Rest in Peace, and Welcome Home Again, beautiful Queen of Hearts.
You left this a richer world than you found it.
As many of you are now aware, Ryan's mom, Tracy Austin, took her
own life on Wednesday. She was a good and kind person who suffered
bipolar disease; she finally lost her struggle with depression. She
was a fine and conscientious mother, and we had remained friends after
our divorce and close partners in the gifts and responsibilities of
parenthood. We together made sure that Ryan is supported and loved,
and she will always have my great respect.
I want to thank all of you who have called and written with your
support. It is comforting indeed. I'd especially like to thank
Principal Troutman and Ms. Cannon from Pearce for their incredible
attention and concern; I've never seen such support from so
many. Today, the school sent a huge envelope containing handmade cards
from Ryan's classmates. What an extraordinary gesture. What an
extraordinarily comforting gesture to Ryan.
We are doing well, considering that we're only two days into
this. In some ways, it is something that I've navigated before—I
lost my mom at an early age, albeit to ill health, not by her own
hand. We will continue to work our way through this as time unfolds;
there is no roadmap. It is simply this thing that we have chosen to
do, to come here and live this thing called life.
In the meantime, please know how grateful I am to you for your kind
thoughts and your extraordinary support. We feel your sympathy and
love, and we are comforted in our loss. Thank you all.
I've been exchanging mail with a friend lately, a schoolteacher,
who knows that Ryan is a pretty sharp kid who needs to be in a sharp
educational environment. It being a Sunday morning, my traditional day
of free-form cogitating, I'm going to put down some thoughts on the
subject. Serendipitously, it is the eve of the first day of the
'07-'08 school year. Okay, then. Good timing.
Yeah, I've looked around pretty extensively at the available
options out there. KIPP, Kealing, magnet schools, Breakthrough, Duke
project, UT pre-prep services, augmentative education, private
schools, co-ops, boarding schools. I find (to varying degree) that all
of these programs are geared towards making him an attractive and
productive cog in the machinery of our particular (and in my opinion,
skewed) economic system.
I have yet to find an educational program that is designed to
assist a child in discovering their hidden interests and talents. We
emphasize getting good grades in a standardized curriculum, getting
good scores on standardized testing; getting accepted to a good
college so you can get a standardized degree and spend your life doing
a good standardized "career" definition for some company and have nice
things and raise up another generation to do the same thing. The whole
of it reflects why we are going nuts as a society. At its worst,
organized education can be an assembly line for robots, and I wouldn't
sentence a dog to such a pointless existence.
My son's potential far exceeds a life goal as silly and
monotonous as that. He and his type can change the world, and there's
a hell of a lot out there that needs to be changed.
I'm not worried about his academic education—he knows how to
educate himself, because I've raised him to know how and taught him
how to do it. His vocabulary already far exceeds the average high
school graduate. He has an in-depth and matter-of-fact knowledge of
disciplines that would've been considered graduate studies in my
time. (I know that I certainly couldn't explain general relativity or
discuss speculative Mayan cultural minutiae at the age of thirteen...)
He knows of geography, social studies, multidimensional mathematics,
history, cultural anthropology, political theories and histories,
paleontology, quantum physics. He is already better educated than
probably 98% of the population of this planet, right here and now,
before his voice has even started changing.
Is it because I am such a great parent? Nope. I am simply the
caretaker that points his hungry brain in the right direction. He asks
"Why is the sky blue?" and I answer "Let's find out." After 30 minutes
of research, we both know that molecules interact with photons in the
frequencies of the visible light spectrum in interesting ways, tending
to scatter blue-frequency photons more efficiently than the rest. It's
known as the Tyndall effect, or Rayleigh scattering. We know that it
has to do with the relative kinetic energy of a photon as a derivative
of its oscillation frequency, and we know about John Tyndall and Lord
Rayleigh, and the status of cutting-edge physics in the mid-nineteenth
century. And we know why the sky is such a beautiful color of blue, too.
You see, there is a critically important thing to remember
here: Ryan is a member of the first Internet Generation.
Ryan is among the first of our species—quite
literally—to grow up with the totality of the accumulated
knowledge of the human race at his fingertips. Everything about
education has now changed, and there aren't many who see the magnitude
of that change. Yet.
The old-as-the-human-race question of educational access is
answered. Over. It's done. We have the contents of every textbook
ever written; the mind of every artist and genius and businessman; the
thoughts of every philosopher and saint and sinner; the information on
the techniques of every craft; the cast of similar minds, sometimes as
fresh as this morning's coffee. They're all available via the machine
that you're using to read these words. To you. At this instant.
How cool is that? Think about it. You can type in "Quantum
Chromodynamics" or "Knitting", sitting in your home, right now,
and get virtually everything that is known on the subject,
instantaneously.
There's now a new operational imperative regarding the
education of our children, and we'll realize it soon. A new question
that never had real meaning before. If everyone can now access every
bit of knowledge effortlessly, then there is a profound moral and ethical
issue that has to be addressed. We must deal with the no-longer
hypothetical question: "What if Beethoven had never been exposed to
music?"
It is a wholly new question of philosophy.
Ryan will excel at anything that interests him. Of that, I have no
doubt. What he needs here and now is a full illumination of what is
available out there to potentially engage his interest. I'd like my
son to get a good Human Cultural Overview and, quite simply, to
be exposed to every unsolved idea available. Whether he chooses to be
a medical doctor or filmmaker or a truck driver or a designer of
toilets doesn't matter to me. He will pursue and excel at anything
that he feels is worthy of his talents. What matters to me is that he
is made aware of as much of
every branch of the tree of human knowledge as possible, so
that his latent creative talents can be kindled, illuminated and
developed. He'll pursue his personal predilections; we all do. And if
I have taught him anything, I have taught him how to efficiently
research an interest. He's learned how to learn at this point. What he
needs to know is the variety and the extent of the playground, the
gameboard. Ryan might be an expert at weaving Tartan plaids for
all I know.
I believe that we as a people have an ethical duty to make sure
that the hypothetical "Tartan plaid weaving geniuses" of the world
have a chance to find out who they are. Whether they live on a sheep
farm in Scotland or next to a crackhouse on 160th street is
immaterial. For the first time in the history of our existence, we can
find everyone's genius. And we have a duty to do so.
Given that contextual milieu, I have been looking for a kind of
"philosophical survey of the disciplines of the human race" curriculum
that probably doesn't yet exist—but one that in my opinion is
desperately needed. Soon, every young mind on the the planet will have
instant access to this
Encyclopedae Humanae that we call the Internet. What we have to
do now is to find a way to help our children to discover their
interests and their talents. They'll do the rest. I am here to tell
you that I watch it every day.
So. Education and what it should do. In my opinion, the organized
primary education that I see out there is currently failing to provide
the breadth of information that will prepare my son for the world in
which he will be living his life. But it's not catastrophic; it's not
doing any particular damage either. There are certainly social and
cultural benefits to being in school, and the failure is ultimately
marginal in our household. We pick up the slack in our own way.
That having been said, the cat is already out of the bag; The
Internet is here. The magnitude of what it represents is only now
beginning to dawn on us. Primary school is going to have to become
primary meta-school. We are going to have to teach our children
how to educate themselves, and we are going to have to give them what
used to be called a world-class liberal arts education, straight out of
the crib.
When I was his age, we took something odius called the
"Differential Aptitude Test." It helped the administrative staff to
determine who took algebra and who took shop class, and it labeled us
and threw expectations upon us—long before we knew ourselves
well enough to have any opinion about it. That mindset will soon be a
goner. We are approaching a day when the average third-grader will be
more intellectually sophisticated than the average twelfth-grader was
in those days.
I'd like to see something along the lines of grades 1-3 teaching
basic reading, writing, math, and small-group social skills. Grades
4-6 could be devoted to discovering the
individual talents and interests of the child—musical,
arithmetic, artistic, rhetorical, cognative, administrative, athletic,
scientific, social, whatever.
Any human interest or talent; there is dormant genius in
everyone. Some folks will formulate theories in cosmology. Other folks
will be fascinated and fulfilled operating a precision machine
tool. We have a duty to ourselves to help those people to find out
their interests and expose them to the myriad possibilities.
So the rest of the 7-12 school experience could expose the student
to every human discipline related to their talents and interests,
teach them large-group citizenship skills and responsibilities (read:
civics), and expose them to the concept of community service. By the
time of high school graduation, students would most certainly have
a clue of who they were and what to pursue, and be fired from within,
having the interest and intention to pursue truly meaningful higher
education.
In the meantime, Ryan and I will keep doing our own little
exercises in research, and I'll keep looking for the upcoming and
inevitable crack in the monolith that we call public education.
To quote Arthur C. Clarke, "Something is going to happen. Something
Wonderful."
To quote Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'."
And, to quote Steve Earle, "The Revolution Starts Now."
August 22nd, 1967 was the last peaceful day for parents in the
summer of love. On the following day, Johnny Allen Hendrix (later to
be rechristened James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix) released "Are You
Experienced?", and parents everywhere realized that their daughters
were no longer going to be safe. Pat Boone and Connie Francis were not
going to be on the radio any more. Half the female population of the
planet were suddenly feeling urges that no one had ever told them
existed.
The guy came out of nowhere with "Purple Haze", "Foxy Lady", "Hey
Joe", "Wind Cries Mary", "Fire", and more. There wasn't a bad song on
the album, and it was all unlike anything ever heard before, anywhere,
period. Taken together, it looked like civilization itself was
crumbling to most of the older generation, not the least reason was
that a "black" man was playing "white" music better than any whitey
could possibly do it. With one phallic thrust of an upside-down guitar
connected to a stack of Marshalls, backed by a white rhythm
section, Jimi swept the gameboard clear, installed
his rules into the new game, and every rock guitarist in the
known universe was scrambling to catch up. They still are, come to
think of it.
I remember hating it at the time. It seemed loud and self-indulgent
and violent and base to this little gentle intellectual proto-geek. Of
course it was, all of that. But when the testosterone of my
adolescence kicked in three years later, I began to understand. Forty
years on, it can be pretty clearly seen that this little
hyper-talented drug addict from Seattle did as much as Martin Luther
King to begin to break down the race barriers of the world, and that
is one of his great legacies.
So. Thanks, Jimi. You streaked through like a short-lived exploding
rainbow comet and changed
everything. You heralded a new day, and provided us with both a
map and a warning, all in one package. It was cool to watch and be a
part of. It all happened just the way it was supposed to. And I am
sure that you simply grinned at St. Peter and said "That was fun."
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders,
give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new
problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight
efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
First, you take a bunch of shaky and risky subprime mortgages and
repackage them into residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS);
then you repackage these RMBS in different (equity, mezzanine, senior)
tranches of cash CDOs that receive a misleading investment grade
rating by the credit rating agencies; then you create synthetic CDOs
out of the same underlying RMBS; then you create CDOs of CDOs (or
squared CDOs) out of these CDOs; and then you create CDOs of CDOs of
CDOs (or cubed CDOs) out of the same murky securities; then you stuff
some of these RMBS and CDO tranches into SIV (structured investment
vehicles) or into ABCP (Asset Backed Commercial Paper) or into money
market funds. Then no wonder that eventually people panic and run - as
they did yesterday on an apparently safe money market fund such as
Sentinel. That toxic waste of unpriceable and uncertain junk and
zombie corpses is now emerging in the most unlikely places in the
financial markets.
Second example: today any wealthy individual can take $1 million and
go to a prime broker and leverage this amount three times; then the
resulting $4 million ($1 equity and $3 debt) can be invested in a fund
of funds that will in turn leverage these $4 millions three or four
times and invest them in a hedge fund; then the hedge fund will take
these funds and leverage them three or four times and buy some very
junior tranche of a CDO that is itself levered nine or ten times. At
the end of this credit chain, the initial $1 million of equity becomes
a $100 million investment out of which $99 million is debt (leverage)
and only $1 million is equity. So we got an overall leverage ratio of
100 to 1. Then, even a small 1% fall in the price of the final
investment (CDO) wipes out the initial capital and creates a chain of
margin calls that unravel this debt house of cards. This unraveling of
a Minskian Ponzi credit scheme is exactly what is happening right now
in financial markets.
I've been screeching here about our unsustainable economy, big
business, the common good, and the folly of consumerism pretty
regularly for the entire existence of this blog. For years before
that, actually. Hell, old and dear friends refuse to drink with me
during election season. I don't blame them; it's okay.
But when the Comptroller General of the United States of
America releases an official report comparing our economic state to
the final days of the Roman Empire, perhaps it's time to attend
the issue more seriously and thoughtfully?
Frank Zappa. A mentor of a sort, my employer for a bit, the most
intelligent human being with whom I've ever had the privilege to be
associated; perhaps the only fully-functional genius that I've ever
met. What I didn't know is that he played Saturday Night Live
on Christmas night in 1976—and performed "Slime From The
Video"—and had Don Pardo do a voice-over of the lyrics as
slime came out of the studio monitors.
There is no possibility of this song being performed better. Pure,
inspired genius-within-genius, all from deep inside the belly of the
very beast discussed in the lyrics. Absolutely one of the coolest
things that I've ever seen:
Caesar Salad. Mmmm. I finally found the right mix for the dressing;
not too sour or tart, super creamy, subtle, not overpowering.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the final version of R&R
Kitchens'...
...Caesar Salad
1 whole egg plus 1 yolk
1 2 oz. can anchovies, drained
1 tbsp minced green onion
3 fat garlic cloves
1 rounded tsp mustard (dry, or 1 tbsp of a deli brand like Guildens works fine)
Juice of 1 medium lemon
1 tsp pepper
2 cups canola oil
5 tbsp grated Parmesan
water, maybe
Put the first seven ingredients into your food processor; pulse
until fairly chopped; open and scrape bowl back down with a spatula.
Turn processor back on; slowly (a drop at a time isn't too
slow for the first quarter cup or so) drizzle in half of the oil; stop
and add Parmesan; scrape sides; start it up again and drizzle in the
other half of the oil. Stop and check it.
You should have a wonderful thick mayonnaise now; likely too thick.
Fire up the food processor again and slowly drizzle in water until you
get the desired consistency. You want it to pour, to be able to coat
the lettuce. Say a little thicker than standard ranch dressing.
Chill it for a couple of hours; get a head of romaine, wash and
chop it into bite size pieces; chill; cut some fresh French bread into
half inch cubes and fry them in butter until just golden, dusting 'em
with a bit of dried oregano or basil for croutons. (Please tell
me you refuse to eat those rock hard flavorless out-of-the-box
so-called croutons!)
You'll want to serve the salad near-ice cold; toss the desired
amount of dressing with the romaine, just enough to coat completely,
immediately prior to serving; garnish with a bit o' Parmesan and soft
crispy buttery croutons on top. Swoon.
Addendum: if you want an excellent clone of Hellman's®,
do the same recipe without the garlic, onions, anchovies, parmesan,
pepper and water. Use just half a lemon's juice, and add two tablespoons of
white vinegar & a teaspoon of salt. Costs about a quarter of
store-bought and you're not eating a bunch of preservatives. Yum. Make
ranch dressing with it. :)
Bloxorz