I. General Introduction
II. Modules for Many Occupations
III. Music, my other retiremen project
IV. What's New
This site aims to help you learn howto be a creative thinker by getting hands- on familiarity in many fields, such as economics, history, law, medicine, engineering, and on and on. I hope to get others to contribute modules for their fields that will have readings and exercises in semester bite sizes. It is run by Frank Forman, an economist retired after 26 years at the U.S. Department of Education. His e-mail address is eckerch@panix.com, except that that incorrect. I don't want robots to flood me with bogus mail. What you do is take the last two letters of the user name and move them to the beginning.
This is half of the site. The other half is about his placing 10,000 78s of classical music on the Web. Go to the end for it.
Education needs to move away from emphasizing content (beyond mastering the three Rs) toward enabling one to draw insights from a variety of ways of thinking. What this site will try to do is to offer modules that enable you to gain something of a hands-on familiarity with how economists, historians, engineers, and many, many more, approach problems in diverse but ultimately compatible ways. My hope is that you will be able to imagine how those in these occupations will approach a problem and also how to conduct focused research on the Internet. I call this skill hyperlink thinking. It is a true twenty-first thinking skill, not available to the world until the first graphics Web browsers in 1994 and barely to researchers who could chase from floor to floor in top-notch academic libraries.
What you will read now is highly preliminary. They were "zusammengestohlen von verschiedenen Diesem und Jenem" (stolen together from various theses and thoses), as Beethoven wrote on the manuscript of his fourteenth string quartet. I do want to get something out now. I shall be writing the economics module, which should be equivalent of about a semester's study. You get out of learning only what you put into it! And I invite others to contribute their own modules.
I hope to keep the temperature of this site down and so want to avoid, above all, controversies over politics. Understanding those who hold different views is indeed helpful, when that understanding avoids psychologizing, but I am concerned here with occupations and with helping you get a hands-on feeling for many different ones.
My aim is thoroughly practical, to help you learn different perspectives to shine on whatever problems, situations, and challenges you are having. Different disciplinary worldviews are fascinating to study in the abstract. I found this out when I read books on computer programming without actually sitting down at a computer, I learned nothing.
I would indeed love to cover the ways of thinking in those of other cultures as well those of occupations, and go beyond the usual superficialities, but in a practical way, not just by offering something interesting to read. Developing such coverage is a high challenge indeed!
At the end of this introductory page is a description of my other retirement project, to put 10,000 78 r.p.m. records and a bunch of out of copyright LPs onto the Web so the world can come listen to these great old recordings for free. This page will be periodically revised to give the latest additions.
B. The Four Philosophies of Education
A short summary for reference throughout.
C. The Aftermath of Math
What one retains after every specific thing taught is forgotten. Every subject has its own aftermath.
D. A Highly Preliminary Grouping of the Ways of Thinking
What is really desired is to group them according to the pragmatics of how learning something in one subject (car repair) transfers to better learning in another (practicing physicians), but also to find evolutionary or neurological connections.
E. Filters and Maxims
Also quite preliminary. Not tied to any specific field. I have been accumulating them for years. Needs to be added to and organized. This could be a website in itself.
F. Language and Trade: A Concrete Example of Multi-Disciplined Hyper-Link Thinking
This was my most rewarding research project in all my twenty-six years at the U.S. Department of Education.
G. Design: The Small English Initiative
Design is one of the major ways of thinking, and this is what came out of my study on language and trade.
H. My Own Proposal: Software for a Small English
This is a specific way of implementing the Small English Initiative.
I. Some Promising Looking Books
But essentialism is not suitable today. What is needed is a smaller emphasis on content and a larger emphasis on hands-on familiarity with different ways of thinking. We have all heard the jokes about the economist, the engineer, the historian, and a can of beans. But, seriously, members of each profession are oriented in different ways. As a first go at it, an economist will seek to find out the exact choice situation, an engineer how the system may have broken down and how to set things right by tinkering, and a historian for parallels from the past. Despite their sometimes pretensions, none of these ways of thought is superior to the other, much less so grand that they encompass all the others.
What is more and more becoming important is not to remember the content of courses (few have any real need to remember from the ninth grade what the quadratic formula is), but to become able to look at a situation through the eyes of an economist, an engineer, and many more.
No one could stay in school long enough to become credentialed in every major way of thinking. My hope with this site is to provide modules toward developing a certain hands-on familiarity with diverse ways of thinking. As an economist, I will try to characterize the fundamental ways economists see things and suggest readings that will take a certain close study but will be far from a full graduate school education (ways of thought, not content, again), exercises, and projects that have to be gone through with diligence.
I invite others to correct and add to my presentation but more than that I want to enlist others from other occupations to contribute their own modules and give practical examples of how they deployed their own learning. The deep thinking required is a challenge of high order, since it is hard to step outside one's frame of reference, just as it is for a fish to be aware of being surrounded by water.
Essentialism, or Back to the Basics. This philosophy maintains that there are certain subjects that are essential to one's education and that experts can determine what is essential for each of these subjects to cover.
Progressivism. This philosophy of education is centered, not on concrete knowledge but on training the mind in ways of thinking. It includes critical thinking, learning how to learn, and metacognition. John Dewey was progressivism's most important exponent, but his orientation was strongly toward serving society. Today we would more likely consider the aim of education to be toward more individualist goals, characterized by Brian J. Caldwell (University of Melbourne) as "competence, virtue, and happiness." This is also the approach of Howard Gardner's The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach (1991). My approach is firmly within the progressivist tradition.
Existentialism, or Roll Your Own. This philosophy is aimed at the cultivation of the self and allows students to construct their own curriculum so as to foster this self-creation. It goes back at least Mr. Jefferson advocating electives at the University of Virginia, but more famously to President Charles Eliot of Harvard in 1886. In its extreme, it supposes that students know their educational needs better than their professors. Of course, we routinely grant that adults do. Adults are not essentialists when it comes to their own learning, else the books they would routinely include assessment tests at the end.
Indeed the education wars are largely about how strongly each of the elements should be emphasized.
I found the answer, mentioned in passing, in one of many papers at a conference on mathematical thinking and mathematics education. No, it was not the axiomatic method, which only rarely gets used outside of pure mathematics, the major exception that I know of being Mario Bunge, Foundations of Physics (Springer, 1967). Rather, the most valuable way of thinking I learned was that, to solve a problem, generalize it, solve that, and then apply to the problem at hand. This is exactly what I did over and over again when I majored in math as an undergraduate. It became a habit with me, to always seek a larger context in every situation. Asking for the larger context can produce irritation, often people with telling me to stop being so "philosophical" (not with being too mathematical!) Too often when I am doing something, not for my boss, but for the higher-ups, I can't get an answer to the exact question. I am quite convinced I do better when I can be told the larger context and not have to guess at it. And yet, not many people understand or feel the need to understand a larger context, though it may be that they pick up that context intuitively while I can't.
So that's the aftermath of math. If this is so, then why not drill students in generalize-solve-apply, spend a semester at it, cover many fields far removed from math, and free up five semesters to develop other habits? I know lawyers, engineers, and physicians have their own characteristic modes of thinking (help me describe them!) but there are precious few undergraduate colleges (and maybe one or two high schools) that offer one-semester introductions to them. Being an avid math major, I happen to love the stuff, so I am preaching against inclination by saying, except for a semester course in generalize- solve-apply, scrap the math and teach several worldview modules.
What I am saying is straight out of Howard Gardner's The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach (1991). He says there are evidently default ways of thinking that will often take hold outside the classroom, that even those with doctorates in physics can forget the physics they are taught and resort to Aristotelian physics when moving a joystick around in a computer game. The whole aim of education, says Gardner, no essentialist he, is to thoroughly discipline the mind to deploy new ways of thinking and in places far away from any classroom. He would never deny, nor would I, that there really are things everyone should learn; rather, the emphasis should shift toward discplined ways (plural) of thinking. The school system is not doing this and, for a variety of reasons, is not likely to be doing so anytime soon. Thus this site.
You are on your own, with the help of this site, which I hope will get input from others. It will involve work on your part, as it requires hands-on immersion in different ways of thinking and not just reading about them.
What ages am I writing about? I characteristically think of high school, but some of these ways can be imparted early. One skill, reading a graph, is so second nature that it seems first nature, but the first graph was drawn in 1340 by the great Nicole Oresme, of the Universities of Oxford and Paris. Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians never hit on it. They fundamentally lacked the idea of continuous change. One might think that the word accelerate, Latin for "toward speed," proves this wrong. In fact it is a term in Medieval Latin, not Classical Latin.
Some are better than others in working with graphs. I am sure graphs are part of many courses, kindergarten on up, but pupils should also be making maps and building things with one's hands. What about writing poems, playing an instrument, sports, singing, painting, sculpting, repairing cars or computers? Car repair is the most valuable course in high school! It gave you familiarity with the breakdown of a complex system. Those who did not repair cars when younger but go into computers can design complex programs. Those who did can fix practical problems. This is a genuine "transfer of learning," or an aftermath, as I call it.
Maybe writing poems is more valuable. Doing show teaches you how to be careful with words. "Clearly, more research is needed," a claim I would make for just about every subject that is taught in school that does not figure so prominently today.
The very most valuable course ought to be English, but few teachers make students write, write, and write and then have enough love for their work that they carefully read all the papers. I would spread writing throughout the curriculum and at all ages, even in arithmetic. Have the children articulate why they set up a word problem they way they did. This helps them learn to write better. It also helps them learn to translate a problem from one realm into another, in this case, into the language of mathematics. So maybe there's another "aftermath of math" beyond generalize-solve-apply.
I'll come up with many more suggestions and wild thourhgts, and here's hoping that others will join in. I am fond of saying that half or my ideas are idiotic; it's just that I don't know which half! I don't want to spend more time than necessary chasing after bad ideas. Exercise: what would it take you to abandon your two most cherished hypothesis. (Saying "convincing evidence" is circular!)
Analogizing: Humanities and the arts, as ways of thinking. Creating literature, music, and painting, as well as performing them, involve different mentalities than writing about them. (I need your help in expanding this!)
Choice: economics, psychology, legislation: Economics is my field and I instantly search out all the costs: if someone advocates better teaching of foreign languages, I ask what will get kicked out of the curriculum. I also ask what is the exact problem and whether there is anything preventing the normal operations of supply and demand from solving the alleged problem. Later: Not so sure about lumping psychology in with economics.
Deductive: mathematics and many parts of the hard sciences. The language of set theory was rarely found in the sciences fifty years ago. No more. It remains, though, that only a few branches of science have been axiomatized, and the only known example of a full theoretic reduction of one part of science to another, and that only in an ideal situation, namely the reduction of heat to the motion of molecules. Still, using deductive reasoning to draw conclusions that can be tested by experiment is everywhere. Later: This seems to conflict with what I said about generalize-solve-apply.
Design: engineering, computer programs, constitutions. There are decided limits about what can be predicted and controlled in advance. The first robots could hardly walk across a room, so complex were the potential number of motions. In due course, designers discovered that letting robots get slightly out of control to learn from the environment is what worked. See Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Logic of Machines (1994).
Eclectic: archeology, forensics. There is little high theory in these fields. Rather they grab pieces of other fields. Getting practice in an eclectic discipline trains the mind.
Historical: evolutionary biology, social, political, and religious histories. History is the accumulation over time of causes random to each other. Realizing this has been called "the discovery of time" that took place during the eighteenth century. Before then history was conceived of as events fitting into a single grand narrative or used as lessons for moral guidance.
Labeling: sociology, psychiatry. Invoking peer pressure or the routinization of charisma does not give much indication of their precise importance (they are hard to quantify), but when they are invoked one says, "Aha! Now I understand," and gets on with life. These labels do not even have to correspond with reality (think id, ego, and superego) to be pragmatically useful. Even though we only barely understand them, major depression and bipolar disorders are usefully, even life-savingly, distinct, for each comes with different medication recommendations (recommendations, not sure- fire cures).
Management: The practice of management is different from the theory of management, but this site could certainly use help from someone who knows about the management aspect of a problem.
Multi-Culturalism: Just a hope for now. Terribly difficult. Most of the talk about "celebrating diversity" rarely goes beyond superficialities. Still, there is great potential here. (See Edward C. Stewart and Milton J. Bennett, American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (1991).) This book is fascinating to read, but does not give hand-on experience.
Subdividing (less politely called logic chopping, hair splitting, and nitpicking): law, philosophy, writing regulations, theology. A certain amount of hair splitting is inevitable and, within limits, helpful. Learning the law also leads one to imagine the best arguments of opposing counsel, not strawpersons. No other occupation gives one such robust training on undermining one's world view!
Tinkering: car repair, computer repair, medicine, legislation. In a radio interview about his book, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (1998), Frank Wilson reported that computer people come in two types, those who worked with cars in their youths and those who had not. The latter were good at designing complex programs, the former in fixing practical problems (such as what to do when a file does not open properly: your friendly computer guy will know what to try when you can't figure out bad instructions using on-screen help.) There is a real "transfer of learning" from car repair that teaches you how to diagnose the breakdown of a complex system, a skill of inestimable value through life. Note that the law comes into play in design (constitutions), tinkering (legislation), and subdividing (writing regulations). Each of these three, I submit, requires different but complimentary modes of thinking.
I disparage none of these disciplined approaches, and will not even hint that all others are inferior to the standard deductive ideal of mathematics and the physical sciences. Rather, we middle-sized, largely ignorant creatures must deploy what methods we can. Because of this, we are irrevocably and irremediably pluralistic (postmodernist) and can only gain partial insights, insights from different occupational ways of thinking that are, for us middle-sized creatures, impossible to fully reconcile. I also reemphasize that this is a most preliminary list and that only some of them will come into play during any virtual get-together, meaing doing disciplined research on the Web.
I shall be adding to these and explaining them, sometimes at length. I'll try to organize them, too.
1. Place yourself in the exact knowledge situation of your audience. This is by far the single greatest reason for poor communication and misunderstanding.
2. Why are we here? What is the exact problem? Will what we want come about if we just wait and do nothing?
3. What are some stubborn facts? Warm- blooded animals require ten times as much food as cold-blooded ones. Within a narrow range, the body heats up when more food is ingested and cools down when exercise is expended. If one's thermostat is off by a fraction of percent, obesity (and rarely the opposite) results. If he eats less, his temperature goes down, but his thermostat is still off. Same if he exercises. Why is this thermostat rarely mentioned in the voluminous literature on obesity?
I would ask you to send me your stubborn facts, but I fear that they would be taken to be your riding your own hobby horses.
4. Ask the reverse question. Not why is there war, why is there ever peace. Not why we sleep but why, given that being awake uses more calories, are we as awake as much as we are, beyond undertaking the four F's, feeding, fleeing, fighting, and sex?
5. Why are there no signs of convergence on a consensus? Is the problem mostly over words? Are there material interests at stake?
6. Reverse question: why is consensus ever reached? Stubborn truth seekers that follow Mr. Jefferson's description of the University of Virginia, "For here we are to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it" are not all that many. The answer is ultimately sociological. Randall Collins, in The Sociology of Philosophies (1999) convinced me that, in the sciences at least, it is not as though all objections have been answered, so much as wheat happens when scientists get new equipment and prefer to chase after new results. Old controversies don't get settled; they just get abandoned.
But in too many cases, social pressures force a consensus.
7. Change can be explained only by a previous change. This one, esp., calls for elaboration.
8. Optimum rarely equals maximum or minimum. Have to come up with examples far away from politically-charged ones.
9. Question failure to produce data-driven, positive evidence FOR a point of view, esp. when the proponents have the wherewithal to gather the evidence. I'll try to come up with examples that are not too contentious.
10. How do the boundaries between respectable views and those out to lunch, off the wall, and over the top get set. This is a sociological question. And why are the boundaries so thin in certain cases?
11. Be aware of the often arbitrary clustering of opinion in subcultures and pressures to conform within it. [Explain.]
12. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11
13. Everything comes in degrees.
14. Everything is variable. Be historically minded.
15. Distinguish process and product.
16. Distinguish the rules of the game, the players of the game, and the outcome of the game.
17. Don't think that you are completely objective. Your views are shaped by your internalization of prevailing norms and also by your own personality type. It is humbling to realize that your views can to some extent be categorized and placed on a scale. Be slow to try to "impose" your personality on the whole world.
18. Check your Premises.
Choice: Economics: I was first called upon to research what the economic literature had to say. I knew already that studies would be few, not helpful, and even bad. The main reason is that it is almost impossible to disentangle cause and effect: would getting kids and adult to learn more foreign languages itself generate more trade, or does increased trade spontaneously induce kids and adults to improve their foreign language skills? The studies don't say. My instinctive question is whether there is some major barrier to learning as much of a foreign language as one's self-interest suggests. I found nothing beyond a concern that "girls and women" (that's the expression for females) faced barriers to education in some countries. As an economist, I would also ask, although others certainly benefit from having one's trading partner learn one's language, whether the chief beneficiary is the learner? I would even ask why increased trade is something good in itself, except that Frederic Bastiat (1801-50) already said "if goods don't cross borders, armies will."
There was one interesting but unsurprising result, namely that knowledge of each others' languages is more important for conducting foreign investment than for engaging in foreign trade.
Cumulative: Human Social History: Not finding much in the economic literature, I hyperlinked to a different discipline, history, and here I found some fascinating and insightful stuff. What is the history of languages used in foreign trade? Was one ever developed just for the purposes of trade? Existing languages, in a simplified ("pidgin") form have been put to use, an early example being Akkadian, the language of the Assyrians, which went far beyond the boundaries of its empire. In time, the Assyrians would adopt Aramaic as their international language of trade, since Aramaic used an alphabet. (See William M. Schniedewund, How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualizatin of Ancient Israel 2004.)
Diaspora traders also spread trade languages. Yiddish is the best-known example, and there is also Armenian, an Indo-European language with thirty-eight letters. These are not new languages as such. One that was new was Chinese Pidgin, made up of words from Chinese, English, and Portugese (big traders at the time). The language was not to last, as the linguistic demands of trade increased. Nevertheless, certain expressions have passed into standard English as humorous examples of a simplified English, such as "long time no see" and "no can do."
Chinese Pidgin, like other pidgins, just grew up. The only example I have been able to find of a deliberately constructed language for trade is "Chinook Jargon." This consists of two hundred words for things used by some fifty American Indian tribes in Oregon and Washington, the Chinook Indians being only of them. Though there are linguistic arguments that this common vocabulary was already in development when White traders moved into the area, especially with the founding of Fort Astoria in Oregon in 1811, and wrote the words down. There are separate words for black bear and brown bear, and new words from French and English for concepts that were unknown to the Indians, such as gun and devil, an idea that came along with the inevitable missionaries to the area. (The early decision by the Pope that Indians had souls that could be saved is among the most consequential actions ever that seemed only minor at the time.) Words that have passed into general English are, potlach, a gift giving ceremony, and [a big] muck-a-muck.
Chinook Jargon had no words for contracts, and it also passed into disuse when trade became complex enough to demand such terms. On the other hand, I was unable to find a trade language for common use along the Silk Road. There certainly was the trade but not the sheer linguistic density as there was in Oregon and Washington. On the other hand, Papua New Guinea is even denser in languages, but still no trade language, evidently for the lack of enough trade.
The historical moral is that trade languages will appear under certain conditions but will fall into disuse when the legal demands exceed their small sizes. This is valuable to know but not captured by economic studies.
Sidebar
The Lord's Prayer in Chinook Jargon
from Horatio Hale, M.A., F.R.S.C:
An International Idiom: A Manual of the Oregon Trade Language or "Chinook Jargon" (London: Whittaker & Co., 1890)
[http://books.google.com/books/download/An_ international_idiom.pdf?id=w_RLAAAAMAAJ&out put=pdf&sig=ACfU3U0_ndE3- 3KoSpfB_eqak1vbRdLZWA]
Chinook Jargon/literal translation/1928 Book of Common Prayer (which I added) Nesika Papa klaksta mitlite kopa Saghalie, kloshe Our Father who livest in the Above, good Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed [be] mika nem kopa konoway kah. Kloshe spose mika chaco thy name over everywhere. Good if thou become thy name. Thy come delate Tyee kopa konoway tillikums. Kloshe spose mika true Chief over all people. Good if Thy kingdom. Thy tumtum mitlite kopa illahee kahkwa kopa Saghalie. Potlatch mind is on earth as in the Above. Give will be [done] on earth as [it is] in heaven. Give kopa nesika kopa okoke sun nesika muckamuck. Mamook to us during this day our food. Do us this day our [daily] bread, [and] klahowya nesika kopa nesika mesachie mamook, kahkwa pity us for our evil doing, as forgive us our --trespasses,-- as nesika mamook klahowya klaksta man spose yaka we do pity any man if he we forgive those who mamook messachie does evil ----trespass---- kopa nesika. Wake mika lolo nesika kopa kah to us. Not thou carry us to where against us. Not lead us -- into---- mesachie mitlite; pe spose mesachie klap nesika, kloshe evil is; but if evil find us, good temptation, but[End sidebar]mika help nesika tolo okoke mesachie. Delate konoway thou help us conquer that evil. Truly all deliver us from evil. [For thine is the illahee mika illahee, pe mika hias skokum, pe mika delate earth thy earth, and thou very strong, and thou truly kingdom,] and [the power], and hias kloshe; kahkwa nesika tikegh konoway okoke. Kloshe kahkwa. very good; so we wish all this. Good so. [the glory, [forever and ever.] Amen.
Subdividing (logic chopping): The majority of English sentences spoken in the world today are between non-native speakers of the language. The problem of language and trade can be finely subdivided and there will be issues peculiar to each, one size definitely not fitting all. Here are some of the chopped pieces:
Even in countries where English is the official or unofficial language or one among more or less equals, words mean different things in different places, sometimes substantially so. The possibility of miscommunication is huge. What might be done about it?
There are also many regional varieties of reduced forms of English, most of which have grown up spontaneously, like Chinglish, Japlish, Korlish, Singlish, and Thaiglish in the obvious countries. Native English speakers will have no problem understanding what what the Korlish sentence, "I have not seen him in so much long time," means, but there are words in these languages that do not at all mean what they do in American or British English. What can be done about miscommunication among them?
There are a number of occupational Englishes, that contain a small number of common words but also many less common words peculiar to the occupation, such as Hotel English and Call Center English. Is there a problem for those wanting to work in hotels or call centers learning these limited languages?
On the other hand, there are more expansive special languages, Business English in China and many other countries, even Legal English in Russia. When taught formally in school, they involve a fairly large vocabulary and fairly complex grammar rules. A different set of problems is involved.
For still more, consult the journal English for Special Purposes. Quiz: Is the English we get in later high school and in college a "special" English, or just "real" English, like "real" coffee (neither frozen or decaffeinated) or a "real" guitar (as opposed to an electric guitar, "real" guitars now being retronymed "acoustic" guitars)? Answer later.
Tinkering: What small tinkerings could be made to improve the learning and use of foreign languages? I have more questions than answers.
*Find out a lot more about how foreign languages are actually learned.
To what extent are foreign languages acquired "just-in-time," through paperback phrase books and introductory lessons, through learning hotel English, call center English, or whatever, on the job, or through after-hours courses online and in places like Berlitz? The BBC has online tests that grade one's knowledge of English. Are scores on these test ever presented to employers? Is one's knowledge of English mostly just informally assessed in conversation? This could have gone under logic chopping.
*Terms used for trade and contracts mean slightly, and sometimes not so slightly, different things in different languages. Make up good dictionaries for them.
*Reconsider the whole assessment business. As I said, essentialism is the basic operative educational philosophy in the world today. However, books read after college almost never contain tests at the end. Why?
Essentialism leads to ready assessment. Grave experts decide on learning objectives, certainly the quadratic formula and what a volt times and amp is. Indeed, there is a survival of the fittest for expertise. Judges in boxing matches, dog grooming contests, wine tasting, and beauty pagents commonly agree within three percent of one another. Disagree with by more and you not grave and are not "fit" to survive as an expert. This could mean that your abilities are not good enough to perceive an underlying reality the experts can, even if it cannot be articulated, or it could mean group-think.
My ideas for promoting that uniquely twenty-first century thinking skill, namely, hyperlink thinking across the disciplines could not possibly go back before 1994. It is simply not possible for even the gravest of experts to assess it.
How can schools promote it, then. And so my final tinker:
*Decentralize
A great strength of America's school system is that it is highly decentralized, meaning that individual school districts and even individual schools and teachers can both experiment and adopt their courses for the concrete needs of the actual students there. For America, the Federal government can help out, not by any sort of central decree about the merits of my ideas or anyone else's, but by reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education act by bypassing the states and letting each county set its own curriculum. Let 3,140 counties bloom! They should be given the widest latitude on how to assess novel courses and measure adequate yearly progress.
In sum, find out more about how languages are actually used and think hard about the structure of educational governance is best suited to flexibly deal with changing situations.
Design: One of my maxims is "Ask the Reverse Question." Not why do we sleep, but why we are ever awake. (Being awake using precious calories, compared to sleeping, why don't we sleep as much as we can get away with.) Not why is there war, but why there is ever peace. And in the context of foreign languages, ask not just how to improve communication by getting people to learn foreign languages better, but just importantly, how miscommunication can be avoided. The fact is that it is costly to learn languages well, and most people, when they don't understand something will not always learn more or even look up words they don't know or are not sure of. Might not it be better, if my knowledge of English is better than yours for me to eschew inserting terms from my idiolect, permeated as it is with inordinately abstruse and erudite terminology, in other words stop using big words? I propose the design of what I call the "Small English" Initiative.
(Answer to quiz: literary English. It is unfortunate that if one wants to study the great German (say) literary masterpieces in college, for the most part one will have to major in German. Being able to converse about them in Germany will be a benefit, but so will being able to talk about the Beethoven's Quartets, which contain notes, not words. Muá es sein?" Es muá sein!" Well, sometimes.)
Basic English was developed in 1930 by C.K. Ogden, a co-author of the well- known book The Meaning of Meaning. It consists of words for the 850 most important concepts, to which are added supplemental lists for specific purposes, like science, business, and religion, that are not already in the 850. Ogden's spirit lives on at the Basic-English Institute, http://www.basic-english.org/. The Institute has compiled additional lists for internet, trade, computer, mathematics, and many others. The site has extended discussions of other small Englishes and rather awkward instructions for sneaking in large-sized vocabularies with suggestions for small English equivalents, in the freeware OpenOffice Suite and the International Dictionary Companion. These dictionaries are a volunteer effort and are very much underway. Getting the installed freeware running is too difficult for those not among the top ten percent of the computer savvy. But the ideas at the site are well-thought out.
Simplified Technical English was developed by the European Association of Aerospace Manufacturers (AECMA) after World War II for mandatory use in writing aircraft repair manuals. Its theme is "one concept, one word" and it adds grammatical rules, such as no passive voice and no paragraph longer than six sentences. Many of the words are too technical for general use and others are dubious. There is software for it but is far from adequate.
Special English is a product of the Voice of America, which offers broadcasts in its restricted vocabulary, which is based upon word frequency rather than concepts. Alas, there is no software.
Si mple Wikipedia is exactly what its name implies and can be found at http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/. There are only general guidelines for writers, however, and no software.
Globish is the brainchild of Jean- Paul Nerriere, a former vice president of International marketing at IBM and consists of a subset of English grammar and a vocabulary of 1500 words. No software.
Cooperate with the makers of the most popular word processors (like Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and OpenOffice, and the more popular ones developed in non-English speaking countries) so that the first "small English" vocabulary list and all customized extensions can become, in effect, separate languages for the word processor. Develop or adopt a freeware word processor, too. Save documents in Rich Text Format.
Develop supplemental lists of initial vocabularies (150 words at most) can be added to the first list. Examples from the Basic-English Institute are business, science, international, computer, and poetry lists. These lists will be read only. Allow individual teachers to select which sets of them get to the students. The combined list will be read only for the student. Then students can add words as they want or need for their own purposes (the existentialist philosophy of education at work!)
For adults in particular occupations, get from the American Physics Society, say, a large list of physics terms in English. Japanese readers of physics papers in English will know the physics words. "Neutrino" is the Japanese word for "neutrino," except that it might be "neutlino," since the Japanese do not distinguish "r" from "l." (They make up for it by having two "m's.") Note that "energy" in German is "Energie" and "Mass" "Masse." (Bach composed "Messe in h moll.") "Force" in German is "Kraft" and "acceleration" Beschleunigung" it is true, but one may assume that German readers of physics papers will know what "force" and "acceleration" mean. Germans were among the first physicists; latecomers will mostly use English words, spelled in their own languages.
("Acceleration" (toward swift) is a medieval Latin word, not one in classical Latin. The ancient Romans did not have the idea of continuous change, which is why they did not draw graphs.)
Where foreign readers of technical papers get in trouble is with big non-technical words. Chances are they will guess their meaning, whether they "should" look up the words or not. Get lists of specialized words for lots of occupations. Let the users (adults, students, teachers) make up and name their own lists (plural, so as to chose lists of commonly understood English words, depending on which readers are being addressed at the moment).
Get the software to make suggestions. For the non-Basic English "several," one might choose "two or three," "quite a number," or "some." "Several" is a word that has what I call useful ambiguity, and I would add it to the Basic English core, but this is for the beta-testers to decide. "Preposterous" might be "not to be taken seriously" or "against reason." "Absurd" might be "without reason" or "foolish." You decide, depending on what you mean. Now these are six different things, as native English speakers will instantly recognize. But the fact is that we rarely pause to select the best word. Our ideas are vague anyhow. (Try to find someone who can define "dog"!) Foreign languages break up the world differently. Recall that "mass" in English designates two concepts in German, the unit of physics and the religious rite. "Geist" in German means "ghost," "spirit," and "mind" in English. To communicate what one needs is not ideal precision but being "good enough" in getting across what you have to say.
Develop practice modules for native English speakers. I had occasion to make summaries of an APEC conference on the teaching of mathematics for an APEC website. I wrote them out as anyone normally would, with big and little words mixed together. I then rewrote them in Basic English. I simply had to keep the non-Basic word curriculum, since it is a term of "ed-speak" familiar to everyone at the conference. Replacing it with Basic English "course of study" would make the readers scratch their heads, wondering how a course of study differed from a curriculum. (A curriculum involves much more than just listing what makes up a course. It recalls to mind conferences, negotiations, and an entire bureaucrat structure.) Making these translations was tedious at first, but got easier within a couple of days. I won't brag that I now never need to check whether a English word is in Basic, but just two days of self-training did let me cut out big words rather quickly. The nice thing is that those who reviewed my summaries felt no need to take out the little words and put big words back in. My summaries read smoothly and did not say anything absurd or preposterous.
Get the spell checkers out quickly, but not too quickly. If they prove popular, their inefficiencies could stick with us like QWERTY. Fuss about grammar and general rules for good communication later. There are already several sorts of "plain [English] writing" software out there. Make it freeware.
AECMA rigidly enforces its vocabulary and grammar rules for its aircraft repair manuals. Teachers can, at their discretion, enforce rules on their students. The American Physics Society, on the other hand, is not about to enforce vocabulary rules on its writers. Not unless the software I envision really takes off.
I close by noting potential network economies of scale. Think about the first- year foreign language courses you took in school. What words were in the vocabularies of those languages you had to memorize? Do textbooks differ for beginning textbooks in your own country? Are they different in different countries? Going the other way, what English words are encountered in first year textbooks written for those living in Japan? Vietnam? Germany? There will be substantial overlap but also wide differences. Now think how it would help avoiding miscommunication if countries around the world started using the same "small English." There is little possibility of any international agreement, just the prospect that if an educator in Russia knows that a German student starts with Basic English (modified after beta- testing) he might well use this same vocabulary in his first year English course. This is the network effect. But beware of QWERTY.
Of course I can split hairs, divide my proposal up into smaller and smaller pieces, and exhaust the reader. My proposal for software for small English may or may not gain attention. Of course, I think it is neither absurd nor preposterous. I outlined my proposal to illustrate the power of hyperlink thinking, which grew out of my research topic on language and trade. I considered the problem from the aspect of several disciplines and proceeded to conduct a disciplined hyperlink search. I considered the issue in light of one of the choice disciplines (economics), from the perspective of disciplines that study random cumulation (human social history), logic chopping, tinkering (I made several suggestions for small changes), and design (my proposal for small English software). Along the way, I employed a tool in one of the deductive disciplines, namely mathematician's strategy of generalize- solve-apply, and generalized the whole business of language into communication and its reverse, avoiding miscommunication. My proposal was the result.
And so, the point of disciplined education, or getting familiar with the disciplines, is to be able to apply different ways to thinking to a problem. Its side effect is to avoid getting carried away by any one of them.
Heyne, Paul (deceased), Peter J. Boettke, and David L. Prychitko. The Economic Way of Thinking. Eleventh edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2006.
Killoran, David M. LSAT Logical Reasoning Bible: A Comprehensive System for Attacking the Logical Reasoning Section of the LSAT. Hilton Head, SC: PowerSource Publishing, 2007. LSAT stands for Law School Admission Test. This is a 541 page, 8«" 11" book of exercises, and they are by no means easy. See the entusiastics Amazon reviews of Killoran. But you might as well get an earlier edition from Bookfinder.com.
Miles, Jack. God: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995; New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
Stewart, Edward C., and Milton J. Bennett. American Cultural Patterns: A Cross- Cultural Perspective. Revised edition. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1991.
Veritas Prep. The Complete GMAT Course Set 15 books in 2286 pages. GMAT is the Graduate Management Admissions Test. I have only Critical Resoning 1, and it offers useful practices. Veritas Prep offers courses in many cities. I hestiate to give a strong recommendation, since it is far more expensive per hour of exercises, than KIlloran's LSAT Logical Reasoning Bible. Check out the Amazon page.
1. Equilibrium Processes
We rarely understand the mechanism, but many systems work so as to move things back to normal. Forman's 96 Percent Rule for Self-Stabalizing Systems has it that in 96 percent of cases, there is no permanent shock to the system and that things turn out as they are going to. I claim that the worst two percent of parents harm their children for life and the best two percent are truly inspirational. Between these extremes, it really doesn't matter. Another example: I have had maybe a hundred teachers. Two turned me off the subject for life, while four (well, I deliberately sought them out) made a permanent impact on me. The rest got through the course, some were not very organized, others superbly so. I doubt that teacher no. 95 got all that much more stuff pounded into my head that no. 3. Of course, some were memorable, but I'm thinking of their lasting impact.
2. Darwinian Processes
The basic paradigm is that of variation that is random with respect to the system and of selection of what will continue. I will have to attach my proposal, "Darwin across the Disciplines." I maintain that Occidental civilizations are three: Classical, based on form, Western, based on change, and Darwinian, based on chance. For now: Forman's 967Percent Rule on Experts. This says that experts, dog grooming judges, whether wine tasters, boxing judges, and drafters of curriculum standards for schools typically agree with each other 96 percent of the time. Anyone who dissents by more than 3 percent is no longer "fit" to be a judge. This can mean that judges have an intuitive understanding of what a well-groomed dog should look like that cannot be articulated in words and does refer to something real. It could also mean group-think. It is subject to change over time and place.
3. Statistical Processes
Terribly, terribly important! Need to expound upon at length.
4. Other
Tasks for the future!
B. Specific Ooccupations
This is the heart of this site. A module will:
1. Economics. This will be my own, but others are welcome to try to do it.
I have been a discophers and give a link to my most important one, which documented what was at the time the single greatest hole in our knowledge of classical music recordings, namely acoustic recordings (that is, without the use of microphones) of chamber music. The World's Encyclopedia of Recorded Music (linked below) begins with electrics. We have a pretty good knowledge of singers, though scattered over many books. James Creighton documented the violin for all periods, and Claude Arnold documented acoustic orchestral recordings.
The links are to some check lists (hardly full-fledged discographies, but I label them as such so that those searching the Web can find them. There is also a delightful transciption of letters my grandmother sent home about her travels to Europe and how her Midwester brass enabled her to snooker lessons out of the great piano pedagogue Theodor Leschetizsky. I include an essay I wrote recommending revisions in the copyright law about old recordings that are of little financial value but of great interests to music lovers.
Letters from Ada Woodward to Her Parents, 1912
A Glenn Gould Supplement Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky's Symphony No. 21 in g minor Wilhelm Kempff Discography Helmut Krebs Checklist The Sixteen Space Capsule Tapes
Copyright, Congress, Due Dilligence, and Coase
Acoustic Chamber Music Sets (1899-1926): A Discography in HTML
Acoustic Chamber Music Sets (1899-1926: A Discography, in RTF
Francis F. Clough and G. J. Cuming, The World's Encyclopedia of Recorded Music. This is the most important discography ever issued. It lists recordings of classical music from the beginning of electrical recording in 1925 through LPs in 1955. My source is the Centre for Historical Analysis of Recorded Music. I took the files for each of the three volumes, applied optical character recognition to them, and concatenated them. I sent my results pack to CHARM for their use. While they appreciated my efforts and intended to add it to their site, they have yet to find the staff to do so. However, searching using ctrl-f is not always accurate or consistent.
Frederick Stock: The complete commercial recordings
Coming very soon:
ECONOMICS and PHILOSOPHY
This is my chief academic work. It is an expansion of my doctoral dissertation (economics), George Mason University, 1985. Not reommended to teach you how economists think!
Frank Forman can be reached at eckerch@panix.com, but first move the last letters of his username to the beginning. This is avoid robots inundating him with spam or worse.
This site and this page officially launched 2012.1.1, although an slightly earlier version appeard two days earlier when the site was activated.
Another textbook, with excerises and discussion topic. It written from the standpoint of economic processes arising from the actions of individual agents. Might as well get the 11th edition cheap from Bookfinder or Amazon, as the 12th edition is quite expensive. Do check out the reviews of various editions at
[http://www.amazon.com/Economi c-Way-Thinking- 12th/dp/0136039855/ref=dp_ob_title_bk]
[http://www.amazon.com/LSAT-Logical- Reasoning-Bible- Comprehensive/dp/0980178258/ref=sr_1_1?s=bo oks&ie=UTF8&qid=1321222995&sr=1-1].
I found this to be the best book about the Bible. I uses a literary approach, as opposed to the historical approach (when were the books written and by whom, how they underwent editing, and how accurate and unbiased are they regarding the facts) and the theological approach (making an overall consistent sense of the sacred writings). More than any other book I know, this one shows how a different perspective can be illuminating.
I would very much like to learn how perspectives from different cultures can be as illuminating as perspectives from different occupations. This book does not offer any answers, but it does show, more deeply than anything I have come across, just how peculiar American culture is.II. MODULES FOR MANY OCCUPATIONS
Talcott Parsons and the functionalists generally propunded on this elaborately. They have fallen distinctly out of fashion because they seem to be Panglossian, even teleological, but there are stabilizing processes, though we dimly understand them. Moreover, they seem to be system-wide and do not fit into the paradigm of individaulism. Need to expand on this!
Again, obviously much more to be done!
o Consist of readings, exercises, on-line discussion groups, hopefully
o Be not just something interesting to read about but put you in the shoes of a practitioner, to repsond to situations like the mathematician, the physicist, and the engineer do when they confront a sealed can of beans, but not as the many jokes would have it, but in a serious matter.
o Be relentlessly practical.
o Focus on how creative solution can come about by combining different approaches.
o Aim at the work equivalent to a one-semester course.
2-10 or 20. MY HOPE!
III. MUSIC
(1996) 79 KB [http://www.panix.com/~checker/woodward.htm]
(1996) 21 KB [http://www.panix.com/~checker/canning.htm]
(1993) 13 KB [http://www.panix.com/~checker/ok.htm]
(1995) 35 KB [http://www.panix.com/~checker/kempff.htm]
(1995) 15 KB [http://www.panix.com/~checker/krebs.htm]
(1993) 9 KB [http://www.panix.com/~checker/space.htm]
(2002) 11 KB [http://www.panix.com/~checker/ccddc.htm]
(a concatenation of a three-part article in the Journal of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections,(2001-1, with minor revisions)
731KB [http://www.filefactory.com/file/cfff94b/n/acch.htm]
(a concatenation of a three-part article in the Journal of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections, 2001-1, with minor revisions)
1.48MB [http://www.filefactory.com/file/cfff924/n/ acch.rtf]
681MB[http://www.filefactory.com/file/cdaf3 17/n/WERM_Searchable.pdf]Uploads to FileFactory.com
Gunnar Johansen plays the complete piano music of Bach
[http://www.filefactory.com/f/fe95791dd3c68d24/]
The performances were mostly recorded on a double-keyboard and include every klavier work in Schmieder, even those with doubts about authenticity. Johansen also recorded some of the manuscript variants, notably those of several pieces from the Well-Tempered Klavier.
[http://www.filefactory.com/f/dee173966a8cbae0/]
Dr. Frederick Wilhelm August Stock (1872-1942) led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 38 years until his death. He was quite a solid conductor and a sensitive interpreter but never spectacular. He made the first recording of an American symphony orchestra in 1916 during the acoustic era. In all, his recordings amount to 15 hours of music.
Reine Gianoli, piano (her Westminster recordings)
Albert Coates, nearly all his recordings
Willem Mengelberg, all recordings issued during his lifetime
The Metaphysics of Liberty
(1989) 557KB [http://www.filefactory.com/file/cff2376/n/ metalib.htm]IV. WHAT'S NEW