scenes are positively riveting. Anyone who wants to master the mechanics of writing an action packed story which doesn't degenerate into a light show should put Battlefield Earth under the literary microscope. Battlefield Earth manifests the Platonic Ideal of action writing, for this book works despite having no other literary merits whatsoever.

On the other hand, if you are an aspiring dithering gamma male or aspiring actor, and you haven't had your iambic pentameter shots, by all means study Hamlet. Good literature is subjective.

I could rant on, but fantasy author Larry Correia has written much better rant [link] on the subject than I could ever hope to pen. Go there if you want more on the subject of literature class. I'm moving on to math.

Mathematics is the ultimate in pure philosophy, and the ancient Greeks appreciated it as such. Unfortunately, most math textbooks are written by people who share this particular Greek perversion, and thus use a minimum of text and a maximum of numbers and obscure squiggles. This is why Barbie thinks math is hard. Normal people need more motivation before putting in that much brain sweat.

The best review for a math class is not a repeat-but-with-some-new-material class. The best review is a practical application of the newly partially mastered skills. I'd have application classes lag at most a semester behind their respective math classes. Personally, I profited from taking Calculus I and Physics With Calculus at the same time—but I had already taken a first pass at Calculus I on my own in the local community college library while I was still in high school, so maybe a bit of lag may be better in general. The science isn't settled.

You don't have to be on the way to a STEM career to have practical applications of high school math. Everyone who wants to invest for retirement or do their own taxes should study some basic accounting and finance. Aspiring entrepreneurs and managers should know rather more on these subjects and throw in cost estimation and strategic thinking for good measure. And anyone who wants to vote should know some probability and statistics in order to evaluate government studies and reporter rants. All these things are applications of math that can be taught at the high school level.

We can also use practical applications as motivation to learn a new math concept in the first place. For example, introductory physics is intimidating because you need to learn about both vectors and differential calculus in order to begin to study motion. That's too much new material before practical payoff! Fortunately, vector algebra is useful for both computer graphics and the study of static forces. If you want to build structures which don't fall down, the study of static forces can be rather handy. The study of three dimensional vectors could be a nice bridge between trigonometry and linear algebra. Delay the study of complex numbers to senior year and you can have students fluent in vectors before they ever start high school physics.

Deriving the Universe is Hard

There is a problem with going all in with applications of mathematics: often you need some pretty serious mathematical tools to solve nontrivial problems. There is a solution, but it will horrify the mathematical savants in the audience: sacrifice some rigor; use the concept/method first and prove it thoroughly later.

For example, we generally teach calculus by starting with tedious limit theorems whose ultimate purpose is unclear. Then we teach how to take derivatives, going through a wide catalog of analytic methods. Some useful applications are shown at this point. Then we tackle the harder problem of analytically solving integrals. For me, some heavy stuff came next: integrating over volumes and surfaces, Taylor's theorem, line integrals, etc. Actually solving differential equations was a fourth semester class.

Newton's Second Law is a differential equation, and second order at that. We have a problem...

My solution? Start with simple numerical methods! Numerical methods are to calculus what counting pebbles and looking at number lines are to first grade arithmetic. Imagine if we tried teaching first grade arithmetic using a rigorous axiomatic approach: "Now class, the real numbers are an ordered field for which the following operations are defined..." Mathematical literacy would become rare indeed! Axiomatic reasoning is indeed powerful. It can result in generalizing concepts originally discovered/learned via the real world. Whole numbers got generalized into fractions and decimals in order to achieve closure for division. Closure for subtraction gave us negative numbers. Square roots led to irrational numbers. Polynomials need complex numbers for closure...But generalized abstract reasoning is unintuitive and a terribly inefficient way to introduce new concepts.

Let's go back to my proposal to teach numerical methods early. Yes, this involves a bunch of tedius arithmetic, but we have calculators now. And some schools might teach some computer programming early enough to allow solutions via programming exercises. True, the simpler, more intuitive methods can be inaccurate and/or unstable. Numerical differentiation has terrible round-off error problems. None of this is a deal killer! By exposing students to these problems first, they have a motivation for learning the more rigorous analytic methods. They will understand the reason for those tedious limit theorems, since they have already wrestled with finite differences.

Mathematical rigor is important, but difficult. Indeed, deductive logic in general is important but difficult. Performing multi step logical inference is an unnatural act. Inductive reasoning is considerably more natural. Many, if not most, people learn far faster through examples, experiences, stories, and analogies. As Charles Murray points out in Real Education, many people never master the art of extended logical reasoning; time trying to repeatedly teach this art is wasted time that could be spent teaching useful wisdom.

Natural learning has its downsides. It doesn't compress well. One theory or Narrative can encapsulate the lesson of a thousand examples. Masters of rational thought can appear to have great memories when they really don't. Also, inductive reasoning can produce wildly contradictory rules of thumb or outright silly superstitions. The ability to integrate vast amounts of wisdom into logically consistent rules, and be able to extrapolate the consequences of those rules, is something of a super power. It should be taught to those who have the ability to learn it.

But this power is oft less super than advertised! A perfectly sound line of reasoning can lead to wrong conclusions if the premises fail to match reality sufficiently. As an example, go back to Rule 1, where I picked apart our "Free Trade" policies. I would like to claim that I found the error through diligent reasoning, but that would by lying. I'm not that smart. Instead, I was exposed for years to news of protesters and populist politicians complaining about Unfair Trade and whatnot. Their claims seemed absurd to me based on my knowledge of microeconomics, but they kept pointing me back to the raw data. That Rust Belt has been rusting for decades. Detroit is a mess. All this Creative Destruction isn't looking so creative. Only after reality slapped me across the face multiple times with a wet salmon did I dive in and try to figure out why Ricardo's theory wasn't working as advertised.

Those who excel at abstraction need some hefty doses of humility. Throughout their education they need to pause and try to apply their book learning to real problems, not just the artificially bounded excercises found in typical textbooks and tests. And the grader should be reality, not a teacher. Give a smart person an exalted degree from a prestigious university without such humility generating experiences and you create menaces to society: lawyers and lawmakers who think they can backseat drive America's businesses, MBAs who optimize once great companies into the ground, Neocons who start unwinnable wars, and Marxists who think they know how to run an entire economy.

And yes, even freedom lovers are vulnerable to hubris when they attempt to derive the universe. Take Ayn Rand, for instance. She attempted to derive a system of ethics based on the idea that Man is a rational animal. Yet as we have just explored, sound reasoning has to be taught and a large fraction of the population can't be taught. Are those people not really human? And what about children? Children don't survive through Reason; children survive by being cute.

Children are notably absent in Atlas Shrugged. There's a lesson here.

Teach More Guy Stuff

Back when school shootings were in the news, there was talk of arming teachers or having armed guards in schools. The latter is a horrible idea. What is a uniformed armed guard to do during the 99.999% of the time there isn't a school shooter situation? Stand around uselessly? This would be a prescription for contempt and abuse by the students. Over time the armed guards might end up becoming a bigger danger to the schools than the shooters they are supposed to thwart. And I wonder how many of the Mall Cop status guards will put their lives on the line for the students who have mocked them over the years?

The more likely situation is that such guards will find something to do. Expect extra backpack inspections and other bits of security theater. Expect a generation of adults who learned to put up with fascist bullshit for most of their childhoods. Goodbye Land of the Free. And goodbye Second Amendment.

The alternative of armed teachers is also problematic. The types of people who become school teachers -- especially elementary school teachers -- are not generally the sort of people who are into combat shooting. There are exceptions, of course, especially among coaches and shop teachers. But elementary schools tend to be light on coaches and shop teachers.

Here is my eeeevil proposal: have a military veteran, ex cop, or other man with combat weapons training at every public school -- as a teacher. And what should they teach? Guy stuff! Let them teach military history, wilderness survival, primitive technology, model rocketry, BB gun marksmanship and gun safety, elementary military training, woodworking, blacksmithing, electronics, how things work, how to kill communists...

And yes, make it a guy. Call me sexist if you will. I'll call it Affirmative Action. Men are underrepresented in elementary schools, and this is a major problem in this age of Single Motherhood. Boys need positive male role models, and if they cannot find them, they'll settle for negative role models such as celebrities or street gang leaders.

And while I'm being sexist, I'll double down and be racist while I'm at it. If a school is predominantly Black, I want the armed Guy Stuff teacher to be Black. I want those boys to grow up realizing that they can be law abiding, bad ass, patriotic, and Black at the same time.

What I don't want is someone who has gone to college majoring in Guy Stuff and going straight into teaching. I want men who have done something in the real world: felled trees, fought fires, built houses, killed terrorists,... so they have some cool "war stories" to tell.

Such a teacher will be the Cool Teacher and be loved by the students, and will thus love the students back. Such a teacher will be thus more likely to put his life on the line in an active shooter situation than even local law enforcement. Meanwhile, students will see the Militia Principle in action on a regular basis. The Second Amendment may survive another generation.

And such Guy Stuff teachers will fill a gaping void in our kids' education. Once upon a Gee Whiz time, we had two-parent families, a viable Boy Scouts program, high trust communities, and after school jobs to provide boys with role models and status. Today, we have boys raised by Mom only and sent to schools run by feminist bitches drunk on Intersectionality Theory. Is it any wonder that boys are asking to be castrated in record numbers these days? Is it any wonder that fewer men are going to college than women?

Get some Real Men in our elementary and intermediate schools. And give boys time doing something that involves moving around so they don't need to be drugged while we are at it.

So ends Part 2. In Part 3, “A More Natural Learning Cycle,” I cover order of operations, student-driven vs. school driven learning, grading systems, and school management ideas.