The Boy Who Could Change the World (41 page)

And time is up. The next day the
Stanford Daily
reports that “during his time on campus, Horowitz met with Jeff Wachtel, senior assistant to University President John Hennessy, to lobby for the adoption of the Academic Bill of Rights at Stanford.”

Horowitz
reposted the
Daily
article
on his site under the heading “Horowitz Rocks Leftist Academia at Stanford,” and pointing out some mistakes the paper made. (Hilariously, the paper heard “United for Peace and Justice is led by a '60s Stalinist” as “United for Peace and Justice is led by 60 Stalinists,” although apparently they heard the bit about it being a “Muslim pro-terrorist” and “North Korean Marxist-Leninist group” correctly.)

What It Means to Be an Intellectual

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/intellectuals

April 17, 2006

Age 19

A friend sent me an email this morning and at the end of it, almost as an afterthought, he responded to a quote I'd sent him from an author praising books. “He would say that,” my friend replied, “he's a writer.”

I want to quibble with this statement—how is it that we can dismiss someone's argument simply because of their job?—but doing so would seem bizarre. There's a social norm that how much we discuss something should be roughly proportional to its importance. Mountains of print may be spilled on the issues of international relations, but spending a couple emails
discussing punctuation
would seem dreadfully bizarre.

There's just one problem: I
enjoy
deep discussions of punctuation and other trivialities. I could try to justify this taste—some argument that we should think about everything we do so that we don't do everything we think about—but why bother? Do I have to justify enjoying certain television shows as well? At some point, isn't pure enjoyment just enough? After all,
time isn't fungible
.

But of course, the same drive that leads me to question punctuation leads me to question the drive itself, and thus this essay.

What is “this drive”? It's the tendency to not simply accept things as they are but to want to think about them, to understand them. To not be content to simply feel sad but
to ask what sadness means
. To not just get a bus pass but
to think about the economic reasons getting a bus pass makes sense
. I call this tendency the intellectual.

The word “intellectual” has a bit of a bad rap. When I think of the
word I hear a man with a southern accent sneering at it. But this stain seems appropriate—
the idea
has a bad rap.

And why is that? One reason is that many people simply don't like to think about things. Perhaps it reminds them of school, which they didn't enjoy, and they don't want to go back there. Another is that they're busy people—men of action—and they don't have time to sit and think about every little detail. But mostly it's just because they think it's a waste of time. What's the point? What difference does it make what you think about punctuation? It's not going to affect anything.

This is the argument that's often used when demonizing intellectuals. As Thomas Frank summarizes the argument:

            
The same bunch of sneaking intellectuals are responsible for the content of Hollywood movies and for the income tax, by which they steal from the rest of us. They do no useful work, producing nothing but movies and newspaper columns while they freeload on the labor of others.

When I think of intellectuals, though, I don't really think of Hollywood producers or politicians or even newspaper columnists. But the people I do think of seem to have something else in common. They don't just love thinking, they love language. They love its tricks and intricacies, its games, the way it gets written down, the books it gets written into, the libraries those books are in, and the typography those books use.

Upon reflection this makes perfect sense. Language is the medium of thought, and so it's no surprise that someone who spends a lot of time thinking spends a lot of time thinking about how to communicate their thoughts as well. And indeed, all the intellectuals that come to mind write, not because they have to or get paid to, but simply for its own sake. What good is thinking if you can't share?

This contrasts with how intellectuals are commonly thought of—namely as pretentious elitist snobs. But real intellectuals, at least in the sense I'm using the term, are anything but. They love nothing more than explaining their ideas so that anyone who's interested can
understand them. They only seem pretentious because discussing such things is so bizarre.

This stereotype actually seems more like the caricature of the academic than the intellectual. (It's perhaps worth noting that most of the intellectuals I can think of
aren't
academics or at least have left the academy.) Far from being intellectuals, academics are encouraged to be almost the opposite. Instead of trying to explain things simply, they're rewarded for making them seem more complicated. Instead of trying to learn about everything, they're forced to focus in on their little subdiscipline. Instead of loving books, they have to love gabbing—up in front of class or at office hour with students or at professional conferences or faculty meetings.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. At the beginning I declined to justify my being an intellectual on any grounds other than pure personal enjoyment. And here, at the end, I can't think of any better justification. Certainly people should think deeply about their actions and the world's problems and other important topics. But the other ones? That's little more than personal preference.

Getting It Wrong

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/gettingitwrong

October 12, 2006

Age 19

Anyone who's spent any time around little kids in school, or even read
books about people who have
, knows that they're terrified of getting the answer wrong. Geez, you don't even need to hang around little kids. When you're out chatting with a bunch of people and you say something that shows you didn't know something, you look embarrassed. When you're playing a video game and not doing well, you try to come up with an excuse. People hate failing, so much so that they're afraid to try.

Which is a problem, because failing is most of what we do, most of the time. The only way to stretch your abilities is to try to do things a little bit beyond them, which means you're going to fail some of the time. Even weirder are the competitive situations. If I'm playing a game that relies solely on practice against someone who's practiced more than me, I'm probably going to lose, no matter how good a person I am. Yet I still feel degraded when I do.

Anyone who wants to build a decent educational environment is going to need to solve this problem. And there seem to be two ways of doing it: try and fix the people so that they don't feel embarrassed at failing, or try to fix the environment so that people don't fail. Which option to pick sometimes gets people into philopolitical debates (trying to improve kids' self-esteem means they won't be able to handle the real world! Preventing kids from experiencing failure is just childish coddling!), but for now let's just be concerned with what works.

Getting people to be OK with being wrong seems tough, if only
because everybody I know has this problem to a greater or lesser degree. There are occasional exceptions—mavericks like Richard Feynman (why do
you
care what other people think?) often seem fearless, although it's hard to gauge how much of that was staged—but these just seem random, with no patterns suggesting
why
.

It seems quite likely that a lot of the fear is induced by a goal-oriented educational system, obsessed with grades for work (A, B, C) and grades for students (1st, 2nd, 3rd). And perhaps the fear of being wrong you see in older people stems from having been through such experiences in childhood. If this is the case, then simply building a decent non-coercive environment for children will solve the problem, but that seems like too much to hope for.

Perhaps the solution is in, as some suggest, building self-esteem, so that when kids are wrong on one thing, they have other things to fall back on. I certainly see this process operating in my own mind: “Pff, sure they can beat me in
Guitar Hero
, but at least I can go back to writing blog entries.” But self-esteem is like a cushion: it prevents the fall from being too damaging, but it doesn't prevent the fall.

The real piece, it would seem, is finding some way to detach a student's actions from their worth. The reason failing hurts is because we think it reflects badly on us. I failed, therefore I'm a failure. But if that's not the case, then there's nothing to feel hurt about.

Detaching a self from your actions might seem like a silly thing, but lots of different pieces of psychology point to it. Richard Layard, in his survey
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
, notes that studies consistently find that people who are detached from their surroundings—whether through Buddhist meditation, Christian belief in God, or cognitive therapy—are happier people. “All feelings of joy and even physical pain are observed to fluctuate, and we see ourselves as like a wave of the sea—where the sea is eternal and the wave is just its present form” (
p. 191
).

Similarly, Alfie Kohn, who
looks more specifically at the studies about children
, finds that it's essential for a child's mental health that parents communicate that they love their child for who they are, no matter what it is they
do
. This concept can lead to some nasty philosophical debates—what are people, if not collections of things
done?—but the practical implications are clear. Children, indeed all people, need unconditional love and support to be able to survive in this world.
Attachment parenting studies
find that even infants are afraid to explore a room unless their mother is close by to support them, and
the same findings have been found in monkeys
.

The flip side is: how do we build educational institutions that discourage these ways of thinking? Obviously we'll want to
get rid of competition
as well as
grades
, but even so,
as we saw with Mission Hill
, kids are scared of failure.

While I'm loath to introduce
more
individualism into American schools, it seems clear that one solution is to have people do work on their own. Kids are embarrassed in front of the class,
shy people get bullied in small groups
, so all that really leaves is to do it on your own.

And this does seem effective. People seem more likely to ask “stupid” questions if they get to write them down on anonymous cards. When people
fail in a video game
, it only makes them want to try again right away so they can finally beat it. Apparently when nobody knows you're getting it wrong, it's a lot easier to handle it. Maybe because you know it can't affect the way people see you.

Schools can also work to discourage this kind of conditional seeing by making it completely unimportant. Even Mission Hill, which ensured every classroom was mixed-age, still had a notion of age and clear requirements for graduating. What if school, instead of a bunch of activities you had to march through, was a bunch of activities students could pick and choose from? When people are no longer marching, it's hard to be worried about your place in line.

But can we take the next step? Can schools not just see their students unconditionally, but actually encourage them to see themselves that way? Clearly we could teach everybody Buddhist meditation or something (which,
studies apparently show
, is effective), but even better would be if there was something in the structure of the school that encouraged this way of thinking.

Removing deadlines and requirements should help students live more fully in the moment. Providing basic care to every student should help them feel valued as people. Creating a safe and trusting
environment should free them from having to keep track of how much they can trust everyone else. And, of course, all the same things would be positive in the larger society.

Too often, people think of schools as systems for building good people. Perhaps it's time to think of them as places to let people be good.