There are and have been quite a few teachers in my family, as far back as my grandmother, and they include those who have taught or are teaching at the elementary, secondary, collegiate, and post-graduate/doctoral levels. Every single one of them, at one time or another, has been singled out as an excellent and inspirational teacher. And every single one of them who is still living is concerned about a trend in American education that has received very little attention.

Oh… there is a great amount of concern about the state of education and whether students are getting the education they need to succeed in an ever-more complex and technological society. There are the proponents and the opponents of more testing to ensure accountability. There are those who favor more inclusive curricula and those who favor a “back to basics” approach. There are those who push merit pay for “better” [I quote this, because to date, I haven’t seen any good and fair way to determine exactly what determines “better”] teachers, and those who oppose it.

But… while someone, somewhere, may have pointed out the trend I’m about to mention, if they have, it’s certainly been lost amid all the other “teaching issues.” And it shouldn’t be. It’s very basic.

The responsibility for learning has been quietly but dramatically shifted over the past two generations. Long years ago, when I was in school, and longer years ago, when my parents and grandparents were in school, the responsibility was very clear. Regardless of the circumstances, the student was the one who was responsible for learning, and the teacher was responsible for teaching. Today, everywhere I look, and everywhere the teachers in my family look, the responsibility for both has been placed on the teacher. Today, teachers must inspire; they must create the atmosphere in which children will learn; they must create a climate where student self-esteem promotes learning. Everything must be positive, despite the fact that, outside of school, life has a tendency to provide far more sticks than carrots, and that “life lessons” can be brutal.

It has gotten to the point where most students take little or no responsibility for learning, particularly if the subject is difficult or “boring.” I’m sorry, but learning well the basics of most disciplines can and will be boring. It takes practice and more practice. Everyone seems to understand that in terms of athletics, but it’s a point apparently lost in school and academics. Learning beyond the simple basics is work; work requires effort; and it shouldn’t be the teacher’s responsibility to provide the student’s motivation.

Whether this is the result of a media culture that spoon-feeds, simplifies, and dumbs down everything, or a tendency to over-protect children, or results from other societal factors is, frankly, secondary. What is being overlooked is that no teacher, no matter how good, talented, and inspirational, can be more than marginally effective when faced with large classrooms filled primarily with students whose motivation is not to learn, but to get through without working or to obtain good grades with the least amount of effort. And all the educational reforms, all the merit pay, all the “back-to-basics” movements, all the testing, and all the legislation will not improve education significantly until parents and society recognize that students have a responsibility for their own education… and act to instill that responsibility.

The actual will to learn has to come from the student, and until our society understands that — and acts on it by emphasizing that students are personally responsible and by letting them fail, horrible as that sounds, when they are not responsible — all of the other “reforms” will result in little improvement in the education of the majority of students.

Over the years, I’ve often heard the argument that all too many laws are biased against the poor or the disadvantaged. One particular example that was cited for years was that in many jurisdictions, the penalties for possessing “crack” cocaine were far stiffer than for possessing exactly the same amount of powdered cocaine, and because crack was more prevalent in poorer neighborhoods, the law was more lenient in dealing with wealthier addicts. Another example is that often criminals who commit what amount to small scale robberies with weapons face far, far greater sentences than do “white collar” criminals who embezzle or misdirect far, far greater sums. In fact, from what I’ve seen, this differential goes much farther than that and generally seems based on the idea that threatening someone with a weapon or violence outweighs all other factors.

I’m not suggesting greater leniency for criminals who try to get their way with weapons or force. Far from it. What I am going to suggest, however, is that, as a society, we’ve bought into the idea that a crime that does not involve violence is somehow less of a crime… or that an act that “legally” deprives others of their money, houses, or other goods, even when the victims are not culpable, is not a crime at all.

Currently, we’re in a financial crisis that has effectively reduced the collective wealth of the United States by something like forty percent. Certainly, my retirement funds, parked in a solid and stable and conservative set of mutual funds, are down somewhere in that neighborhood, and I’ve heard of others losing even more. I didn’t gamble with the money. I didn’t follow hot-shot brokers and tips. But like hundreds of millions of Americans, I had that money taken, in effect, stolen because a group of hot-shot money managers came up with ways to leverage financial assets, in some cases as high as 130 to one, in order to boost their corporate profits and to “earn” extraordinary bonuses.

Now… if you asked any one of them what would happen if ten percent of these assets went bad, at least some of them could have predicted what would happen. That’s knowledgeable neglect. Most didn’t understand at all. They just went along. That’s negligence.

The basis behind criminal law, in an overall sense, is to deter crime and harm to the individual and to punish those who create such harm. We tend to classify such crimes on the severity of the harm and on the intent of the perpetrator, with an offense such as premeditated murder being one of the more severe, because the perpetrator knew he or she was going to commit the offense of taking another life. Assault generally merits less punishment… and so on. But some acts, even when “accidental,” also merit punishment, such as involuntary manslaughter or accidental vehicular manslaughter.

Now… let us say that an individual has diligently saved five percent of his or her earnings for thirty or forty years, a sum amounting to years of work… and through either premeditation or negligence someone takes it away. If that someone is a thief or an embezzler, the act comes under criminal law. If that someone is a corporate CEO who agrees to massive trades in credit-default swaps and derivatives, then he can just claim he made a mistake… and most won’t even do that, even in front of a Congressional hearing.

Right now, a broker, a brokerage firm, an investment banker, and many other individuals can take actions that lead to financial devastation for millions of others — and walk away, essentially unscathed, saying, “It was just the market.” Or “we did the best we could.” And all too many of them take enormous bonuses when they leave. We tend not to let careless drivers, doctors, or lawyers get away with such excuses when they’ve committed malpractice. Exactly how did we set up a structure where those individuals who manage our savings and our retirement have no liability and accountability for incredibly poor judgment or out-and-out negligence?

Perhaps to take care of the worst abuses, we ought to enact legislation that creates criminal punishments for “involuntary theft” or “fiduciary negligence,” in cases where the actions of an individual, regardless of his corporate standing, lead directly to the loss of significant sums of money on the part of large numbers of individuals. Perhaps then, if they faced the possibility of long prison terms, some of these financial types wouldn’t be quite so quick to adopt and endorse leverage schemes they don’t understand.

I know… any such suggestion will have the financial gurus claiming that such laws and regulations will destroy the world financial structures. So… for all those of you who don’t like my thoughts and suggestions, what exactly would you suggest to create greater accountability and responsibility? And… please, please… don’t cite Adam Smith and the invisible hand or the pure and free market. History has proved, time and time again, that, while such a free market might work if men and women were angels, history has also demonstrated that people aren’t anywhere close to that honest and altruistic where money is concerned, especially other people’s money.

Are the stock markets and the publishing markets subject to the same sorts of ups and downs…and crashes? In some ways, that sounds like an attempt to draw an impossible parallel, but since the fluctuations of both are created by the interplay of financial, logical, and emotional factors, I’m not so certain that there aren’t certain similarities.

Theoretically, each is based on financial principles. If a publisher doesn’t make money, sooner or later, the company goes under or gets reorganized. Authors whose books don’t sell sooner or later don’t sell any more books… and it’s often sooner, rather than later. Likewise, the price of stock in money-losing companies usually goes down, and if a dividend-paying company can’t pay its dividend, or cuts it, the stock price usually plummets.

In both the stock market and in publishing, there are scores of analysts who try to predict what will happen and what stock or book is hot… with more than a few reasons why you should or should not buy said book or stock. And in both areas, they’re often wrong.

And in both markets, the financial results are strongly influenced by hype and by perception. Some books that show marginal technical writing ability, but which tell a story that taps into a popular sensibility sell incredibly well, far beyond what most editors and publishers would have predicted, while others, even with the same general theme and better written, do not. Also, there are books that, like a popular “stock-de-jour,” enjoy a quick flash on the best-seller list and then sink, forgotten by all within a year. There are other books, like stodgy and conservative utility stocks, that sell well but not spectacularly year after year.

But what about crashes? Will the publishing market suffer the same sort of financial melt-down as the financial markets appear to be experiencing at present?

So far, at least, and for the past century, overall book sales don’t seem to be quite so precipitous in either their ascents or descents as the stock market. But… that’s not true of the sales of individual authors, some of whom have either seen smashing sales success, followed by years of decline into oblivion, and others who have been one-book hits, and still others who have toiled for years, barely staying in print, until some book, somehow, propelled them into success.

And as in the stock market, no matter what the “experts” claim, successes and failures don’t seem to follow just logic or expertise.

Recently, I’ve run across a number of blogs, commentaries, and the like about the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has been awarded to a well-established French writer, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, whose work is less known outside France. Interestingly enough, the Swedish Academy praised Le Clezio as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure… explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

According to public information, the new Nobel Laureate has published more than 40 essays, novels, and children’s books, where he has written of exile and self-discovery, cultural dislocation and globalization and the clash between modern civilization and traditional cultures.

At the same time, a noted critic of American fiction, Horace Engdahl, who is also the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, has suggested that it is unlikely that the U.S. will produce a Nobel Prize winner because American writers are “too insular, too isolated” and “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.”

Now… I have nothing for — or against — Mr. Le Clezio, because I have to confess that I’ve never read any of his work, partly because there aren’t any French bookstores in Southwestern Utah and because his work is largely untranslated into English.

But I have to ask, “To which American writers are you referring, Mr. Engdahl?”

I have written all the themes claimed as reasons for awarding the Nobel to Mr. Le Clezio, and there are several handfuls, if not more, of talented American writers who have also done the same. All of us have written well outside contemporary U.S. culture, while at times also dissecting that very culture and contrasting it to alien cultures. Many have produced a larger body of work than Mr. Le Clezio, and certainly a writer like Ursula K. LeGuin, for example, has more than transcended her “own” culture. Or is the problem that all those who might nominate American writers only select those who are in fact “insular,” rather than nominating from the F&SF community, where writers usually do go well beyond the parochial?

Of course, I’m just a “genre” writer, but I do find it most interesting that what I — and others also classed as such — write fits into the description of what it takes to win a Nobel Prize for literature, at least according to the press releases of the Swedish Academy, while those who are praised and acclaimed by “mainstream” U.S. critics are dismissed as “too insular” by those associated with the Nobel Prize selection and administration.

That leaves us F&SF “genre writers” damned either way, it appears.

Once upon a time, some two thousand years ago, there was a city of a million people, with great aqueducts, public baths, a solid sewage and sanitation system, and that city ruled the largest empire the world had then known. Little more than two centuries ago, that great city had dwindled to something like 50,000 people living above and amid the ruins of greatness. Although Rome has since rebuilt itself, for much of the past millennium it was a shadow of its former greatness. Some 4600 years ago, another city, known as Mohenjo-Daro, flourished in the Indus River valley. It too had good water and sanitation systems, with bathing facilities in individual dwellings, and a central granary that suggests a sophisticated culture. Today, only ruins remain.

The world is littered with ruins of former great cities and empires. And why do I raise this oh-so-obvious observation? Because these ruins obscure an even more basic and obvious point — one that was overlooked by the vast majority of the citizens of each of these fallen great cities. That may be because what lies behind the observation is so very simple.

Because of the complexity of great and advanced cultures, such societies are incredibly fragile and can only be maintained by equally great and cooperative effort.

And it is a form of cultural and societal arrogance to refuse to understand the underlying fragility of a complex society. Look what happened after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans… or in L.A. almost a generation ago during the Watts Riots.

Just look at the chaos in the world financial markets. We were on the brink of having an entire productive society shut down because banks could not or would not lend… because they have no way of trusting or verifying the trustworthiness of those who would borrow. We have incurred trillions of dollars in debt because those who created various securities also created an uncertain and untrustworthy marketplace. Yet… have we had a global famine, or a war of the scale of World War II? Or even a continental impact on crops similar to that created by the dust bowl of the 1930s?

We have not, and yet our entire system of commerce, on which our civilization is predicated, is teetering, and no one seems to have an answer.

Cooperative effort has to be based on trust, and trust comes from believing that most others will do their part and not take undue and undeserved advantage of others. Cooperation can be maintained, for a time, without trust, through bribery of various sorts, such as buying votes and public support through the diversion of resources or increasing public debt, and through fear of a greater calamity — such as a great enemy, either real or contrived — or through promises of a better tomorrow of some sort. But, over time, and in the end, if public trust is not either maintained or rebuilt, that society is doomed.

Right now, that public trust is threatened, and all the technically “correct” adjustments to the lending and borrowing will fail unless steps are also taken to reassure the people that the abuses of the past will be corrected and that massive and undeserved diversions of resources into the hands of a comparative few will no longer be tolerated.

It’s not communism or socialism to suggest that financial rewards — for salaried employees, because that’s exactly what CEOs are — of as much as 1,000 times the income of an average worker, if not more, are both economically unwarranted and an abuse of public trust.

Yet those who have taken such rewards fail to understand, or perhaps, like the Roman emperors of old, choose not to understand, that continuing such a system makes a society more and more fragile, both economically and politically, until it reaches the point where it cannot and will not stand on its own. In the past, such an erosion of public trust took longer, because communications and knowledge were slower to diffuse through the system and because those lower in society had less access to both.

With higher technology everything happens more quickly, both prosperity and expansion, and in turn, the loss of public trust and confidence. Will we be so sure of ourselves and our society, so arrogant that we will refuse to see the fragility of our society and refuse to act to renew and rebuild it?

Sic gloria transit.