(Or, Don’t Hate Me Because I’m a Conservative)

I voted in Palm Beach County today.

For some of you, the needle may have already skidded across the metaphorical record. I’ve already seen the gears turning on the faces of my friends this week….. Voting… voting… there’s voting going on? OH! THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY!

Then they stare at me in disdain and disbelief.

It gets worse.

I was having a little text exchange the other night with one of my most brilliant friends (who happens to be an ardent Obama supporter) about politics. It was late and I think I’d had a glass of wine or two—enough to be a little more loose-lipped about my political past than I’d normally be.

“Big secret,” I typed. “I was an absentee ballot voter in Palm Beach County, Florida in the 2000 elections. I voted for Bush. You heard me: I’m one of the 500 people in the world who got us into this whole mess.”

I’m not kidding when I tell you I didn’t hear from him again for a full 24 hours.

“I’m still recovering from this information,” he responded.

I’ve been carrying around the hanging chads of my past like emotional baggage. Admittedly, at the time, I was just a gung-ho, extremely conservative, incredibly religious voter. As the years roll by, though, the implication of that chad (or today’s I VOTED! sticker) and what people might perceive as my social and ethical philosophy has been a nightmare.

Don’t get me wrong: the implications of my voting choices were intense early on. I was filling out that Florida voter punch card from my dorm room at a women’s liberal arts college in western Massachusetts. I knew what it was to have a political philosophy that wasn’t exactly the same as those of my peers.

Not that I had much of a “philosophy” at the time.

Nevertheless, the alienation these days is worse.

Before You Bail on Me

Let me get it out of the way and say that I don’t think Republicans (the big brand and its spray tanned leader, at least) are my peers anymore, either. In fact, I don’t know if modern Republicanism ever embodied what I think; I definitely see now that I’m a fiscal conservative and social liberal. As I’ve been watching this election unfold (and as I find myself coincidentally once again in Palm Beach County, registered as a Republican, feeling like a stranger in a strange land and having to choose between one of these blow-hards), I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the general deterioration of political discourse and critical thinking that goes along with it. After all, this is my blog and I’m bracing for the potential backlash this is going to bring even as I write it.

My objective here is actually to ratchet up the level of critical, concrete thinking both within and between parties—as in, I’m seriously hoping to affect the next conversation you have over coffee about your political values and direction—and I’m sticking my neck out to do so.

I repeat: this is not  game of Political Red Rover. You don’t have to come over. I just want to start some interesting conversation.

That being said:

We Have No Joint Sense of Purpose As A Nation—and between Parties

In theory, people of all parties should be working towards more or less the same fundamental ideals (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, anyone?) and arguing over ways to get there. That means that my Obama-supporting friend and I should actually have basic ideals about public welfare and society that more or less line up. We probably do. That’s what makes us tolerable to each other, at least from a political standpoint.

It’s easy to imagine that back when the colonies were recently independent, early Americans had a sense of joint purpose, like, “We’re here to build a country from scratch,” (not to oversimplify). While even at that time there was plenty of difference of political philosophy, building a strong United States was paramount to virtually everyone; after all, most people had risked their lives (or their family members had) to do so.
Compare that to today. That sense of civic duty and engagement, the feeling we’re still creating and ironing out the longevity of a nation that protects its people and lives without a monarch, and the reality that we’re still participating in the greatest governmental experiment in history are all largely absent from the fiery fights we have with everyone from our worst enemies to our own grandmothers.

Now, this all hinges on one main idea (conceivably an idea that many Republicans no longer hold dear (or, worse, that they’re being portrayed as having forgotten)): the success and continuity of the whole might require trumping the needs and desires of the individual.

It’s not all about me. It’s not all about you, either.

Republicanism can make sense in light of the fundamental ideas that we’re all in this together and that what happens to my neighbor actually affects my own wellbeing, so it behooves me to have his best interest in mind. When that’s abandoned, things go wrong.

Next time you get into a political spat with someone, stop and establish what their objective is for the country (and I mean addressing education, poverty, wealth, quality of life, freedom)—and see if you can articulate your own. It may turn out that the guy you’re arguing with really is a total jerk who ought to be punched, but at least you’ll have defined your terms on your way to that assessment.

In light of that, I want to make a few comments on my conservatism:

I Don’t Want Lower Taxes So I Can Horde Money…

…and go shopping at Givenchy for extra handbags while children are going to bed hungry and unable to read.

Not that I don’t like bags.

As far as I’m concerned, my main reason for desiring lower taxes is because I don’t want the government directing my charitable giving, and I’d like to be able to give more, more comfortably, even when the recipients of those gifts don’t count as a tax deduction.

This may sound very pollyanna, but I don’t simply mean I want to give my wealth to my children without the state being involved (although that’s true, too). I mean that if my family members and friends—parents, siblings, whomever—need me, I would like to have more to give. If the local food bank is in need, I’d like to have more to give. Moreover, I believe distribution of funds can be more efficient (and therefore more effective) when the government is not involved.

This, again, goes back to general purpose: what the heck are we doing here and what can we do to contribute? I legitimately want to be freed up to give freely, and if any of you know me personally, you know that I do, sometimes at great personal cost. Heck, I’ve even offered a kidney to a Twitter friend (a liberal, no less!). I put my money where my mouth is, and I think as a conservative that has to come with the territory.

Generosity has to be a fundamental tenet of a functioning fiscally conservative government. That for many Republicans giving generously isn’t a key piece of the equation points to why things are so broken (and why I’m usually mortified to admit I have anything to do with them).

So If the Government Shouldn’t Be Handing Out Money, Who Should?

Social organizations should be distributing the cash. There’s a problem in making that happen, though, I know. It has a lot to do with values and, again, a disintegrating sense of social responsibility, often assumed to be or portrayed as specific to those on the right. I also think it’s why we fight so quickly and so harshly; politics is quickly becoming the new religion. According to Gallup, the number of Americans who identify as having no religious affiliation has increased from “near zero in the 1950s to 16%*” in 2010. Now, this is obviously not a majority, but I think it does reflect a secular shift in our culture. Despite less affiliation with religion—the way man sorts through who he is in relation to the universe and other people—there are still ethical and social issues that need to be resolved, and politics has become the arena in which we hash them out.

As a conservative, I don’t necessarily think that’s best. Philip K. Howard makes a fascinating observation in The Death Of Common Sense that speaks directly to this legislation of behavior and attitude:

Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it’s not the result of venal bureaucrats. (p. 99)

We can’t legislate that citizens be better people. Moreover, we can’t force people to not exercise every right they have to the nth degree (fly everywhere in a private jet, consume unknown quantities of artery-clogging beef product at Taco Bell, etc).

When we talk about why the government “should be doing something,” we should more carefully look at why we as individuals are not doing whatever that is.

Shut Up Already

OK, I will. But I want to leave you with this: at the end of the day, I believe our political discourse is a direct reflection of how much respect we have for one another. I’d say the vast majority of my friends are liberals, and I deeply respect them, largely because the kinds of people I’m friends with are people who hold dear personal responsibility, discipline, delayed gratification, and critical thinking.

Those ideals are what allow us to talk calmly about ways to grow into a society and culture of which we can all be proud—and they’re the only sort of conversations that will ultimately get us somewhere as a Union.

Try it sometime.

Sally and Marcie

For anyone who knows me personally, it should come as no surprise that I spent a portion of my holiday weekend tucked in to the December/January ’12 issue of Garden and Gun magazine. This issue’s cover model is a very handsome black Labrador retriever named Deke, a hunting dog trained at the famous Wildrose Kennels in Mississippi.

Luna

Our house is crawling with dogs—we currently have seven—so anything about training dogs, dog psychology, or getting your pack to do anything you desperately hope it would do appeals to me. The owner of Wildrose, Mike Stewart, who is legendary for turning out doggies who absolutely love to listen and work for their masters, offered some tips at the end of story.

As it turns out, being a great dog leader is just like being a people leader! ( And you thought this post was just an excuse to make you look at photos of my mutts.)

“The way I see it, most dogs are just out for a good time. I equate them with frat boys at Ole Miss. Yeah, it’s fun to stand around with a plastic cup of beer and a cigarette. But if you show them there’s value in work beyond that, if you stop that behavior and show them there’s more that’s possible in their life? Motivate them to see other, bigger rewards? Well, both the frat boy and the dog might very well adopt the new behavior. Then you reinforce it, and that new behavior is still fun. It’s just a different kind of fun.” -Mike Stewart, Wildrose Kennels

The Pud'

The special thing about effectively leading (or managing or teaching or parenting) is the ability to connect the work or discipline needed for a new skill to the excitement and personal satisfaction that that new skill can bring. In fact, not only does effectively teaching a new skill foster enthusiasm about that particular skill, but it also creates enthusiasm around the entire experience of learning and being productive.

Getting this “different kind of fun” to register is what keeps [some of] my dogs heeling off-leash and what can ultimately keep a waffling high school student from dropping out. It propels an Australian Shepherd through a Fly Ball course and keeps a piano student seated at the bench for an extra hour of practice. It keeps a seeing-eye dog faithfully leading its master and a CEO keeping her team on task.

…and it drives people coming out of a long holiday weekend back to their desks.

Curiosity begets curiosity. Discipline with reward begets more discipline. Achievement begets achievement.

Astro

When we see no reason to do new work, when we don’t value what it is we’re creating, and when the task at hand seems disconnected from a more worthwhile world around us, it makes all the sense in the world that we’d do the same thing a dog naturally does: lay around and nap.

How do you make the connection to a “different kind of fun” for those you lead? For yourself?

Stevie

I have had it. This conversation about the value of college has gone absolutely off the rails. I’m so ticked this morning I’m having trouble writing coherently. I guess this makes sense, because anger is rooted in fear, and I have finally become terrified for the future of education in the United States.

I found a book review in Time the other day of Michael Ellberg’s much anticipated The Education of Millionaires. You can read the brief article and check out the absolutely infuriating comments here.

It’s worth reading, but if you’re not going to, you know need to know that  Gregorian’s article is plastered with comments from young men skewering him for pointing out that:

…what is forgotten in the discussion about dollars and cents is that the purpose of education, whatever its cost or its source, is not simply to enable one to earn a living but to prepare one for living over the course of an entire lifetime with all the ups and downs that come our way.

News Flash! Education is about preparation for living. It’s about WHAT THE HELL YOU DO ALL DAY. Education is about why you bother to get your ass out of bed, how you choose to spend your time, what you value, and how you interact with the world. It’s reflected in how you treat others—people you know and people you don’t. It’s reflected in what you have to offer the world, in the quality of work you do. It’s also reflected in the puzzling and ubiquitous choice to subsist on a diet of ramen or BigMacs and own a 62” television with a full cable package instead of investing in nutritious food and a library card.

It’s pretty easy to make college the target: I’m sure any minute now we’ll see “I have a $120,000 degree and all I got was this lousy sweatshirt” hoodies sold on street corners. But we’re not really fighting about college, people!

We’re having a big, embarrassing, ugly fight about what we value.

If you think about it, it makes all the sense in the world that Gregorian’s readers think he’s a nut for thinking education is about preparation for life. After all, the cultural message we’ve been sending to students for decades hasn’t been saying anything like that. We’re finally seeing the product of several generations of Americans who have grown up in a consumer culture whose public education system has told them that the point of their educations is to grow up and get a job so they have money to spend on useless shit.

When the majority of signifiers of success and glory that we present to kids are based on things don’t require excellence (Ms. Spears and Mr. Bieber, anyone?), how could we suddenly expect excellence to suddenly matter to them?  When we worship people for being beautiful and rich, not skilled and productive, why would anyone aim to be anything but beautiful and rich? Why would anyone think an education is worth anything more than the salary it puts back in their pockets?

Expensive education is laughable when the national cultural ethos revolves around Kim Karadshian and Snookie (who, unlike me, is a New York Times Bestselling Author).

Gregorian probably could have chosen a better phrase than the “ups and downs” of living. It’s a bit gee-whiz for talking about the Stuff Of Life. But that’s what’s coming to a head here. College has become an easy Wizard to stand up to, but we should be a hell of a lot more concerned with the directionless values and lever-pulling that’s going on behind the scenes that’s making us think that way.

The aftermath of dismissing an exploratory, art and literature filled education is not only going to hit each one of us in the wallet when our economy can’t keep up in global competition, but it’s also going to continue to hit us where it matters more, in the head and the heart.

In rallying about the uselessness of true education we forget why To Kill a Mockinbird is as relevant now as it was sixty years ago. We argue that the Disney Concert Hall is as important as a storage facility–never mind Ghery’s exterior. We tell Sydney Poitier to stick it and Sally Mann to hang up the camera. We tell Steve Jobs that Apple could be ugly and get along just fine. We tell 826 Valencia not to bother teaching urban youth to write creatively and Art Basel Miami to shut its doors.

We tell women to stay home.

We tell children to be seen and not heard.

Instead of lambasting someone for thinking that higher level education is about preparation for living, maybe we should shut our big traps for a second and consider that maybe it is.

Question is: what are we going to do about it?

(…or, Why The Drive-Through Habit Portends Terrible Critical Thinking)

Since I teach high school students all over the United States, it’s pretty noticeable when they’re uniformly unfamiliar with something. For almost ten years I’ve been explaining to students from Boca to Toronto to Palm Springs the same term. I mean, every time it comes up I’m thinking, “Well, here we go again.”

I’ve been kvetching about this in my head for a good decade, and finally this week I figured I should share with the rest of you. No time like the present! After all, many of the students I teach come from [insert trumpet aire here] The Finest High Schools in the United States. If they don’t know something, it’s because we’re not teaching them (…and I mean you and me and the rest of culture, not Mrs. Samuels down in the English department). These kids are like little litmus tests for our collective ability to think, and, friend, let me tell you: it ain’t looking good out there.The words that stump ‘em, over and over? “Mutually exclusive.” You may be surprised at how few of them can explain mutual exclusivity at its most basic: you cannot have one thing if you have the other.

While the concept pops up in a reading comprehension section on the SAT, mutual exclusivity isn’t a literary term. It’s a key ingredient of critical thinking, and in our culture we just love to pretend it exists where it doesn’t and ignore its presence in other situations.

Why? Because, counter-intuitively, ignoring things that really have to be mutually exclusive can make it much easier to form an opinion about an issue and stick to it, and, as you  may have noticed, we’re far more into our opinions than our thinking. Ignoring mutually exclusive parts of a problem is a way to be mentally lazy, the downside of which is pretty bleak; not only are we having stupid arguments, but we’re not collectively getting anywhere anymore (government shutdown threats, anyone?) and we’re not equipping our kids with problem solving skills, either.

I thought I might draw up a little case study of this is in action.

The Debate over Nationalized Healthcare

If there’s one thing we’ve heard an awful lot of yammering about since the Clinton administration it’s the healthcare situation in the United States—and rightly so. I mean, this is a huge issue. Oddly enough, though, I have yet to see an article on the cover of Time or Newsweek called “Choose One: The Right to Consume Unlimited McRibs or The Right to Unlimited Healthcare.”
Really, that’s the heart of the healthcare debate: two mutually exclusive behaviors.

Michael Pollan wrote a great Op-Ed in the NY Times a few years ago called Big Food vs. Big Insurance, in which he points out that because of our obesity and smoking,

three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat ‘preventable chronic diseases’. [emphasis mine]

According to the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease,

Heart disease, the number one cause of death in the United States and 17 percent of U.S. health spending, is estimated to affect 40 percent of U.S. adults or 116 million people…

It’s pretty common sense that a group of people cannot eat unlimited fast food, consume untold quantities of saturated fat and salt, smoke cigarettes, and hope to maintain high-quality affordable health care for anyone, even for people who got sick through no fault of their own, like those with lupus, cancer, or MS. We can either: A) subsist on fat, salt, smoke, and TV or B) expect unlimited affordable healthcare for all in times of illness and disease.

However, when’s the last time you heard people arguing about government healthcare spending and heard any of this come up? Ignoring mutual exclusivity keeps the issue muddy–and safe. Common sense is a pain in the butt! It’s much easier to quote rules and ethics— e.g. It’s unconstitutional to force citizens to purchase things or It’s unethical to let someone die of ovarian cancer because she didn’t have access to screening—than to acknowledge a fundamental divide at the top of the argument.

Our sloppy thinking actually affects our ability to come to clear, reasonable conclusions. Obviously.

A focus on the mutually exclusive–”we have to pick one or the other and work from there”– throws a monkey wrench in our “I have the right to do whatever I want” mentality and disrupts our penchant for black-and-white, pick-a-side decision-making. Acknowledging mutual exclusivity in the healthcare debate makes the conversation more nuanced (hate to acknowledge that the drive-through lifestyle actually helps funnels money away from cancer research, you know?) and leaves the onus of responsibility directly on our own shoulders, so we scrap it.

We’re doing this all over the place.

By ignoring the 900 pound gorilla in the debate–those things we have to choose between–we’re modeling really shoddy thinking for the next generation—the generation that will ultimately be making decisions about our own welfare and carving out our society’s place in the global community.

At this rate it’s difficult to say that what they’ll be doing is “making decisions” if they’re unfamiliar with the most basic of critical thinking skills. It’ll probably be more like throwing ideas up against the wall in the hope that something sticks. They’ll be lacking strategery, if you get my drift.

If we teach them to be just like us—lazy thinkers–we can only expect that they’ll return the favor with poorly explored decisions in the future.

Funny how stuff jumps out at you right when you need it…

This week I’ve been reading Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein, the biography of Pulitzer Prize winner Wendy Wasserstein. If you’re a follower of my Artist Series of interviews, I’m sure this comes as no surprise: I like to be all up in the metaphorical grills of incredible creators and artists and, since Ms. Wasserstein is no longer with us, this is as close as I can get for now.

Warning: this is not an essay on why it’s so wonderful that Wendy won the Pulitzer.

To catch you up to speed, Wendy grew up in New York—went to Ethical Culture and graduated after a rather academically tumultuous experience at Mount Holyoke. She got into writing plays while at MHC, returned to New York, enrolled at City College’s inaugural creative writing program and studied with the Joseph Heller (the genius behind one of my favorite books, Catch-22).

Heller himself wrote her recommendation for her masters program at Yale, and she attended Yale while Christopher Durang, Sigourney Weaver, and none other than Meryl-freakin-Streep were there. Sounds incredible, right?

If this happened to me I’d have “J. Heller loves me” tattooed on my forehead, which is to say I can only imagine that when Joseph Heller writes your recommendation that you have a sense that you’re going in the right direction.

For Wendy, Yale was a disaster. The dean loathed her work–he went so far as to tell her it was a mistake to have admitted her. The major presentation of her work was miscast and bombed. She didn’t get one stinking award at graduation. In fact, according to Salamon, the dean didn’t even mention her existence when he wrote a memoir about his years at the school.

Shortly after graduation she wrote a girlfriend a note,

Here I am [at my mother’s], a graduate of Mount Holyoke, City College and Yale and considering a career in Frozen Yogurt.

She continues to kid, and then she says it:

Also, Ruthie, in truth I don’t think I’m that good, and I guess after these years of educational pursuits I’m far more critical. [p 137]

Oh, did that ever feel good to find! Here she was, thirteen years away from the most prestigious prize in play writing, and she thought she sucked! In fact, because she’d been so well educated, she kinda knew she did.

What a relief!

We never hear stories about how Thomas Edison felt like he was a lousy light bulb inventor. We just hear that he slogged on with a happy-shmappy smile through something like ten thousand iterations until he hit the light bulb jackpot. It’s so misleading! Who the hell can be that rah-rah all the time?

The beautiful thing here, though, is that even though Wendy thought she wasn’t very good, she stuck it out. She knew she had something and she kept slogging through.

She didn’t exult in her failure. She hated it. Frankly, to read about it, it’s all very nauseating. She was not the Steve Jobs of the theater. She was someone who, albeit jokingly, thought, maybe I need to scrap this whole play thing and get into soft serve.

Since I’m not dead, I’m not interested in publicizing my own hemming and hawing and sense of inadequacies, but I will tell you that I’ve considered the ol’ frozen yogurt franchise more than once over the past few years. The great news is, I can think I’m not that good and still keep going.

Every day seems like one giant face palm lately, but I can still mutter, “See you from the prize podium in 2024.”

Maybe you’ll be up there with me?

This summer I’ve been reading The Corrections by one of the great writers of our time, Jonathan Franzen, so I was particularly anxious to read an excerpt from his commencement address at Kenyon College this spring, which I found in The Week.

I’ve been hanging on to the following thoughts of his for a while and had originally intended to use them as part of a larger piece on authenticity and publicity, but I felt like they couldn’t be more poignant as everyone waits for what Mashable essentially dubbed the biggest rollout on Facebook since Facebook itself.

Franzen:

…since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors…

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

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If you use the web with regularity, which you probably do, you’ve likely developed fluency in Ad Hoc Searchese, that loose, disjointed language we all use to tease out search results that suit our needs. Whether you’re searching for restaurant vegan Upper West Side brunch or cancer treatment homeopathy stage 3, your use of minced up English is ubiquitous.

The practice is born of necessity: even with your supposedly refined search phrase, you’ll probably end up searching more than once for the same information. Think about how often you refine or rephrase your queries when your search results are way off base. The struggle to find great search results echoes one of the most challenging aspects of learning in any arena: the effort to precisely describe that which you do not already know.

Think about it. At this point, search engines can really only offer query results if you’ve perfectly described for the engine what it is you don’t know. I had a conversation this summer with the Director of Bing, Stefan Weitz, about education, intelligence, and search’s Big Brother hand in it all.

“…The key challenge of search is that it doesn’t understand language all that well. It’s a really hard problem to solve: it’s semantics. We’re trying to give machines the ability to understand all the colloquialisms and  idioms that we use—the different ways that we connect words and objects together—so that [those machines] can begin to understand and have those kinds of conversations with us.

Today, the machine is all based on math. If you punch in ‘cognitive neuroscience,’ you’ll get a bunch of results, but those results will [be based on] the simple math of how many times other words appear in the context of those other two words. So, there’s not a lot of ‘human’ behind those results. “

If you’re not already considering the significance of this, it’s time to start. Why? Search engines have become the de facto libraries of our age and largely drive our self-education. It’s not the way we used to learn, and the good news is that it won’t always be like this. We’re in a time of transition, and it’s imperative that we understand the nature of the transition so that we can move into the next phase of search without falling apart as learners in the meantime.

Any child of the ’80s or earlier probably recalls a class trip to the school library during which the librarian delivered a crash course on how to use the card catalogue. The catalogue really only offered three ways to search for books: title, author, and topic. For today’s students, though, the web is a cross-referenced card catalogue of the world—and it’s cross-referenced by every word in the language. There’s very little in the way of a definitive starting place for research; using the internet for information and education isn’t a title, author, topic practice.

As it turns out, your pidgin search queries will eventually become a thing of the past: search engines are working to offer a more natural, holistic approach to user’s information acquisition. Lessons on creating long tail search terms will (happily) become obsolete; the introduction to research as we know it will become a thing of the past.

Is Easier Search Better Search?

Sure, it’ll be easier, and easier is nice, but there’s much more to future search than ease. This more holistic, semantically driven search engine also means much broader access to information that’s both deeply meaningful and likely to promote consideration and further exploration. Instead of the frenetic experience of continually rephrasing search terms and hoping to find relevant facts, search is going to be bent on delivering ideas and solutions. In essence, the very same search that’s been accused of making us stupid [see The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains] may actually begin to help make us smarter—and wiser.

“For those who have a hunger for wisdom…[this holistic, semantics-driven] search can help. In order to make a good decision you have to have as many facts or as many viewpoints as possible. You have to be able to look at multiple viewpoints, rationalize them, [and] maybe have some cognitive dissonance as you can’t quite make sense of these two things…but at least you understand the choice you’ve made,” says Weitz.

As an example, Weitz offers a hypothetical story about a controversial issue, like deforestation or extinction. A holistic search engine, like those engines currently in development, will be able to find those outlier pieces of information that are relevant to our decision-making—like an article that holds a linchpin piece of information about rebuilding habitats—and it will bring that article to the querier’s attention no matter how inconsequential or repetitious the rest of the article is. Today’s search engines would leave that article in the dust, but in a few years that article will show up in results because it’s truly relevant.

If you’re searching with current technology,

“…your actually finding that little tiny piece of data that’s only mentioned in, maybe, one in a thousand articles is unlikely, whereas a search engine, [as it begins to] make these correlations and build these bridges between pieces of information, could begin to expose that to you. The magic of search in helping people get smarter or contributing to their wisdom is that it can begin to expose things and bubble things up that you wouldn’t necessarily have found otherwise,” said Weitz.

Still, to anyone interested in promoting critical thinking, removing the need to describe what one doesn’t know—potentially eliminating the need for deductive, Socratic inquiry—can be disarming. It’s the funny, beneficial underbelly of our ad hoc search language: it makes us work to find information. It compels–forces, even–to assess what we know and what we don’t know. In fact, using crummy search in its current form is probably good mental exercise

According to Weitz, in the coming years search will become so integral to our daily lives that we won’t even be saying “search” anymore.

“Remember how we used to have to “dial up” to the web to ‘get on’?” he quips. “Now you’re always on the web. It’s just what you do… and the same thing will happen with search. You’re always kind of doing it, whether you know it or not.”

So if the search engine is going to become so effortlessly incorporated into our lives and so semantically driven that it’s actually synthesizing ideas for us, where will we come in? What does this mean for thinking and teaching others to think?

“I think, for teachers, there will be less instruction around how to create a proper Boolean query…” says Weitz. Future searches will, “be much more of a ‘speak to it as you’d speak to anybody else’” experience for the searcher. “I think what’s going to become incredibly important in search for kids is not so much the act of searching–it’s  knowing what to do with the results once you get them.”

For the first time, you really will have information right at your fingertips—cohesive, connected, meaningful information. There won’t be anything standing between anyone with an internet connection and virtually anything he or she wants to know. Preparing students for that reality—a web experience that can serve to make them smarter—is the task at hand.

“You probably do hundreds of searches within a given week– you get all these different results, and [it’s most important to] actually know how to capture the ones that are most relevant and most interesting to you. What do you do with them? How do you store them? How do you tag them? How do you curate them? How do you link them to something else you saw previously to contribute to a larger understanding of a topic?

“Critical thinking… simply becomes more important as you have to work less hard to find data and services on the web. That’s, to me, probably the  most important thing teachers can teach six year olds right now. I know with my six year old, I’m teaching her that every single day.”

I saw a commercial the other day in which a young man who appears to be traveling in Europe speaks some English into his cell phone, presses a button, and the phone translates to the frowning older man he’s talking to that the boy’s “grandfather is from this town.”

The old man smiles and takes him in, and for a brief moment the world is a bit smaller.

Sort of.

This story is the often championed example cited by people who rail against the “waste of time” that is memorization—after all, why learn French when you can just speak some words into your cell phone and out they pop, perfectly translated without any effort from you?

Sure, if you want to find a croissant, a bathroom, or your grandfather’s grave, you can probably get by with your cell phone.

What we Learn and Why We Learn It

Whether or not you follow educational debate, you’ll find that the debate is, in all its forms, really about what we should learn and why we should learn it. Furthermore, we’re not really arguing about what the kids should be doing—we’re having a great debate about how each of us should spend our time, what we value, and what we’re trying to collectively accomplish.

What we learn and why we learn it is so deceptively simple, but the debate is complex. I’d argue that the single greatest factor fueling the debate is the ubiquity of the web and the instantaneous access to information it provides.

“Why learn that Physics formula when you can just look it up?!”

“Why learn French if you can just speak into your phone?”

“Who wants to memorize Whitman, anyway?”

But is instantaneous access to information the same as instantaneous access to understanding?

Don’t Internalize? Get Dumb.

Nicholas Carr’s exploration of the effects of Google address that very problem, citing research that extends beyond his own:

What the Net diminishes is Johnson’s primary kind of knowledge: the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence. (The Shallows, 143)

Wait? Relying on the internet as your outboard brain can interfere with development of useful intelligence? Yes. Here’s why:

Every click we make on the Web marks a break in our concentration, a bottom-up disruption of our attention – and it’s Google’s economic interest to make sure we click as often as possible. The last thing the company wants is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. (The Shallows, 155)

Without slow, savoring, concentrated thought (you’ll often hear this referred to as “flow”), you impede your ability to make connections that make you a more effective thinker. Read: if you’re not thinking on your own and synthesizing info in your brain—rather than on the screen—you’re not going to maintain or develop intelligence.

Not only that, your ability to communicate (and compete!) with people who do ensure that they engage in “slow, concentrated thought” is going to be diminished.

This ain’t good, and its implications extend from the classroom to the global arena.

We have to decide if we’re okay with modern cultural discourse being reduced to finding a place to pee and a snack via an iPhone, because if we’re really going to resort to “just look it up” educational theory, that’s where we’re headed. If you’re someone actively involved in international conversation, be that conversation political, social, or economic, your inclination should be obvious.

But, you don’t have to be on the front lines of reframing the global community for memorization to be important to you.

It’s important that we protect ourselves intellectually by making the effort to learn and retain information for the sake of retaining it, in the sheer hope that we’ll be able to use it again. In this regard, curiosity is the greatest attribute of the creative problem-solver.

We have to come to terms with the truth, that memorization, retention, just learning stuff is invaluable to our ability to solve problems and think creatively. We can’t ditch internalization of information for a focus on strategy and problem-solving—because we cannot have one without the other.

Discourse: It’s More Complex Than Speak ‘n’ Spell

Back to our boy seeking his grandfather’s homeland.

It’s dangerous to believe that technology is a wholly reliable intermediary for communication, activism, and peace. Often, the most important, dynamic, nuanced conversations happen on-the-spot, face-to-face.

You’re never going to have a salon level conversation while pausing to translate it through a cell phone. On the other hand, you’re never going to be fully equipped to communicate with everyone on every topic in every language on the fly, solve every problem without looking up a formula, or recite every piece of poetry without error.

But so what?

Does that mean we shouldn’t bother at all? Not if we know we’re weaker problem-solvers with information only “at our fingertips” rather than within our intellects.

We’ll never be independently, fully equipped for anything. Never. Couldn’t be. Furthermore, we’ll never be able to out-know technology. But for now, we’re certain to be able to out-understand technology, and if we start  limiting those things we bother to learn “because we can just look them up” we end up without any understanding at all.

Maybe it’s time to go learn some French.

(c) Phoenix New Times

I came across an excellent post about John Mayer’s recent Master Class at his alma mater, Berklee College of Music, that resonated with me as an essayist and artist. With the advent of social media has come a new era of business expectations and new definitions of businesspeople; it’s largely considered insufficient to be only young entrepreneurs, authors, or musicians. Instead, we’re living in the era of entrepreneur-marketers, author-marketers, and musician-marketers.

As a writer, I find that it takes me an enormous amount of time and concentration to read, digest, and create work that anyone else might consider reading. I’ve heard of people who can just crank out thousands of words a day, but I’m just not that person. I struggle with this new role of writer-marketer, and so I was relieved to hear that I’m not the only one.

Elisa Rice, the Berklee student blogger who covered the event, recounts several remarks of Mayer’s from his Berklee Clinic that hit home with me that will likely resonate with anyone whose professional life involves problem solving or creativity.

Twitter…started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller.

…Mayer realized that pouring creativity into smaller, less important, promotional outlets like twitter not only distracted him from focusing on more critical endeavors like his career, it also narrowed his mental capacity for music and writing intelligent songs.

“The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million Twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using Twitter as an outlet and I started using Twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”

Interestingly, Mayer largely walked away from Twitter, and I’ll admit that I admire him for having done so.

What does it mean for those of us who might disappear into the void if we stopped Tweeting for promotion? Mayer doesn’t experience that risk, but I do.

To Ship or Not to Ship

It’s no secret that I post in flurries and lulls on S.o.o.S., and my inner marketer (and my marketer friends) warns that people grow tired of waiting and I lose my readership because I don’t keep up a steady pace. I break blogging rules all the time—lengths of way beyond 600 words, lack of bullet points, never a Top 10 list, syntax that demands my reader’s attention. Surely this is to the blog traffic’s detriment, but I worry if I followed those rules that it would work to the writing’s detriment, much like Mayer’s music suffered.

After all, I’m a writer. This is what I do. I see my work as an extension of myself. Moreover, as I publish more books, I don’t want to give away the farm while I’m working on crafting more complex ideas.

Turns out, Mayer discourages that kind of “crank it out no matter what” thinking, too.

…Mayer also targeted the urgency beginning artists feel to update their blogs and YouTube channels with new songs or videos to maintain steady flows of interest for their work. Instead, Mayer explained that he found the separation of creation and promotion necessary in his own career, saying “as you start playing music you’re going to stop thinking about getting better. As soon as you flip the switch into showing other people your music, for some reason, the other brain sort of goes away.”

“You got the distraction of being able to publish yourself immediately, and it is a distraction if you’re not done producing what the product is going to be that you’re going to someday use the promotion to sell…I had to go through the same thing I’m talking to you about – what you have to go through – which is to completely manage all the distraction. Manage the temptation of publishing yourself.” [emphasis mine]

Balancing Promotion and Quality

Ultimately, we as creators, artists, and problem solvers require the time and circumstance to pay attention to the work we’re doing to actually turn out quality. We’re all wrestling with the balance between promotion (How many mediocre ebooks have we seen cranked out in the interest of turning a small profit?) and quality—and how to give ourselves the freedom to think and unmitigated attention that it takes to emit quality.

Would you consider cutting back on distraction if you were assured your creativity and end results would improve?

Is the pressure of self-promotion actually working to the detriment of our products, ideas, and works of art?

Bad news/good news.

You’re not necessarily being creative if

• You’re doing something with “flair.”
• You’re being unorthodox.
• You used glitter.
• You’re painting a painting.

Meanwhile, you might be doing something extremely creative if

• Your solution is simple.
• You’ve only made a slight change.
• You’re repairing a fence.

When we want to enhance our own creativity, it’s easy to think: “I need more creativity in my life! I need to start scrapbooking!” or, “I need to get the easel out of the attic!” Worse, many people think, “I’m no good at art. I’ll never be creative.”

Good news, though: the creative process is about finding fresh and effective solutions to problems or making new connections between ideas in every discipline, whether you’re a roofing contractor, philosopher, personal trainer, or musician. Creative ideas don’t land on your shoulder like a feather from above; you can find them.

The creative process is very much like critical thinking, and it’s all learnable: the very first step of both skills is cultivating the habit of examination.

Close Reading

Our television-and-internet, scan-don’t-read culture isn’t helping your ability to examine things carefully. If anything, it’s helping you to break the habit of paying prolonged attention.

To get good at creativity, you’re going to have to cultivate the ability to pay attention to details. We talk about “close reading” frequently in literature, art history, and architectural criticism—it’s the process of looking at a single work incredibly carefully. Imagine looking at a few hundred words of a novel and examining it for context, tone, literary references, structure, intent, etc. In a way, for the moment, we treat those few hundred words as more valuable and with more intensity than the entire novel itself.

We treat details of problems with the same level of regard and intensity when we’re being creative.

Creativity is hinged on a cultivated ability to examine the components of any problem or information set. A close reading of all the details of a situation is what ultimately yields the creative connection that offers a solution or new insight. If an element of a problem were a strand of hair, the best creative thinkers wouldn’t just dismiss it; they zoom in and see something shaped like a pipe….and then zoom in even further and see layers of overlapping scales around that pipe.

Are you dismissing seemingly ho-hum details, those seemingly single strands that are actually made up of thousands of layers, and missing the ultimate creative connection you’re seeking?

If you want to begin thinking creatively, don’t focus on creativity. Focus on examination.