Book Review: Emile, or On Education

Emile, the book The Social Animal is based on, is a fantastic look into Rousseau's pedagogy and general philosophy. It has interesting insights and practices for teachers and parents. Here's what struck me from the book:

Different Types of Reading

Reading for Language -- I read with a writer's mentality here: When I notice grammatical structures that "work" I write them down in a notebook I keep next to me. If I find some that clearly do not "work", I'll try to correct them on the spot. When I see a word I don't know, I'll look up in the online  dictionary, and search for more uses to get a better feel for the word. Then I'll check synonyms, and I'll find more words I don't know, and then different uses for that word.  (Note: I just started doing this while reading The Brothers Karamazov).

Reading for Contemplation -- This includes fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, self-help, and interviews, among others. While reading with a notebook by my side, I'll actively make connections to my everyday life or other things I've read. Whether the work presents a non-fiction theory or a character I can identify with, most of the works I read should make me contemplate and challenge pre-existing notions.

Reading for Information -- This is when I read much faster since I am merely trying to suck the information -- the main points -- from the work. This is typically news and technical books.

These types of reading overlap. The Brothers Karamazov I read for language and contemplation, and therefore read it very slowly. I'm reading Emile more for contemplation and information, and thus I'm reading it much faster (though not speed-reading), since I'm less focused on appreciating and absorbing the language and more focused on absorbing -- and writing down -- the information it presents.

Reading Newsletter December 2011

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

This is a special friend's favorite book, so reading this was neat in and of itself.  Thankfully, this was also an enjoyable and heartening read.

Set in New York during the times of world war II, this story follows immigrant comic-book artist Joe Kavalier and his savvy business partner and best friend Sam Clay as they take the world by storm through their best-selling comic books. While they are, admittedly, limited (they don't have many other skills, friends, or opportunities) we fall in love with this duo. This is, I think, partly because their journey is so entertaining, and partly because we measure people not by talent, but by their growth rate (c.f David Brooks Life Report). The book raises the conflicts between a) making art vs selling it and b) "high" art vs "low" art. They make their money selling "trash", as their bosses call it, but Joe becomes frustrated and wants to make a comic he considers to be "high" art. At one point, his partner Sam explicitly states that comic books are a lower form of art, but changes his mind when he sees the brilliance Joe creates. As someone who enjoys both Great Books ("high art") and contemporary rap music ("low art"), and sees genius in both, this was confirming, (or at the very least, fodder for rationalization).

Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham wrote that, as long as people get the same benefit and enjoyment, pushpin is as good as poetry. For example, Mozart = Mos Def, Hemingway = Harry Potter, etc. While i agree on the enjoyment part, I'm a bit hesitant to admit the that pushpin is -- always -- just as beneficial as poetry.

Wuthering Heights

This was awful. Not awful in the juicy, Twilight sort of way -- it was actually very well-written, it's a classic for a reason -- but awful because it's deliberately and decidedly painful.  It follows inherently contemptuous and spiteful characters as they drown in their own depravity. Ripe with tones of religious self-righteousness, as well as subtle criticisms of those tones, this book is a big train wreck-- it's the 18th century, more "high-brow"(?), version of the MTV show, The Real World.

A confession: While it pains me to say this, I kinda sorta liked it. Going through a tough week at the time,  I enjoyed reading about the misery of others in such a comical and exaggerated -- yet seemingly real -- way. I'd be curious to hear what someone else thought of this book, especially if they think it's worth reading.

The Brothers Karamazov

In a recent Charlie Rose interview, David Brooks remarked that novelists, in addition to defining the generation, used to set the morals of the day. In Russia, you were either a Tolstoy or Dostoyeski person, and this said something about you and what you believed in. I'm not sure which I am yet, though, I must say, this was a beautiful book.

It's a 800 page murder-mystery, character study, and religious & intellectual inquiry. The hero, a young monk named Aloysha, is the messenger, confidant, and moral compass of the story. Even if he's a bit parochial in his views, his religious thirst for life and ability to forgive is something I desire to emulate.

(SPOILER ALERT)

Notice the differences between Tolstoy and Dostoyeski's works. In War & Peace, Pierre marries the women he's loved since the beginning of the story. In The Brothers Karamazov, there is a bitter love triangle right until the very end, in which love is characterized as, unexpectedly, but not apologetically, arbitrary and whimsical, and driven by sex and circumstance. In Tolstoy, Pieerre is sullen and gloomy his entire life until he undergoes immeasurable suffering, which, in reviving his spirit and soul, creates a hero out of him. Whether there is a God or not, War or Peace, he decidedly, and perhaps too easily, loves life: its conversations, its patterns, its flaws, and neither asks nor expects anything more. Dostoyeski, on the contrary, ends with Alyosha, our hero, finding solace solely in suffering mandated by God. Pierre's hasty and sudden contentment and security, as well as Alyosha's questionable rationalizations and unwavering faith both leave us with the burning question: are these characters worthy heroes, lucky fools, or, perhaps, both?

Books for Next Month


Emile by Rosseau // A Sentimental Education by Flaubert // Paidea: The Ideas of Greek Culture // Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Freire // and one of John Dewey's works

Next month is my "Education" theme (more info forthcoming). If any of these catch your interest, I invite you to read one of these and join the conversation.

Reading Newsletter

Taking a page out of Ryan Holiday's playbook, I'm writing a Reading Newsletter, a list of books I've read  in the last two months. The goals of sharing this are to a) encourage myself to read more b) hear feedback + book recommendations and c) encourage others to read the same books if they're interested.

***


War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace follows the main character, Pierre, through the good, the bad, and the ugly. Tolstoy makes painstaking efforts to show how Pierre is miserable + complacent when comfortable, but happy + heroic when suffering. By displaying how social norms and expectations are imposed on Pierre, the author makes it easy for us to identify with Pierre, and with, I believe, Tolstoy himself. This work of historical fiction also aims to challenge how we view history: History is not the work of individual great men; it is the inexplicable force that causes thousands of men to give up their lives. This book could have been half as long for my liking, but the moments of beauty make the long-read well worth it. Makes me want to read more Russian Literature; what would you recommend next?


Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Reading Kahneman's book sparked a column and an essay for me. This 500 page book is, unfortunately, as my professor summarized nicely "heavy on minutia, short on policy recommendation." It has everything to do with self-knowledge, and little, if anything, to do with self-betterment. Jonah Lehrer called such self knowledge surprisingly useless -- even if you know about your flaws, you can't change them. I don't believe this makes self-knowledge useless, though. I compare it to studying baseball without hitting or pitching. Sure, you won't get that much better till you actually hit or pitch, but when you do, you'll improve faster because you'll have a better idea of what's imortant, what to avoid, what it looks like when you're doing it well, etc. To be fair, I'm evaluating Kahneman on something he never set out to do -- improve human nature. All in all, his book is enjoyable, easily readable, and provided me with new things to think about -- halo effects, base rates, representative biasess, the narrative fallacy, just to name a few -- in daily life.

Upheaval of Thought, by Martha Naussbaum


There are some great thoughts here. Having been a big fan of Seneca, who encourages us, more or less, to get over our emotions, this was a comforting -- or justifying, depending on how you look at it --insight into the value of emotions. Naussbuam states that emotions are expressions of appraisal -- they evaluate the progress of our our personal projects and desires. Kahneman would agree but add the caveat that they -- that is, system 1 + 2 -- need to be trained to understand statistics. our emotions can change when the situation is shown in new light (i.e. your mad at someone but then realize his mom is suffering from a disease and now you're sympathetic and ready to help).  I found her descriptions of erotic love interesting too, seeking explanations and justifications in works of fiction. While Naussbaum has some fantastic insights, this book is a bit hard to get into. To learn about love and the emotions, I'd rather read the works of fiction she analyzes. And i think that's what's next for this month: Proust. Bronte. Dante. Lolita.

To thank Ryan for the idea, i'll close my first newsletter the same way he closes his:

"Like I've said before, I hope that you'll get around to reading whichever of these books catch your eye and that you'll learn as much as I did. Whether you buy them on Amazon today or or at a store six months from now makes no difference to me. You're welcome to email me questions or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of a good book on a related topic, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these books comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.

I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I'd never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it. This means that I treat reading with a certain amount of respect. All I ask, if you decide to email me back, is that you're not just thinking aloud. Enjoy these books, treat your education like the job that it is, and let me know if you ever need anything."

The Social Animal

Below are my notes from David Brook's The Social Animal, emphases mine.

"A story is easier to remember than a bunch of individual letters. Expertise is about forming internal connections so that little pieces of information turn into bigger networked chunks of information. Learning is not merely about accumulating facts. It is internalizing the relationships bteween pieces of information."

"She was a firm believer in Jonah Lehrer's dictum "You know more than you know." She wanted to give him an exercise that would allow him to wander around the problem in a way that may seem haphazard and wasteful, because the mind is often most productive when it is the most carefree."

"He would go off to college and he would sit in classes as required, but he only understood those classes would be only first stage of his learning. He would have to spend nights writing random thoughts into his journal. He would organize his thoughts on the floor. He would have to stew and struggle and then maybe a few times in his life, while taking a shower or walking to the grocery store, some insight would come to him and make all the difference. This would be his method for escaping passive institutional learning."

"It is easier to change your environment than to change your insides. Change your environment and then let the new cues do the work."

"In other words, even with automatic reactions playing such a large role, we have choices. We can choose to put ourselves in environments where the moral faculties will be strengthened. A person who chooses to spend time in the military or in church will react differently to the world than a person who spends his time in nightclubs or a street gang. We can choose to practice those small acts of service that condition the mind for the moments when the big acts of sacrifice are required. We can choose the narrative we tell about our lives. We're born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can't control. But...We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to organize perceptions. "

"A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind."

"World is divided between Askers and Guessers. Askers feel no shame when making requests are willing to be told no without being hurt...Guessers hate asking for favors and feel guilty when saying no to other people's requests. In guess culture, Donderi writes, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're sure the answer will be yes...Sometimes Harold even thought of buying some self-help books--an entire genre designed to teach Guessers how to be Askers."

"On the other hand, Harold desperately wanted to know what he was supposed to do with his life. He dreamed of finding some calling that would end all uncertainty and would give his life meaning. He longed for some theme that would connect one event in his life to another and replace the jarring sensation he had that each of his moments was unconnected to what came before and after. He dreamed that someday some all-knowing mentor would sit him down and not only tell him how to live but why he was here. But his Moses never came. Of course he could never come, because you can only discover your vocation by doing it, and seeing if it feels right. There's no substitute for the process of trying on different lives, and waiting to find the one that fits."

"Some days he felt as though he was waiting for a set of opinions, habits and goals to harden in his mind."

"Wisdom, Berlin concludes, is not scientific knowledge but a special sensitiveness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor which cannot either be altered or fully described and calculated; an ability to be guided by rules of thumb -- the immemorial wisdom said to reside in peasants and other 'simple folk' -- where rules of science do not, in principle apply. This inexpressible sense of cosmic orientation is the 'sense of reality,' the 'knowledge' of how to live."

"The most important thing about any classroom is the relationship between a teacher and a student...Merit pay for teachers in the classroom. Students learn best from someone they love. Mentoring programs also create relationship...The first generation of human-capital policies gave people access to schools, colleges, and training facilities. Second-generation policies would have to help them develop the habits, knowledge, and mental traits they needed to succeed there. It's not enough to give a student the chance to go to a community college if, once she gets there, she finds the requirements confusing, the guidance counselors rude and unavailable...These obstacles defeat students lacking social capital. Second-generation human-capital policies have to pay attention to the hidden curriculum of life as much to the overt one.

"Other people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a never ending interpenetration of souls."

**

Here is a criticism of the book by a philosophy professor:

"Life, morality and politics are not science, but their improvement requires thought — not only thought about the most effective means of shaping people, which is Brooks’s concern, but thought about what our ends should be. Such questions don’t appeal to him, since they cannot be settled by empirical evidence of the kind he feels comfortable with. Brooks is out to expose the superficiality of an overly rational view of human nature, but there is more than one kind of superficiality."

DIY U

I just finished Anna Kamentz's book DIY U, about the future of education. A smart, quick read that will definitely relevant to my research. She had a really insightful piece in the NYT the other day. Below are my favorite quotes, emphases mine:

"I spend four years writing papers on Melvillle while my roomate is synthesizing proteins--what could our experiences possibly have in common that make us suitable for employment in middle management? There's no wide agreement on how to measure "liberal arts" or "critical thinking" or "decision making" or the other skills that college purports to teach."

"It's time to aggressively demystify the college degree and to say more loudly that four-year college is not for everyone: not in the name of limiting choice, but in the name of expanding it."

(On College Unbound): "His days are spent interning at a green architecture firm, his nights learning sign language , ballroom dancing, or discussing world issues with his seven roomates, and Saturday mornign taking a graduate level seminar. Monday and Friday mornings the eight college unbound students meet in an intensive seminar that crunches three general-ed requirements at a time into one, with lots of writing. "Most of the world sees intelligence as students memorizing facts that don't necessarily add practical application to their lives and regurgitating them later in life," Villagomez says. I believe intelligence is something much greater than that. It has alot more to do with adaptability."

"The way I see it, higher education, ten twenty years from now is going to look very different. It won't be the brick and mortar and the semseter and a course in this and a course in that. It's going to be more outcomes based and skill based, project based. You don't have to take these sixty courses or whatever it is to be a journalist. Someone will identify your gaps and then you address the gaps, in whatever way is possible. And that may mean taking an online course from New Zealand, being in a discussion forum with people in Canada, an internship in Mexico with Habitat for Humanity. You just need to get the knowledge and skills whatever way you can and then test out or present a portfolio. And when you add it up, a few years later, you actually are ready to be a good journalist."

"Forget about giving the guy a fish, or teaching him how to fish, either. Teach him how to teach himself, and he'll always be able to acquire the skills he needs to find food, skills you haven't even thought of yet for things you didn't know you could eat."

"The so called traditional path--graduating from high school at 18, going straight to college and living on campus, graduating at 22 and going straight into the workforce with a college-appropriate job--describes the experience of just 10% of people today."

"A complete personal learning plan ought to have four parts: finding a goal and the credentials or skills needed, formal study, experiential education, and building a personal learning network... In order to be succesfull in any educational program, the first subject you have to study is yourself. Treat it like any project: get a new notebook, a file folder, or if you have access to a computer, start a file labeled "About me" then start making a list or drawing a map for things that interest you or represent you."

Decoded

My lovely and talented sister gave me Decoded as a present. In this aesthetically beautiful book, Jay-Z tells his story, unpacks his rhymes (much more impressive than I expected), and makes a case for the integrity of hip-hop.

Some people call heroic figures who take action activists. Others call them entrepreneurs. Jay-Z calls him the modern day hustla.

"My life has been more poetry than prose, more about unpredictable leaps and links than simple steady movement, or worse, stagnation. It's allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I'm supposed to be doing next. Stories have ups and downs and moments of development followed by moments of climax; the storyteller has to keep it all together, which is an incredibly skill. But poetry is all climax, every word and line pops with the same energy as the whole; even the spaces between the words can feel charged with potential energy. It fits my style to rhyme with high stakes riding on every word and to fill every pause with pressure and possibility. And maybe I just have ADD, but I also like my rhymes to stay loose enough to follow whatever ideas hijack my train of thought, just like I like my mind to stay loose enough to absorb everything around me.

-- p. 191, emphasis mine

Book Review: Case in Point

It's becoming more important (other people have convinced me it's becoming more important) to have a grasp on business basics, to have the fundamentals down, if you will. Not everyone has access to classes. If you'd like something less time consuming to help you think about business (notice I say not as an alternative to classes, or better yet, the actual practice), Case in Point may be a good start.

Case in Point (CIP)--which is meant to be preparation for consulting interviews--gives you a high quality framework for a variety of different subjects. Quick: What are some ways Coke should increase sales its revenue? Quick: How can Ben and Jerry estimate its market size and price strategy? Quick: Motorola wants to grow its company. What are some things you should think about? CIP helps you attempt to answer these questions.

My dad correctly pointed out to me that the answers are too general and don't depict reality--that it takes years to understand the complexities inherent in these decisions--but I'd still say that a framework is better than nothing. If you were an alien and wanted to understand our planet, wouldn't playing the Sims for a few hours (until your son went to military school or you used rosebud to renovate your house) be better than nothing?

I have underwent a case study with Robert, my friend who is applying for consulting positions and who I thank for introducing me to the subject, and I find that intellectually engaging in and of itself. I'm signed up for a business class with graduate students and engineers, we'll see if I stick with it.

Book Notes: Create Your Own Economy

Excerpt from Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy, p. 96:

"The late Fischer Blank, the brilliant economist who helped invent options pricing theory in finance, was obsessed with recording his ideas and conversations. Perry Mehrling, Black's biographer, wrote about Black's life:

'He did almost all of his work in an outlining program called ThinkTank, which he used as a kind of external associative memory to supplement his own. Everything he read, every conversation he had, every thought that occurred, everything got summarized and added to the database that swelled eventually to 20 million bytes organized in 2,000 alphabetical files...Reading, discussion, and thinking that Fischer did outside the office was recorded on slips of paper to be entered into the database later. Reading, discussion and thinking that took place inside the office was recorded directly.'"

This is extreme, to be sure, but I highlight this example to make a point. Makers of ideas are not only, as shown above, storing more of their brain's activity, they--as Steven Johnson emphasized in Where Good Ideas Come From--are organizing it, using programs such as Devon Think to act as glorified search engine of their own brains, or at least what they document from them.

Imagine, a search engine which encourages you to make relevant connections between present and past thoughts. Johnson uses this program to write his books; I just downloaded a demo the other day to see what it's like.

Book Notes: I Am Charlotte Simmons

I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe follows the ambitious and beautiful girl from the south, the aspiring but outwardly meek intellectual, the athlete undergoing a personal renaissance, and the fraternity member doing his thing, and the effect is an exposé of what the modern university is really like.

Some great quotes:

p. 277 "Oh yeah. Up 'to then, students like us used to just go to graduate school and become college teachers. But after that,a new intellectual comes on the scene: the bad-ass. The bad-ass is sort of a rogue intellectual. A bad-ass doesn't want to do anything so boring and low paid and like...codified...as teaching. The bad-ass types, they're the types who don't want to spend their twenties, they don't want to spend the prime of life as a graduate student cooped up in some cubicle up in the stacks of the library. You're an intellectual, but you want to operate on a higher level. This is a new millennium, and you want to be a member of the millennial aristocracy, which is a meritocracy, but an aristo-meritocracy. You're a mutant...You're not just some dealer in ideas who's content to sell the ideas of a Marx or a Freud or a Darwin to the unenlightened...you're going to create the new matrixes yourself, or matrices I guess it is, if you see what I'm saying?"

p. 455 "'would you call yourself a fan?'...'Not in the way most fans are fans...'Well, I guess I mean I'm interested in what makes fans fans.' He wanted to say, 'Why on earth do Dupont University students with average SATs of fourteen-ninety get excited, scream their hearts out over 'their ' basketball team--which is made up of a bunch of hired mercenaries who probably wouldn't average nine hundred without the swimmies--who live a life completely apart from the real students, who feel infinitely superior to them, who eat better food in a better dining room, who have tutors to do their schoolwork for them, who say you ain't, he don', and nome saying?, who look upon friendly student fans as either sluts or suck-ups--why are they fans of such people?' But not even the egoist in Adam could push him that far."

I'll Take This From That: Getting Things Done

What do we think about all the time? Allen says it's the psychic decisions that weigh on our minds (how we want to phrase this to a friend, when and where we want to schedule our meeting, when we will fit in time to go to the supermarket, etc). In other words, open loops that we have not processed.

Allen recommends that we process everything right away, or we decide that we will process everything at a later date. His theory is that he only wants to think a thought once. He wants to have reliable systems for everything so he can get store a thought and be confident that he will be able to find it.

Since reading it, I've organized my internet bookmarks and my word documents into labeled files, follow a "Next Actions philosophy", schedule times to check everything (email, phone, facebook), and schedule times to have a clear head (turn everything off), while leaving ample time to be spontaneous. I've installed a weekly time to review my systems and take care of all the things I said I'd leave for the weekly review.

I even make my bed. Mom would be proud.