I hope the nutty idea that we should create school assembly lines and try to drop reading, math, and science nodules into the brains of children as they marched in lockstep is about over. International achievement scores indicate the absence of art, literature, music, drama and other creative activities has severely damaged the cognitive arena. This story about the value of a liberal arts education makes an important point:

“ A book collector ran into a Leave No Child Behind graduate who told him he had just thrown out an old dusty Bible he had found in his parent’s ancestral home. He told him someone named Guten-something had printed it. “Not Gutenberg!” shouted the bibliophile. “ You idiot! You’ve just thrown away one of the first books ever printed. A copy sold at auction recently for over one million dollars!” The LNCB product was unmoved. “My copy wouldn’t have brought a dime. Some fellow named Martin Luther had scribbled all over it.”

About every decade a few U. S. educators and many ignorant politicians come up with sometimes bizarre and often ineffective “progroms” to bring us up to the level of other industrialized countries. We have had individualized learning packages, “modern math,” many different reading programs, numerous intelligence and content standardized tests, and Leave No Child Behind just to name a few. At this moment Common Core is the rage. That probably won’t work either.

We have too much poverty, too many priorities rating higher than education, and too little knowledge of what makes our brains tick in some kind of sequential pattern. We have even tried playing the classical music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach to fetuses to arouse their thirst for learning early. The classics are supposed to increase hand-eye coordination and other qualities we haven’t been able to define yet.  I don’t know if rock-and-roll has been tried on fetuses. I suspect it might improve the flexibility of the pelvis.

Music Seems To Work On Mice And Rats

I do have an observation and several questions about the efficacy of classical music after directly teaching and supervising high school students for twenty years. High school orchestras always contain the brightest students in the entire school. Members usually win most of the scholarship awards. Question: Were they smart before they selected the violin or oboe–or did the music and the performance challenges make them smart? It’s the old chicken-or-egg question. Question: Did the fact that the parents could finance an instrument and entice or force the kid to play it influence the intellectual ability of their student–or did they recognize they had a kid smart enough to play the viola so they bought her one? Question: When two violinists marry, how many produce linebackers or defensive ends instead of more violinists and cellists?

Japanese medical researchers have determined that mice that get heart transplants survive much longer if opera music or Mozart is played loudly during their surgeries. Mice exposed to single-frequency tones do not live as long. Research indicates that Mozart helps stimulate the production of immune system cells. We do heart transplants all over the country now. Have we tried Bach or Beethoven as a transforming sound during these long, complex operations?

I would think the Rotterdam police who are training rats and employing them to sniff out drugs, chemicals, and explosive materials would be very interested in this research.  The police now use five rats instead of lab tests for quick tests of suspect materials. The rats, named after such famous detectives as Magnum and Poirot, have a 95 percent success rate. The rats often make correct decisions in two seconds. Rotterdam is not the first city to use rats for detection. In Mozambique rats have uncovered 2,406 land mines, 992 bombs, and 13,025 small arms and ammo. They have helped clear over six million square meters of the country. Columbia has replaced some bomb-sniffing dogs with bomb-sniffing rats. Rats have even been used to sniff out tuberculosis in some countries, replacing the expense of lab tests. If rat trainers would expose them to classical music, who knows how versatile rats could be? I’m taking a break now to listen to a little Mozart.

What Did Accounting Teach Antoinette Tuff?

I wonder what Antoinette Tuff’s ACT score was–but it probably didn’t mean anything. Antoinette was the Georgia school bookkeeper who talked the sick, deranged shooter Michael Brandon Hill out of firing up to 500 rounds with his AR-15 at kids in an elementary school. Although she said she almost peed in her pants, she spoke to him in a calm, methodical manner while not showing fear or hatred. She discovered humanity in him–and he discovered humanity in her. We will never know how many children she saved in a situation like Sandy Hook.

If we examined her school records, transcripts, and test scores, do we have any chance of determining what educational elements she used in containing this frightening, explosive situation? I think not. Did she get her courage from history courses? Did she refine her ability to make judgments in algebra class? Did she get her moral tone and selfless attitude from literature? Was she in the school orchestra–or did she play volleyball?  Did she draw her compassion and kindness for others from home economics? We don’t know enough about the brain and personal environment of people yet to know what a person will do. A mass murderer such as Adolf Eichmann loves his wife and children. Priests, ministers, and imans can molest men, women, and children on Saturday night and preach about Jesus and Mohammad Sunday morning.  But we do know that besides bookkeeping she knew about life. We just don’t know how she acquired the lessons of life.

English teacher Elaine Bransford published a letter in the StarTribune listing what students should know. School board members and politicians should read and digest. Here are a few:

*** You should know the world is wide, and while you are an important part of it, you are   not the center of it.

*** You should know that, however infuriating it might be, things can be both true and false at the same time. Things can also be more or less true, or more or less right, than other things. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in things with conviction, but it       does mean that you should remember this mantra: “I could be wrong, so let me find  out why I’m right.”

*** You should feel a sense of responsibility for your role in family, your community, your country, and your world. Without this sense of responsibility, happiness will be elusive.

*** You should understand the importance of a sense of humor.

*** You should take a cue from great literature and understand that there is one thing that    remains as true today as it was a 1,000 years ago–pride goes before the fall.

*** You should understand that the relationship between happiness and fun is a   complicated one.

I don’t think these goals were listed in Leave No Child Behind.

And Then We Know Virtually Nothing About Genetics, Intelligence, And The 100 Trillion Somethings In The Brain

Barack Obama has set aside $1 billion to study the brain, mostly because of Alzheimer’s. It is not nearly enough to isolate functioning sections of the brain. We don’t know much about genetics and inheriting skills and smarts either. There’s a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell in the latest New Yorker called “Man And Superman.” Remember when people were trying to raise SUPERBABIES? We are just beginning to understand that we have supermen.

Eero Mantyranta of Finland won seven medals in the 1960, 1964, and 1968 Winter Olympics because he had more red blood cells than other competitors. He has a rare genetic mutation which causes his bone marrow to overproduce red blood cells. People often wonder why he has such a bulbous nose surrounded by a red and purple face. Now we know. He has 65 percent more red blood cells than the normal adult. Gladwell sums it up: “In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles–a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles.” Mantyranta won these events because of “excess” red blood cells. In the 1964 Olympics he won a 15-kilometer race by 40 seconds, a record never equaled. Eero has the right stuff.

Lance Armstrong, the biker, always pretended he had the right stuff–but he didn’t have the mutant genes of Eero so he faked it. Lance proved he was not Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy of the 1950’s. He won bike races by doping himself with his own blood containing red blood cells before the flag went down.

The Relationship Between World-Class High Jumpers And Kangaroos

   There are genes that assist other great athletes. Donald Thomas, world champion high jumper, leaped 7 feet 3.25 inches on the seventh jump of his life. Wow! In eight more months he won the world championship. Why did he win? He did have long legs, a necessity for jumping success, but he had extremely long Achilles tendons–ten and one-quarter inches—which gave him tremendous spring after planting his feet. We do share genes with kangaroos, but Thomas had a bigger share!

Ted Williams, perhaps the greatest all-around hitter in baseball, always insisted that he could count the seams on a baseball thrown at him at one hundred miles an hour. His visual acuity tested at 20/10. Ophthalmologist Louis Tosenbaum has tested about 400 major leaguers and found that the average acuity is 20/13 for good hitters. That means that they can see at 20 feet what the rest of us with 20/20 see at 13 feet. What an advantage when a pitcher can throw fastballs, curves, sliders, change-ups, knuckleballs, and other assorted junk at batters 60 feet away. Although as a pitcher I was a pretty good hitter in high school and college, I was somewhat handicapped by being near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other.

We Have A Lot To Learn About Learning

  We have a lot of work to do before we really know how people learn. The life of Stephen Hawking should give us pause when we think we know what we’re doing. At the age of 21 Hawking was diagnosed with a motor neurone disease and given two to three years to live. Now an absolutely brilliant theoretical physicist at age 71, Hawking must use a computer-generated voice he controls with a facial muscle and a blink from one eye. He cannot move any other muscles.

In a film about his remarkable life, Hawking says it’s theoretically possible to copy a person’s brain on a computer to provide a “life” after death because such a brain could exist outside of the body. Hawking, severely physically impaired as he is, believes that the terminally ill should determine when they want their lives ended.

Hawking is a marvel of the intellectual world. At age 21 he enjoyed a dilettante’s life at Oxford University. After his illness incapacitated him, his study of the origins of the universe

Astounded everyone around him. Hawking says, “All my life I have lived with the threat of an early death, so I hate wasting time.” His sister says, “ It is useless to argue with him, he always turns the argument around.” Precocious from birth, when he and his sister received a large doll’s house when young children, he immediately added plumbing and electricity. Perhaps sometime in the future we will be able to determine what has made it possible for Hawking to intellectually tick–and tock.