Whether willed, involuntary, or a mix of both, the declining literacy of college students is by now so often lamented that reports of it should no longer come as a surprise. And yet, on some level, they still do: English majors in regional Kansas universities find the opening to Bleak House virtually unintelligible; even students at “highly selective, elite colleges” struggle to read, let alone comprehend, books in their entirety. Things were different in 1941, and very different indeed if you happened to be taking English 135 at the University of Michigan, a class titled “Fate and the Individual in European Literature.” The instructor: a certain W. H. Auden.
In his capacity as an educator, the poet threw down the gauntlet of an “infamously difficult” syllabus, as literary academic and YouTuber Adam Walker explains in his new video above, that “asked undergraduates to read about 6,000 pages of classic literature.”
Not that the course was out of touch with current events: in its historical moment, “Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and expanded into Eastern Europe. Systematic extermination begins with mass shootings, and the machinery of genocide is accelerating. It’s no accident that Auden takes an interest in fate and the individual in European literature” — a theme that, as he frames it, begins with Dante. After the entirety of The Divine Comedy, Auden’s students had their free choice between Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Sophocles’ Antigone.
From there, the required reading plunged into Horace’s Odes and Augustine’s Confessions, four Shakespeare plays, Pascal’s Pensées, Goethe’s Faust (but only Part I), and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to name just a few texts. Not everyone would consider Dostoevsky European, of course, but then, nobody would consider Herman Melville European, which for Auden was hardly a reason to leave Moby-Dick off the syllabus. Walker describes that novel as relevant to the course’s themes of “obsession and cosmic struggle,” evident in all these works and their treatments of “passion and historical forces, and how individuals navigate those forces”: ideas that transcend national and cultural boundaries by definition. Whether they would come across to the kind of twenty-first-century students who’d balk at being assigned even a full-length Auden poem is another question entirely.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We’ve previously written about one of Leonard Bernstein’s major works, The Unanswered Question, the staggering six-part lecture that the multi-disciplinary artist gave as part of his duties as Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton Professor. Over 11 hours, Bernstein attempts to explain the whither and the whence of music history, notably at a time when Classical music had come to a sort of crisis point of atonality and anti-music, but was still pre-Merzbow.
But, as Bernstein said “…the best way to ‘know’ a thing is in the context of another discipline,” and these six lectures bring in all sorts of contexts, especially Chomsky’s linguistic theory, phonology, semantics, and more. And he does it all with frequent trips to the piano to make a point, or bringing in a whole orchestra—which Bernstein kept in his back pocket for times just like this.
Joking aside, this is still a major scholarly work that has plenty inside to debate. That’s pertinent a half a century after the fact, especially when so much music feels like it has stopped advancing, just recycling.
The above clip is just one of the gems to be found among the lectures, something that one viewer found so stunning they recorded it off the television screen and posted to YouTube.
In the clip, Bernstein uses the melody of “Fair Harvard,” also known as “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” by Thomas Moore—recognizable to the young’uns as the fiddle intro to “Come On, Eileen”—as a starting point. He assumes a prehistoric hominid humming the tune, then the younger and/or female members of the tribe singing along an octave apart.
From this moment of musical and human evolution, Bernstein brings in the fifth interval—only a few million years later—and then the fourth. Then polyphony is born out of that and…well, we don’t want to spoil everything. Soon Bernstein brings us up to the circle of fifths, compressing them into the 12 tones of the scale, and then 12 keys.
Bernstein can hear the potential for chaos, however, in the possibilities of “chromatic goulash,” and so ends with Bach, the master of “tonal control” who balanced the chromatic (which uses notes outside a key’s scale) with the diatonic (which doesn’t). (It all comes back to Bach, doesn’t it?)
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
At the age of twelve, he followed his own line of reasoning to find a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. At thirteen he read Kant, just for the fun of it. And before he was fifteen he had taught himself differential and integral calculus.
But while the young Einstein was engrossed in intellectual pursuits, he didn’t much care for school. He hated rote learning and despised authoritarian schoolmasters. His sense of intellectual superiority was resented by his teachers.
At the Gymnasium a teacher once said to him that he, the teacher, would be much happier if the boy were not in his class. Einstein replied that he had done nothing wrong. The teacher answered, “Yes, that is true. But you sit there in the back row and smile, and that violates the feeling of respect that a teacher needs from his class.”
The same teacher famously said that Einstein “would never get anywhere in life.”
What bothered Einstein most about the Luitpold was its oppressive atmosphere. His sister Maja would later write:
“The military tone of the school, the systematic training in the worship of authority that was supposed to accustom pupils at an early age to military discipline, was also particularly unpleasant for the boy. He contemplated with dread that not-too-distant moment when he will have to don a soldier’s uniform in order to fulfill his military obligations.”
When he was sixteen, Einstein’s parents moved to Italy to pursue a business venture. They told him to stay behind and finish school. But Einstein was desperate to join them in Italy before his seventeenth birthday. “According to the German citizenship laws,” Maja explained, “a male citizen must not emigrate after his completed sixteenth year; otherwise, if he fails to report for military service, he is declared a deserter.”
So Einstein found a way to get a doctor’s permission to withdraw from the school on the pretext of “mental exhaustion,” and fled to Italy without a diploma. Years later, in 1944, during the final days of World War II, the Luitpold Gymnasium was obliterated by Allied bombing. So we don’t have a record of Einstein’s grades there. But there is a record of a principal at the school looking up Einstein’s grades in 1929 to fact check a press report that Einstein had been a very bad student. Walter Sullivan writes about it in a 1984 piece in The New York Times:
With 1 as the highest grade and 6 the lowest, the principal reported, Einstein’s marks in Greek, Latin and mathematics oscillated between 1 and 2 until, toward the end, he invariably scored 1 in math.
After he dropped out, Einstein’s family enlisted a well-connected friend to persuade the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, or ETH, to let him take the entrance exam, even though he was only sixteen years old and had not graduated from high school. He scored brilliantly in physics and math, but poorly in other areas. The director of the ETH suggested he finish preparatory school in the town of Aarau, in the Swiss canton of Aargau. A diploma from the cantonal school would guarantee Einstein admission to the ETH.
At Aarau, Einstein was pleasantly surprised to find a liberal atmosphere in which independent thought was encouraged. “When compared to six years’ schooling at a German authoritarian gymnasium,” he later said, “it made me clearly realize how much superior an education based on free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority.”
In Einstein’s first semester at Aarau, the school still used the old method of scoring from 1 to 6, with 1 as the highest grade. In the second semester the system was reversed, with 6 becoming the highest grade. Barry R. Parker talks about Einstein’s first-semester grades in his book, Einstein: The Passions of a Scientist:
His grades over the first few months were: German, 2–3; French, 3–4; history, 1–2; mathematics, 1; physics, 1–2; natural history, 2–3; chemistry, 2–3; drawing, 2–3; and violin, 1. (The range is 1 to 6, with 1 being the highest.) Although none of the grades, with the exception of French, were considered poor, some of them were only average.
The school headmaster, Jost Winteler, who had welcomed Einstein into his home as a boarder and had become something of a surrogate father to him during his time at Aarau, was concerned that a young man as obviously brilliant as Albert was receiving average grades in so many courses. At Christmas in 1895, he mailed a report card to Einstein’s parents. Hermann Einstein replied with warm thanks, but said he was not too worried. As Parker writes, Einstein’s father said he was used to seeing a few “not-so-good grades along with very good ones.”
In the next semester Einstein’s grades improved, but were still mixed. As Toby Hendy of the YouTube channel Tibees shows in the video above, Einstein’s final grades were excellent in math and physics, but closer to average in other areas.
Einstein’s uneven academic performance continued at the ETH, as Hendy shows. By the third year his relationship with the head of the physics department, Heinrich Weber, began to deteriorate. Weber was offended by the young man’s arrogance. “You’re a clever boy, Einstein,” said Weber. “An extremely clever boy. But you have one great fault. You’ll never allow yourself to be told anything.” Einstein was particularly frustrated that Weber refused to teach the groundbreaking electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell. He began spending less time in the classroom and more time reading up on current physics at home and in the cafes of Zurich.
Einstein increasingly focused his attention on physics, and neglected mathematics. He came to regret this. “It was not clear to me as a student,” he later said, “that a more profound knowledge of the basic principles of physics was tied up with the most intricate mathematical methods.”
Einstein’s classmate Marcel Grossmann helped him by sharing his notes from the math lectures Einstein had skipped. When Einstein graduated, his conflict with Weber cost him the teaching job he had expected to receive. Grossmann eventually came to Einstein’s rescue again, urging his father to help him secure a well-paid job as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. Many years later, when Grossmann died, Einstein wrote a letter to his widow that conveyed not only his sadness at an old friend’s death, but also his bittersweet memories of life as a college student:
“Our days together come back to me. He a model student; I untidy and a daydreamer. He on excellent terms with the teachers and grasping everything easily; I aloof and discontented, not very popular. But we were good friends and our conversations over iced coffee at the Metropol every few weeks belong among my nicest memories.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
In South Korea, where I live, there may be no brand as respected as Habodeu. Children dream of it; adults seemingly do anything to play up their own connections to it, however tenuous those connections may be. But what is Habodeu? An electronics company? A line of clothing? Some kind of luxury car? Not at all: it is, in fact, the Korean pronunciation of Harvard, the American university. Practically everyone around the world is aware of Harvard’s prestige, but relatively few know that you can take many of its courses online without paying tuition, or even applying. In fact, you can find a list of more than 130 such courses right here, all available to take right now.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Homework has lately become unfashionable, at least according to what I’ve heard from teachers in certain parts of the United States. That may complicate various fairly long-standing educational practices, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect an absolute drop in standards and expectations. Those of us who went to school around the turn of the millennium may remember feeling entombed in homework, an intensified version of what the generation that came of age amid the early Cold War’s pressure for “more science,” would have dealt with. But late baby boomers and early Gen-Xers in the sixties and seventies had a much lighter load, as did the generation educated under John Dewey’s reforms of the early twentieth century.
We can follow this line all the way back to the times of the Babylonians, 4,000 years ago. In the video above from her channel Tibees, science YouTuber Toby Hendy shows us a few artifacts of homework from antiquity and explains how to interpret them.
Inscribed in a clay tablet, their simple but numerous marks reveal them to be examples of math homework, that most loathed category today, and perhaps then as well. (Even when interpreted in modern language, the calculations may seem unfamiliar, performed as they are not in our base ten, but base 60 — shades of the “new math” to come much later.) That the Babylonians had fairly advanced mathematics, which Hendy demonstrates using some clay of her own, may be as much of a surprise as the fact that they did homework.
Not that they all did it. Universal schooling itself dates only from the industrial age, and for the Babylonians, industry was still a long way off. They did, however, take the considerable step of creating civilization, which they couldn’t have done without writing. The ancient assignment Hendy shows would’ve been done by a student at an eduba, which she describes as a “scribe school.” Scribe, as we know, means one who writes — which, in Babylon, meant one who writes in Sumerian. That skill was transmitted through the network of eduba, or “house where tablets are passed out,” which were usually located in private residences, and which turned out graduates literate and numerate enough to keep the empire running, at least until the sixth century BC or so. From certain destructive forces, it seems, no amount of homework can protect a civilization forever.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Produced between 1956 and 1964 by AT&T, the Bell Telephone Science Hour TV specials anticipate the literary zaniness of The Muppet Show and the scientific enthusiasm of Cosmos. The “ship of the imagination” in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot may in fact owe something to the episode above, one of nine, directed by none other than It’s A Wonderful Life’s Frank Capra. “Strap on your wits and hop on your magic carpet,” begins the special, “You’ve got one, you know: Your imagination.” As a guide for our imagination, The Strange Case of the Cosmic Raysenlists the humanities—specifically three puppets representing Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and, somewhat incongruously for its detective theme, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who plays the foil as an incurious spoilsport. The show’s host, Frank Baxter (“Dr. Research”) was actually a professor of English at UCLA and appears here with Richard Carlson, explaining scientific concepts with confidence.
The one-hour films became very popular as tools of science education, but there are good reasons—other than their datedness or Dr. Baxter’s expertise—to approach them critically. At times, the degree of speculation indulged by Baxter and the writers strains credulity. For example, writes Geoff Alexander in Academic Films for the Classroom: A History, 1958’s The Unchained Goddess (above) “introduces the viewer to bizarre concepts such as the possibility of ‘steering’ hurricanes away from land by creating bio-hazards such as ocean borne oil-slicks and introducing oil-based ocean fires.” These grim, fossil fuel industry-friendly scenarios nonetheless openly acknowledged the possibility of man-made climate change and looked forward to solar energy.
Along with some dystopian weirdness, the series also contains a good deal of explicit Christian proselytizing, thanks to Capra. As a condition for taking the job, “the renowned director would be allowed to embed religious messages in the films.” As Capra himself said to AT&T president Cleo F. Craig:
If I make a science film, I will have to say that scientific research is just another expression of the Holy Spirit… I will say that science, in essence, is just another facet of man’s quest for God.
At times, writes Alexander, “the religious perspective is taken to extremes,” as in the first episode, Our Mr. Sun, which begins with a quotation from Psalms and admonishes “viewers who would dare to question the causal relationship between solar energy and the divinity.” The Unchained Goddess, above, is the fourth in the series, and Capra’s last.
Afterward, a director named Owen Crump took over duties on the next four episodes. His films, writes Alexander, “did not overtly proselytize” and “relied less on animated characters interacting with Dr. Baxter.” (Watch the Crump-directed Gateways to the Mind above, a more sober-minded, yet still strangely off-kilter, inquiry into the five senses.) The last film, The Restless Sea was produced by Walt Disney and directed by Les Clark, and starred Disney himself and Baxter’s replacement, Sterling Holloway.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
From 1945 to 1951, Disney produced a series of educational films to be shown in American schools. How to bathe an infant. How not to catch a cold. Why you shouldn’t drive fast. Disney covered these subjects in its educational shorts, and then eventually got to the touchy subject of biology and sexuality. If there was ever a company suited to talk about “vaginas” in the 1940s in a family-friendly way, it was Disney. Hence The Story of Menstruation.
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There may be no more contentious an issue at the level of local U.S. government than education. All of the socioeconomic and cultural fault lines communities would rather paper over become fully exposed in debates over funding, curriculum, districting, etc. But we rarely hear discussions about educational policy at the national level these days.
You’ll hear no major political candidate deliver a speech solely focused on education. Debate moderators don’t much ask about it. The United States founders’ own thoughts on the subject are occasionally cited—but only in passing, on the way to the latest round of talks on war and wealth. Aside from proposals dismissed as too radical, education is mostly considered a lower priority for the nation’s leaders, or it’s roped into highly charged debates about political and social unrest on university campuses.
Chomsky, however, has no interest in harnessing education to prop up governments or market economies. Nor does he see education as a tool for righting historical wrongs, securing middle class jobs, or meeting any other agenda.
Chomsky, whose thoughts on education we’ve featured before, tells us in the short video interview at the top of the post how he defines what it means to be truly educated. And to do so, he reaches back to a philosopher whose views you won’t hear referenced often, Wilhelm von Humboldt, German humanist, friend of Goethe and Schiller, and “founder of the modern higher education system.” Humboldt, Chomsky says, “argued, I think, very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively, independently, without external controls.” A true education, Chomsky suggests, opens a door to human intellectual freedom and creative autonomy.
To clarify, Chomsky paraphrases a “leading physicist” and former MIT colleague, who would tell his students, “it’s not important what we cover in the class; it’s important what you discover.” Given this point of view, to be truly educated means to be resourceful, to be able to “formulate serious questions” and “question standard doctrine, if that’s appropriate”… It means to “find your own way.” This definition sounds similar to Nietzsche’s views on the subject, though Nietzsche had little hope in very many people attaining a true education. Chomsky, as you might expect, proceeds in a much more democratic spirit.
In the interview above from 2013 (see the second video), you can hear him discuss why he has devoted his life to educating not only his paying students, but also nearly anyone who asks him a question. He also talks about his own education and further elucidates his views on the relationship between education, creativity, and critical inquiry. And, in the very first few minutes, you’ll find out whether Chomsky prefers George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. (Hint: it’s neither.)
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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