Muszkiewicz Reader

What’s high school for?

Perhaps we could endeavor to teach our future the following:

- How to focus intently on a problem until it’s solved.

- The benefit of postponing short-term satisfaction in exchange for long-term success.

- How to read critically.

- The power of being able to lead groups of peers without receiving clear delegated authority.

- An understanding of the extraordinary power of the scientific method, in just about any situation or endeavor.

-How to persuasively present ideas in multiple forms, especially in writing and before a group.

-Project management. Self-management and the management of ideas, projects and people.

-Personal finance. Understanding the truth about money and debt and leverage.

-An insatiable desire (and the ability) to learn more. Forever.

-Most of all, the self-reliance that comes from understanding that relentless hard work can be applied to solve problems worth solving.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

In other words, when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers. Our ‘reasoning’ is a means to a predetermined end—winning our ‘case’—and is shot through with biases. They include ‘confirmation bias,’ in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and ‘disconfirmation bias,’ in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you’re ‘supposed to see.’ Imagine you got through everybody’s list, until everything you hadn’t read didn’t really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.

Even deeper, for children, math looms large; there’s something about doing well in math that makes kids feel they are smart in everything. In that sense, math can be a powerful tool to promote social justice. “When you have all the kids in a class succeeding in a subject, you see that they’re competing against the problem, not one another,” says Mighton. ‘It’s like they’re climbing a mountain together. You see a very healthy kind of competition. And it makes kids more generous to one another. Math can save us.’

It will take independent-minded educators to use Jump and see if its results can be replicated in more classrooms and schools. It’s hard to imagine what society might look like if we could undermine the math hierarchies that get solidified in grade school. These patterns tend to play out across society, often in negative ways. Wasn’t it the whiz kids who invented financial derivatives and subprime mortgages? And how many adults got themselves into hot water with their mortgages because, at bottom, they didn’t really understand the risks?

‘But you know, all presidents done something good. Well, most of them. Except that last one.’

[Walter] Breuning, a self-described Republican, meant President George W. Bush.

‘He got us into war. We can’t get out of war now,’ he said. ‘I voted for him. But that’s about all. His father was a pretty good president, not too bad. The kid had too much power. He got himself wrapped up and that’s it.’

…

‘I think every change that we’ve ever made, ever since I was a child — 100 years — every change has been good for the people,’ Breuning said. ‘My God, we used to have to write with pen and ink, you know, (for) everything. When the machines came, it just made life so much easier.’

…

Breuning talked current affairs with the other residents. One of his main causes was to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘War never cured anything. Look at the North and South right today. They’re still fighting over the damn war. They’ll never get over that,’ he said.

What puzzles me is why there isn’t more indignation. The Tea Party is the most indignant domestic political movement since Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party, but its wrath is turned in the wrong direction. It favors policies that are favorable to corporations and unfavorable to individuals. Its opposition to Obamacare is a textbook example. Insurance companies and the health care industry finance a “populist” movement that is manipulated to oppose its own interests. The billionaire Koch brothers payroll right wing front organizations that oppose labor unions and financial reform. The patriots wave their flags and don’t realize they’re being duped.