Decades ago, I read a study that compared the abilities and success of teachers in public secondary schools to those of teachers in elite private schools.  The conclusion back then was that the overall teaching capabilities of teachers in public schools were actually better than those of teachers in private schools, but that the students in private schools, on average, learned more.

From what I’ve seen over the years, as a student, as a parent, and as a university lecturer, I suspect that conclusion remains largely accurate.  That’s why I’m extraordinarily suspicious of any “new” idea or concept in education that comes from institutions such as Harvard or Yale, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, Smith, Ripon, and any other number of “elite” colleges or universities.  Why?  Because when you have both top level students and professors, almost anything will work in educating those students… and that’s something that all too many educators, particularly the administrations at state colleges and universities, don’t seem to grasp.

Now… if that “new” idea works at an inner city charter school, or public school, where most of the students are well below grade level, then… then I get interested.  Or if it works at a mid-level state university or college. But after teaching at a state university and being married to a professor who’s taught at that level for over thirty years, I’ve seen more “new” ideas floated and fail that I can even begin to count, and almost none of them worked as well as the old-fashioned methods of maintaining standards and accountability and simply requiring students to learn the material.

The same principle also applies to “inspirational” teachers. Certain individuals have the capability to inspire.  From what I’ve observed, the ability can be refined and better directed, but not all teachers have that capability, nor do all CEOs, nor all professionals in any given field.  Yet  I don’t see anyone claiming that the only good CEOs. lawyers, doctors, or dentists are the inspirational ones.  But in education, I’ve seen all too many books and articles based on what inspirational teachers do that claim that inspiration is the only way, and I’ve seen those methods succeed in making students feel better, but fail in improving their learning.

The techniques used by successful professionals [the ones who have been successful for decades, not those who are “flavour du jour”] in any field vary considerably, but the one thing those successful professionals all have in common is subject matter mastery, combined with self-discipline… and both of those are exactly what it takes for students to be successful.  And, just as in the rest of life, not all students have the ability, for whatever reason, to master certain subjects, and of those who do, not all have the self-discipline to keep at it steadily enough to attain that mastery.

What’s overlooked all too often in all the educational fads is that the desired end result is a student with a mastery of the subject, with the ability to think and apply that knowledge with skill, and the self-discipline to do so.  Fads come and go;   those basic requirements don’t.

Over the past several centuries, all manner of ethical and practical questions have been raised about the necessity of economic profit, its role in a society, and even whether it is necessary. Most truly thinking individuals [yes, a value judgment on my part] believe that, because there has never been a long-standing civilization that did not incorporate a market-based economic system in some form, some form of profit is also necessary.  Beyond that, I have some doubts that any majority consensus exists.

From my own experience and research, however, I will make two observations:  (1) Absolute maximization of profits results in a minimization of freedom.  (2) Absolute minimization of profits does the same.

The second point is more obvious to most people because a market-based economy, for a practical purposes, ceases to exist if there is no profit at all, and even the egalitarian Scandinavian countries had to pull back from taxation levels that were so high that they effectively destroyed profits.

The first point is continually ignored or disputed by extreme free-market types, despite the plethora of evidence to the contrary. What isn’t obvious to most people, particularly politicians, regulators, and ultra-price conscious consumers is that maximization of both revenue and profits requires keeping wages and costs low, keeping inventory to those items in the highest demand, and eliminating competition.  Politicians and regulators, at least at present, only look at low prices.  The Amazon lawsuit against Apple and the Big Five publishers was a perfect example.  The Department of Justice effectively stated that it didn’t care if Amazon’s practices gave it a ninety percent market share.  All DOJ cared about was that short-term prices were lower.  Well…now that Amazon won, just what happened to all those low prices?  I certainly don’t see much difference to the consumer.  Another example is the cable/satellite television market.  Now that the major communications content providers have largely consolidated and are maximizing their profits, the diversity of content has dropped drastically… and prices have increased. Walmart is yet another example.

Or put in another context, freedom in any area isn’t free.  Just as there’s a cost to political freedom, there’s also a cost to economic freedom of choice, and when low prices completely trump freedom of choice, not only does quality suffer for the goods most people can afford, but only the ultra-rich can afford truly high quality goods and services… and some goods and services aren’t available at any price… and in the long run, prices aren’t even lower.

In the early to mid-1970s, a Jesuit priest began a quiet, indeed almost unknown [at the time] effort, to help political refugees, liberals, and reformers, escape incarceration or liquidation by militarily-dominated South American governments.  During this period, the priest never spoke out against these governments, although one Catholic bishop – Jeronimo Podesta – did so and had been promptly suspended as a priest, never to return to the clergy.  At the same time, this Jesuit priest continued to help many of those persecuted by the government, and various reports put the number of those he helped or saved in excess of a hundred, possibly more, at a time when literally thousands of people vanished, never to be seen again. Much later, in 2000, he was the first prominent Catholic to declare that the Argentine Catholic Church needed to put on “garments of public penance” for its failures during the “Dirty War” of the 1970s. That Jesuit priest, of course, was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis.

Some of his detractors fault him for not speaking out and taking a public position during the Dirty War.  Others, particularly those he did save, praise him for what he did, noting that he even saved people and made efforts for those with whose political beliefs he did not agree.

Was he a hero, as some say, or did he betray his duty as a priest by not taking a public stance? While likely everyone will have an answer, I’d like to pose the question differently – when is taking a public position useful, even heroic, and when is it a futile and meaningless gesture, one that essentially keeps the individual from doing any good at all?

In a way, to my thinking, what happened in Nazi Germany before WWII offers a useful analogy.  In 1930, speaking out against Hitler and the Nazis might have done some good, especially if more powerful and noteworthy individuals had done so.  By 1940, doing so was suicide, and a suicide that accomplished absolutely nothing.

Father Bergoglio had been ordained as a priest in December 1969, and did not even become a Jesuit until 1973.  He was not that well-known, if known at all outside of a limited circle, and, as a man from a humble background, who had been a janitor and a low-level laboratory technician, he certainly didn’t have powerful friends or influential contacts at that point in his life.  When those few in the church who had position and power, such as Podesta, did speak out, they were silenced, in one way or another.  It would appear that Father Bergoglio did what he could do and did his best to save those that he could.

Was it heroism?  Probably not grand and glorious heroism, but it took great courage and strength of will, because, if he had been discovered, he would likely have vanished as so many others did during that time. And is it heroism, truly, to speak out when it is vain, when by being less obvious, one could save more?  Yet…how does one tell?  And without being in Father Bergoglio’s cassock at the time, how can those who would judge him tell, either?

NOTE:  As one whose beliefs approximate Anglican/Episcopalian agnosticism, I’m trying to offer an open question.

Moby Dick is indeed missing, but it’s the asteroid, not the Herman Melville book, which, I have to confess, I could never get around to finishing, one of the handful of novels I chose not to struggle through… and considering how many bad novels I’ve had to read over my career, I think that says something.  The asteroid Moby Dick [asteroid 2000 EM26], a chunk of rock some 270 meters long, was supposed to show up sometime last month roughly 2 million miles from Earth… and didn’t.

The fact that telescopes couldn’t find it doesn’t mean that aliens exploded it or that it disintegrated, but that either astronomers didn’t calculate its orbit correctly when it was discovered in 2002 or that various gravitational forces nudged it into a different orbit.  What’s troubling about this is that the “failure to appear” is indicative of our vulnerability to large objects colliding with Earth.  A piece of rock roughly the size of a WWII cruiser falling to Earth doesn’t sound that catastrophic to most people, but most people don’t understand the results produced when even comparatively small chunks of rock slam into the planet.

The Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia a little over a year ago with a force of 500 kilotons [some 30 times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima] was much smaller than Moby Dick, only some 20 meters across, but it injured some 1,500 people seriously enough to require medical treatment and damaged over 7,000 buildings – all from the effects of a shock wave that began more than 20 kilometers away high in the atmosphere. That’s what a comparatively small chunk of rock did after hitting the Earth’s atmosphere at more than 40,000 miles per hour.

In 1908, another object, either a comet or a small asteroid, exploded above the Tunguska River in Siberia, flattening some 80 million trees over an area of 800 square miles, and, of course, there is also the Chicxulub Crater at the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula – a crater 110 miles in diameter formed 65 million years ago when a bolide six miles in diameter struck the earth at 40,000 miles per hour.  Scientists have calculated that the impact would have released two million times more energy than the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated, broiling the earth’s surface, igniting wildfires worldwide and plunging Earth into darkness as debris filled clouded the atmosphere. Some suggest this was the event that led to the end of the dinosaurs.  Whether it did or not, such an impact today would effectively destroy pretty much all human societies and their infrastructure.

But for all the suggestions and warnings, what have we done?  Not nearly enough.  Not anywhere close to all the near-Earth asteroids and other objects capable of impacting Earth have been discovered and followed, and we certainly haven’t developed the capability to deflect even moderate sized rocks.  In the meantime, the financial industry spends tens of millions of dollars to execute securities trades in nanoseconds in order to make billions through sheer speculation.

From reading some of my posts, readers might get the impression that I’m not extremely fond of religion.  In some ways, I’m not.  I’m especially skeptical of organized religions that, in their attempts to grow and perpetuate their doctrines and “way of life,” succeed in creating a mental state where those who practice the faith become essentially blind to the shortcomings and huge inconsistencies inherent in that faith… and often reject literal physical realities because they conflict with their beliefs.

On the other hand, given human nature, I’m not so sure that human societies without any religion at all, at least today, might not be far crueler, less ordered, and less desirable places in which to live, but then, ultra-theocratic societies tend to be religiously ordered to the point of denying human freedoms, as well as also being crueler and less desirable places to live, especially for women.

As I’ve noted before, the only codes of behavior the majority of human beings have accepted, at least for most of human history, have been those with strong roots in religion.  I suspect that’s because most of us really don’t think another human being has the “right” to declare what rules our conduct should follow, but that “God” does.  Yet, paradoxically, “God” doesn’t tell us that.  Other human beings tell us what God told them is correct behavior, and for most people throughout history, such theologically derived codes of law and behavior have been accepted. I suspect part of the reason for this is not necessarily great unanimity, but a combination of religious belief and simple pragmatism, and it may be that the key to a “good” society is indeed the combination of a theological concern and a secular pragmatism.  Certainly, those few societies without a significant religious “tie,” such as Nazism and Communism, have been anything but “good” places to live, yet the same is true for ultra-religious societies.  Oh… the “true believers” in those societies did well, but not many others.

History does show that societies dominated by religion tend to be short on human freedoms, creativity, and progress.  Societies where religion plays no role in setting cultural values also tend to be short on human freedom and restrict creativity, but often achieve progress for a time by stealing from others in various ways.

So, as much as I may complain or point out the notable shortcomings of religion, and organized religion in particular, it appears that healthy societies require some theological basis, at least at the current level of human ethical development.  The question then becomes to what degree religion should influence government, law, and behavior. Personally, I think the Founding Fathers got it right, but I mean it in the way they wrote the Constitution, and not in the activist way in which too many true believers seem to think that freedom of religion means the freedom to compel others to behave according to their religious beliefs or the freedom to enact laws that in some fashion or another effectively institutionalize those beliefs.