24 Aug 2013

Workout

20 min first thing: 50 supine movements *sans* weights, 150 lowrise steps, walking, 50 dance movements with walking stick (the old soft shoe). No need for pain med at end of workout.

Kant Study

Trying to read Dieter Henrich’s seminal study of Kant’s arguments in the Transcendental Deduction: doubly difficult in that it’s a series of text-images and the only way of reading it is careful scrolling with the touchpad. Hard to believe that, according to Henrich, Heidegger simply took the 1781 arguments as definitive when (to my understanding) they have an oversimplified account of the transition from sensation to intuition-of-concept.

It’s quite possible that Heidegger never even understood the arguments of the 1787 edition. Many philosophers seem not to have understood them, including PF Strawson who bases his rather snotty opinion of Kant (in The Bounds of Sense) on 1781. Jiggered if I do which is why my “Johansen class” (a reading of Johansen’s “A HIstory of Ancient Philosophy”) is being delayed for ANOTHER read thru of the Transcendental Deduction material in the Critique.

To just use the first edition is like imagining that America’s constitution is its (1782!) Articles of Confederation and ignoring its (1789!) Constitution despite the clear statements of the Founders! Tea Bag quality stupidity!

Dream

D and I back together, found a flat. She didn’t like the fact that the bedroom was small and way in the back, but I was just relieved to find an apartment. I went to work at Northwestern University for my former supervisor at Princeton.

On my first day I was supposed to show for a meeting to discuss how Information Centers could support a student pizza initiative. You see, the new owners of Northwestern, a consortium of Indian billionaires (from India, that is) wanted the students to have pizza at registration, and a specific type of “fluffy red” pizza. Our job was to make sure the students got it.

At first, I couldn’t find the pizza restaurant in the student mall…a huge collection of shops just for Northwestern students, laid out confusingly. I finally found it after the meeting ended, and got what I needed to know along with some (cold) “Fluffy Red” pizza.

All This Useless Brutality, Continued

Here’s more on the “value added teachers help students succeed” study by Friedman, Chetty and Rockoff of Harvard referenced in my blog post “All This Useless Brutality”, below. Basically, using a lot of math which appears hard but which is easy as long as you have a computer programmer handy who knows his ass from a hole in the ground, they “prove” that “high value-added” teachers (teachers whose students do well on tests) have students who become high earners and live in fancy zip codes.

At significant points they simply refuse to consider things that might invalidate their thesis. For example, their high VA teachers were so by accident: they predate teachers’ being told to get high test scores, a consequence of No Child Left Behind. A teacher of high “VA prime”, or VA’, who was told to get high test scores and abused his students or cheated, might not produce the same results, but…who cares?

This is the “methodology” that drove Adorno batshit on the Princeton Radio Research project: a lot of genuine mumbo-jumbo which isn’t based on an honest theoretical basis. For my fat pal, Adorno, job one would be an investigation of the effect of a teacher who’s been told that high test scores are a condition of her job.

There might be a radical difference. As it happens, students taught by compassionate and liberal teachers who do anything but “teach to the test” since they live in districts where they are respected and not under threat, may have the same high test scores as students taught by cheap thugs, or perhaps not.

Ethics alone, for my guy Adorno, would demand that the study not proceed until this is resolved. Mathematically, he’d demand that we quantify the expense of spirit in a waste of shame represented by sitting in a “teach to the test” school and subtract that quantity from the quantification of living in a fancy zip code.

“Intelligence is a moral category” – TW Adorno

Additional Notes

I read the complete paper on the ferry. It’s basically just computer programming code-monkey stuff.

You know, my sociology majoring friends in the 1960s took it as a given that (somewhat on the analogy of medicine’s “not to knowingly do harm”) sociology would ALWAYS do good as part of studying a social phenomenon. For example, to study the positive effects of a Jobs Corps program on a community, it would create the program.

Bill Ayers and Kathy Boudin “studied” education by designing practical alternatives to the meaningless curriculum being pounded into students in Chicago of the 1960s and showing how these worked better than “English” classes where the homeboys zoned out in the back or didn’t attend.

[Hi Bill!]

What’s interesting is that business does this all the time. As software engineers in silicon valley we were loaded up with fabulous benefits.

But Friedman, Chetty et al. take society as a given. They assume that it’s “better” to attend a “good” school, pay into a 401K and have a conventional job inside the USA. It’s “bad” to attend Roosevelt University (because you’re fed up with racism at the tender age of 17), buy and hold gold, and flee to China to teach English, or (as ersatz for bad) “something we don’t have to worry about because it is statistically marginal”.

They define a “good” teacher as a “value added” teacher, and a VA teacher is one whose students get good test scores. They then prove the (quite possibly false) semi-tautology that such a teacher will continue to produce students who get good test scores and not blow her brains out, take to the bottle, or flee to Bora Bora.

Using a match of Social Security data and school records and a well-documented, well-designed matching algorithm that they probably got from some hard-working programmer at Harvard’s information center, they then prove that VA teachers produce nice little students who contribute to 401Ks.

This reminds me of a very disturbing photo in wikimedia of a Nazi medical officer sitting next to a Jew in freezing water. It fills me with rage and sorrow.

What would be the effect if all teachers were given a raise and office space in which to grade papers?

Isn’t the pressure on teachers a direct result of over-indulgence of children who aren’t expected to work hard anymore?

Why would a “bad” teacher enter the profession? Maybe she thinks she’s a good teacher.

Is “bad teaching” the controlling factor of poor outcomes, however defined? How about bullying? Perhaps a really bad teacher could have a dialectical effect. I had the worst French teacher in the world. But as a result of the fact that he pissed me off, I now speak French seulement in Paris.

Wouldn’t the best metric be whether or not homework assignments are complete?

All This Useless Brutality

Edward Hopper, “Automat”

See this New York Times article: and note, beyond all the phony science implicit in pure measurement of complex, self-reflexive and interacting systems, and even beyond the casual bureaucratic brutality in which the only solution for “bad teaching” is locating the “bad teacher” in a high-tech witch hunt, and then, in a fashionable Mamet way, firing her fucking ass, there is an elementary aporia.

Which is that the source of the bad teacher may be that she needs dental work that she cannot afford, or has been assigned a bunch of thugs, or is being systematically pecked to death in the good old barnyard.

Note, please, that when you fire somebody you have to replace them, and it’s very, very expensive to recruit and background-check while retaining substitute teachers, any one of whom could be the Archangel Michael or John Wayne Gacy.

Elvis Costello put his finger on the Thatcher era in another country, in “All this Useless Beauty”. Doesn’t scan the same way, but the anthem for Amerikkka today is All This Useless Brutality.

Philomoria

I guess there’s a market for his crap, but Alain de Botton’s ravings on the BBC today are worse than Ayn Rand, a form of love of foolishness as opposed to philosophy: a philomoria.

Ayn Rand addressed real philosophers (if sometimes she seems not to have read anything more than an encyclopedia article on some) and had a dedication to her perversion of the truth, but de Buffoon does violence to the truth in the service of the corporate state, if this article is any guide. Let’s take a look at some examples.

(de Botton is writing about Britain’s new “coalition” government of Tories and Liberal Democrats, and their cuts to education funding, especially arts and humanities. His words are in italics)

Speak to anyone working in the humanities within academia right now and you will hear that this country is about to enter a new Dark Age. The reason lies in the coalition government’s decision to impose swingeing cuts on almost all departments.

…except science, engineering and that sort of computer training that guarantees unemployability…

Philosophers, historians, classicists and literary critics feel especially badly let down. They fear a new age of philistinism, a moment when the nation finally gives up on serious culture and focuses instead on making money and inebriating itself on talent contests and celebrity chat shows.

You got that shit right, Alain.

If asked to apportion blame for what has happened to their departments, these academics do not have to search long for an answer, obviously “the government” is responsible. It is the government that has failed to appreciate the valuable work that the humanities do and it must therefore be scorned accordingly.

Well, it is: both Labour’s profligacy and the focus of Tory/LibDem cuts are government actions.

I want to try to respond to familiar stories of our times, with a little more analysis and opinion than is normally allowed in the media. I’d like to provoke thought, analysis – and the occasional disagreement.

And pick up a few shillings…

I’ll be looking at the way museums work, how people talk to one another, what a non-scientist can say about environmental catastrophe and why marriage is a spiritual discipline.

Gee, marriage used to be fun back in the day
Marriage was fun, and, in the old sense, rather gay
“Spiritual discipline” was for the monks and the nuns
Marriage was all about hot dogs and buns.
In your famous old Civil War, the Puritans
Were after Oliver’s fall, also-rans
But now they blight your green and pleasant land
Groaning like clock gods to the commuters in the Strand.

The dialogue with listeners through comments is also part of the pleasure of the exercise.

…until you see comments from a certain obstreperous and scurrilous Yank (me)…

It could seem unfair to knock someone when they are already down,

Not at all, Alain baby. It’s been the occupation of the bully since time, out of mind. Let’s blame the victim and feel all right.

but personally I can’t help but feel this approach and analysis lets academics off far too lightly. I have spent most of my professional life around and in the shadow of academics in the humanities, and have benefited hugely from the stored knowledge that they sit upon.

You cashed out, and like Lenin and many other “intellectuals”, you scorn the losers and the competition as semiotics of the inner contour of your own hidden weakness.

However, right now, at this difficult moment in the history of British universities, there is a need to acknowledge that at least some of the woes that have befallen academics is squarely their own fault. To put it at its simplest, academics in the humanities have failed to explain why what they do should matter so much. They’ve failed to explain to the government, but this really only means “us” – the public at large.

Excuse me, sir. The public voted, narrowly, for the Coalition, which was formed because no one party received a majority. Under your Constitution, the resulting executive has broad and Royal policies to make radical changes in the name of your Queen, changes that in my own USA would have to be approved by Congress.

This is how your mad woman (Thatcher) destroyed popular local councils, including the Greater London Council that staged the Marathon I ran in London in 1983, against the wishes of the majority of Londoners, and many other communities. In the name of a mandate to reduce taxes, she reduced councils that were educating children but retained foolish military expenses such as Trident and the remilitarization of the Falklands as opposed to negotiating their handover to Alfonsin’s democratic Argentina.

She then, late in her term, instituted the medievally regressive poll tax.

These actions were taken without popular approval.

Your Coalition is doing the same thing with a far weaker mandate. And the resources “freed” up by this barbarism will indeed be poured into the rat-hole of popular culture.

Don’t you dare, don’t you dare mock the truth, you swine.

Who is “the public”? The man on the Clapham omnibus? You? And who voted for these cuts? Who voted for aircraft carriers without aircraft when one of these hulks would fund semesters of humanities?

They have allowed themselves to be offended by the very need to justify their relevance, speaking only in dangerously vague terms about the value of culture in helping people to “think” or they have counted on having just enough respect left not to have to spell out why they should exist at all, other than because what they do is just so important.

Here is why you are no philosopher, Alain, no lover of wisdom, but a philomorion, a lover of foolishness.

You did not think this through.

In a middle class existence as opposed to la vida loca, we do many things as part of what a mathematician would call a partial ordering.

Mum doesn’t gas up the car in the snow because she likes to: my kids enjoyed putting our USA self-service gas in Mum’s car for the direct experience but part of being an adult is learning to defer gratification, and do task A so that task B (getting the children to school) can be performed, as part of an overall mission of educating the children properly.

For each task, we might get direct satisfaction from its performance. Many people like driving cars, although few enjoy stopping for gas.

Or, we may take satisfaction in knowing that task A will allow us to perform a more pleasurable task later on. We go to a crowded mall at holiday time and buy gifts for the children in the aforesaid snow looking forward to the task/pleasure of giving them to the children.

Now, in this complex network of middle class anhedonia, there are moments that are pure gratification such as the love of the children. They are end points on what for a rather strange mathematician would be a graph from which no links emerge.

How does this relate to university education?

It relates because today, the widening of access to university education, unaccompanied by a sort of pre-WWI German nationalism or a single religious faith, has cheapened the experience. The poor and lower middle class regard university tasks as means to an end, and your idiotic radio talk is unreflectingly, unphilosophically, philomoronically infected by the universal acceptance of this narrative of university life…one that is simply not shared by its best faculty, whether in the sciences or the humanities.

Let me tell you a story, Alain. As part of an elaborate draft-dodging scheme during a time in which men my age were being sent to Vietnam to kill and die, I learned computer programming. A student in the humanities, I found it tedious at first. But in order to learn it I had to become passionately interested in programming, a common experience of computer geeks.

It became a ding an sich, a thing in itself, a for-itself, and remained so for thirty years. The science became my art in the sense that art and philosophy are best pursued as we pursue love, for their own sake.

Aristotle and the best faculty (the only worthwhile faculty) believe that one of humanity’s final ends is not home ownership, nor vacationing in Spain, nor swilling vintage Port wine, but Truth and Beauty, and your nation of poets and philosophers has come a cropper in the last two years not because your best university faculty were playing Soduku or jerking themselves off, but because the end of life was defined by politicians, corporations and the media as the cheapest kind of financial pseudo-prosperity.

One middle-class narrative admits as much, admits that The Higher Things might be ends-in-themselves, but must be deferred. If there are children, certainly, their needs take precedence; your boy Bertrand Russell was a good father because during his fathering years, he avoided the mental exhaustion caused by his earlier work on the foundations of mathematics.

But since Russell’s time, when children’s needs could be met for shillings and pence at the cornershop with a set of Britain’s Limited toy soldiers, the corporations have ensured that there is no “upper bound” on desire, and make sure the kids always have one more new product to lust, rage and nag after.

Which, along with the government’s preference for keeping labour in one place while capital runs all over the world, by over-encouraging home ownership, ensures that the parents can never pursue cultured pursuits. Their culture turns into its evil twin, entertainment, for by the time the children are abed, Mum and Dad need a program which does all their emotional work for them.

Aristotle’s Truth is eliminated, and while this assassination creates the pathologies you’d like the universities to address, it may not be able to cure them on return, especially if you wish it to be therapeutic.

Now they have learnt that if they couldn’t say in clear terms why they still mattered, then an impatient, harried government might just decide that they didn’t really, and a bored, stressed, stoical wider public wouldn’t bother to raise a hand in protest.

Today, “clarity” means telling people what they want to hear.

Don’t get me wrong, I care deeply for the humanities and believe they have a vital role to play in a healthy society. I just think that the way culture is currently taught in universities is a travesty of its real potential, and that the government cuts are an understandable, if not at all nice, consequence of the failure of current teaching methods and goals.

Here it comes…the public image of the academic, who slaves in fact to write acceptable peer-reviewed journal articles while grading half-literate papers and teaching year in year out, as a lazy and obfuscating sod. The Leninism of the “intellectual” telling the public that all those other intellectuals are lazy sods who write bullshit.

My personal view of what the humanities are for is simple – they should help us to live.

Tolstoyan bread and salt, but it’s bullshit, Alain, for very precise reasons, reasons that you’d anticipate if you were a philosopher and not a philomorion.

First of all, the humanities should also help us to die…as you seem to know.

But far more important is that the very question, “do the humanities help us to live?” (and/or die) is not outside the humanities in the way that the philosophy of mathematics is not itself part of mathematics, and the philosophy of science is outside science.

Whether the truth helps us to live or whether it might actually be rather depressing is internal to the humanities, and your idiotically simple answer should be a question.

Hamlet’s learning the truth from his father’s ghost causes his depression to deepen, from “O that this too, too solid flesh would melt” to the suicidal “to be, or not to be”. But when he learns another truth from Fortinbras’ Sergeant, that men can be motivated not only by comfort and pleasure but for pure recognition as seen in Hegel, his depression disappears.

The truth affects us different ways as does beauty. Seeing the paintings in the National Gallery might lead to frustration if one must return to a bedsit in Earl’s Court. Reading Hamlet might spoil the copywriter’s zippy style.

Or, the gallery goer might get new hope and a print for his bedsit at the National Gallery, and the copywriter may discover that ad copy in iambic pentameter has a great deal of oomph.

It depends on the person, not the subject.

We should look to culture as a repository of useful and consoling ideas about how to face our most pressing personal and professional issues. We should look to novels and historical narratives to impart moral instruction and edification, to great paintings for suggestions about value, to philosophy to probe our anxieties and offer consolations.

This is what some Victorians certainly believed. But to put it into words does violence to the language…what are “suggestions about value”? Certainly, as a teacher, if I were bear-leading a flock of students through the Louvre, I might certainly explain Poussin’s Wedding of Orpheus by recounting the myth, and ask the students if it’s healthy to grieve a relationship as did Orpheus, or whether he should have paid more attention to Eurydice during the wedding ceremony, instead of riffing out on his lyre.

But this could be done with a print bought at the National Gallery. The whole point of ferrying a mob of urchins to the Louvre is to give them, not only Improving Lessons, but a sensory experience of painting: the smell of the aging varnish, the strange silence, the diffident guards.

This could in some cases become an end in itself outside the middle class rat race, one just as precious as the clamor of kids who’ve got what they wanted at Christmas.

Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate’s great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,

And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,
Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast
That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,
That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Open its eight bells out, skulls’ mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.

Louis Macneice is writing about personal gratification, which is frowned upon today as far as the downsized middle class is concerned. Complementary to the over-gratification of British and American children, such pursuits are frowned upon.

But the university might teach such pursuits, and under the Coalition’s attack lies the suggestion that time itself should reverse, and that gratification, for all but the upper crust, should not be sought in, but replaced by, Church, which deadens and endures.

And when you’ve lived long enough, as I have, and read enough, as I have, you ask with Auden, must we suffer it all again, must you English suffer it all again: the return, not of the repressed, but of repression, and its enforcer, the drunken brutality which is returning increasingly a feature of British life and a throwback to the 18th century.

The university cannot reverse this process but its downsizing is, if not a cause, an epiphenomenon of the overall trend. Basically, a society that defunds the humanities is one in which bullying increases.

It should be the job of a university education to tease out the therapeutic and illuminative aspects of culture, so that we can emerge from a period of study as slightly less disturbed, selfish, unempathetic and blinkered human beings, who can be of greater benefit not only to the economy, but also to our friends, our children and our spouses.

Nothing wrong with this (apart from the fact that you forgot to mention that some of us would like to benefit ourselves by being more cultivated individuals for the sheer goddamn hell of it).

But: the elimination of the university, its down-sizing, will certainly cause more people to pursue low amusement, whereas we do not know if the down-sized university will be up to the neo-Victorian task.

You’re asking it to work harder and do more with less. You’re starving it of capital while expecting too much. That is like those cute K-12 experiments in which half the teachers in a school are laid off pour encourager. The results here in the States? Kids spending study hall watching kiddie slasher movies like Spawn of Chuckie, to mention one typical example.

You’re also forgetting brain drain. I met the eminent Cambridge mathematician John Horton Conway at our local convenience store when I was at Princeton…he was examining logic puzzle magazines. He’d been lured to Princeton with a princely salary. If British universities are cut, your faculty are going to flee…to the USA, and anglophone Asia such as Singapore and Hong Kong.

(Conway has since returned to Britain, but before the era of cutbacks.)

Do we learn more from Oprah Winfrey?

No. I admire her, but we don’t.

I’m certainly not the first person to express these hopes of education. You start to hear them in mid-19th Century Victorian Britain, when men like John Stewart Mill come out with statements like: “The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.”

Mill’s sunny optimism was belied by men like Eichmann, who told Hannah Arendt that he’d studied and admired Kant. Since for the most part, cultivation of the mind produces good people (Eichmann an exception that proves a rule), and the end of life is truth and perhaps beauty as opposed to tawdry hollow riches of the sort that produced 2008’s crash, we should just “do it”…fund the universities.

His contemporary Matthew Arnold sounded similar notes, expressing a view that a liberal education should help to inspire in us “a love of our neighbour, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human misery”. At its most ambitious, Arnold added, it should even engender the “noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it”.

These well-meaning, mid-Victorians wanted to use humanistic culture to replace scripture. They wanted universities to become our new churches, places that would teach us how to live, but without dogma or superstition.

Claims that culture could stand in for scripture – that Middlemarch could take up the responsibilities previously handled by the Psalms, or the essays of Schopenhauer satisfy needs once catered to by Saint Augustine’s City of God – still have a way of sounding a bit eccentric, or just insane in their combination of impiety and ambition. But I want to argue that we are wrong to be suspicious of such claims. Culture can and should change and save our lives.

John Stuart Mill did not argue that we should pursue Culture in order to be more effective in more tawdry pursuits such as business or putting up with Mothers In Law. Instead, he recognized that for Cultured gents, their pursuits were ends in themselves, and that these chaps were usually better ratepayers than the flash chaps, who would, in the absence of any lust for Truth and Beauty, ruin girls and waste family fortunes crying “bring in” or at the gaming table.

Arnold, writing about fifty years later, did make an argument of that form, and it is for that reason weaker. We Yankees say that you can lead a horse to water, and students, exposed to Higher Things strictly to avoid their spending their twenties, in Shepherd’s words from The Winter’s Tale,

…getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting…

usually get wenches with child, wrong the ancientry, steal and fight simply out of human nature, and in resentment at the burial of the very idea that it might just be droll to read Shakespeare.

Alan Bennett’s History Boys was about lessons in life
Though it was at first hoped by men like Arnold and Mill that universities might be our new churches, these centres of learning have never offered what churches invariably focus on – guidance. It is a basic tenet of contemporary scholarship that no academic should connect works of culture to individual sorrows.

It’s a detail, but one that should be noticed if you call yourself a philosopher: churches haven’t always focused on guidance. The Augustinian strain in Christianity preached “predestination”, and this meant that the reprobate could not be guided.

St Augustine and Luther realized, through a glass darkly, something that Baruch Spinoza put into words: “blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself”. The good man doesn’t have to put out an effort (or go to university) to avoid wronging the ancientry, getting wenches with child, stealing, or fighting.

St Augustine and Luther thought this virtue was God’s election. Spinoza was more university-oriented in that his good man would desire knowledge more than wronging the ancientry. But in all three, it is an uncaused state, one that cannot be inculcated through guidance, whether secular or spiritual. Spinoza said, “needs must it be hard”, and “everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare”, and probably believed that it could not be inculcated, especially today, in a society in which parents insist on their children going to uni.

Now, it is true that universities of the Middle Ages and Reformation were founded and funded in a spirit parallel to, if different from, that of today. As Max Weber has shown, Capital jostled Religion aside, or joined it at the head table where they have sat uneasily together ever since, demanding that all institutions justify themselves in service to them, like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

A (the monastery before Henry VIII, the Lutheran seminary, the American land-grant college for the training strictly of ministers or teachers) was for B1 (religion). Then, in the 20th century, A became for B2 (the corporation). That was because otherwise, the old Reformation suspicion would arise in the popular mind that the clerisy were not carrying their own weight.

Which they weren’t, and it was a good thing, because sufficient numbers of the clerisy, disguised as far as Parliament or American state legislatures were concerned as servants of God or of Mammon, were actually pursuing a “higher”, or Millsian, form of pure self-gratification, writing poetry and discovering relativity for the hell of it. We all benefited, but that wasn’t the point.

The downsizing of the universities in Britain has to be viewed as a symptom, not even a false cure, of a general brutalization caused by global capitalism. This is because in 1946, in a Britain parts of which had regressed economically and in some respects to the fourteenth century owing to Britain’s two world wars, Labour was nonetheless able to provide National Health while maintaining the reputation of Britain’s private universities (which, I’d admit, received far less funding than they do today, although they did receive some on account of defence spending) and actually creating new public universities!

(Neil Kynaston’s excellent study of this period, Austerity Britain does point out that the expansion after the 1945 Percy report was “spasmodic”, receiving a lot of resistance from the private universities. However, the most significant fact is that investment was not cut back despite the far more desperate situation of Britain at the time.)

The contemporary guardians of culture have a habit of cudgelling anyone who might try to use culture for didactic ends or to open a subject up to a mass audience. When confronted by those who demand of culture that it should be relevant and useful, that it should offer up advice on how to choose a career or survive the end of a marriage, how to contain sexual impulses or cope with the news of a medical death sentence, the guardians of culture become very disdainful.

This is because the “lessons” of culture are not one size fits all. de Botton wants a “culture” of T shirts and baseball caps.

Many British youths do have a problem in containing sexual impulses, or as Shakespeare would say, getting wenches with child. Others have the older “British” problem that their own sexuality is too well contained, and they can’t express love, so they beat up queers as a result. These differences are best met by therapy.

Whatever the rhetoric of graduation ceremonies and the ambitious tone of prospectuses, there seems a strange and regrettable truth to confront about the workings of the modern university, that the institution has precious little interest in teaching us any emotional or ethical life skills – how to love our neighbours, clear human confusion, diminish human misery and leave the world better and happier than we found it.

Nonsense on stilts. Multicultural education does help us love our neighbors. Many of the cutback advocates prefer a more traditional education which celebrates ethnic hatred, and might prefer the students to watch Branagh’s rather pornographically violent and somewhat over the top patriotic Henry V. The cutbacks tend to preserve the worst of the old.

There should be classes in, among other topics, being alone, reconsidering work, improving relationships with children, reconnecting with nature and facing illness. A university alive to the true responsibilities of cultural artefacts within a secular age would establish a Department for Relationships, an Institute of Dying and a Centre for Self-Knowledge.

Eye roll. Crotch grab. For one thing, dying, relationships and self-knowledge cannot be separated.

Universities may well be teaching the right books but they too often fail to ask direct questions of them, declining to advance sufficiently vulgar, neo-religious enquiries because they are embarrassed to admit the true nature of our inner needs. They are fatefully in love with ambiguity, they trust in the absurd modernist doctrine that great art should have no moral content or desire to change its audience.

That’s not a modernist doctrine. Instead, the great modernist works (take Joyce), far from having no moral content, address the question of how to live with dignity in a society out of scale with human needs, in which it seems hard to live a decent life: you’re so responsible for your personal means and ends, and the ways and means are so deliberately opaque, that moral choice is obscured; you go to work for a financial firm only to discover when it’s too late that its investments or disinvestments are destroying the environment or people’s lives.

Joyce’s characters are trying to live in a society of bullshitters so clever at narration as to construct a fantasy land in which the “British” were responsible for everything bad, and the Church could not be questioned. Sure, modernism wasn’t about conformity, although that is what de Botton seems to be demanding: that we “contain” impulse and treat marriage like a job so as not to impose costs on a downsized government or damage our all important “performance” at work.

Prior to the current epoch, God and Mammon sat uneasily together despite Christ’s warnings. Today they seem to fuse and the result is monstrous. Spinoza’s, Luther’s, and St Augustine’s message was that the saint does exactly what he wants, not what’s expected of him, but what he wants is the good, which is trivially the only thing we want (the rest is consumerism and its evil twin, addiction).

We have constructed an intellectual world whose most celebrated institutions rarely dare to ask, let alone answer, the most serious questions of the soul. Oprah Winfrey may not provide the deepest possibly analysis of the human condition, but arguably, in my view, she asks many more of the right questions than the humanities’ professors at Oxford.

Philomoria. Oprah gets her books from professors, or from students inspired to love books by professors!

An insult to humanities teachers that have to, year in, year out, ask the most serious questions of the soul.

I had to teach The Painted Veil the other day. In preparing, I had to ask myself, am I Walter Fane? I asked my ex-wife during a period of half-reconciliation to come to China with me. During my marriage I’d “contained” my sexual impulses, and along with them, like Prince Charles, my ability to love.

I took only one class at Oxford, and that was online, and I left it because it was too dumbed-down and I didn’t want to overwhelm the teacher as I am carpet bombing Alain here. But I find it very hard to believe that in teaching, for example, The Painted Veil, Oxford professors have the students count words to measure Maugham’s vocabulary or treat the story as anything but profoundly about moral growth. But being responsible professors, they have to show how “moral growth” emerges from the nuts and bolts of character and dialogue.

And…if they are looking over their shoulder to see if they are on the chopping block, they will talk far less about the big questions, and instead teach the facts in a measurable way, in order to justify rehire.

Yes, de Botton is worse than Ayn Rand.

Toilet Monster

I call “Toilet Monster” the phenomenon in Hong Kong schools, where one kid in English class says, “Teach-ahh! I gotta go to the toilet!” and soon, other children take up the cry, resulting in a general Clamour. In response to today’s Hue and Cry, I had the Little Hearts draw their Toilet Monster and write about it.

Then, on the MTR I wrote this edifying little poem:

Monkey See: Monkey Do:
The Toilet Monster will get you
If to the Lao Shih Teacher you tell a Lie
And dishonestly say with no reason Why
You need a Vacation in the Loo.

If you have to go, you have to go
This is something all Teachers know:
Some times to Poo and others to Pee
It is something we all do, naturally.

But woe unto the little Child
Who ill-bred and with manners Wild
Doth say I gotta when he don’t
The Toilet Monster will get him, see if he won’t!

And take you to his Poopy Lair
Where he’ll you frighten, and he’ll you scare
By serving Fruit Juice in cups of Hair
And pretending to be a scarey bear.

So, little Children, you must be Good
And always do that which you should
And eschew that which you’d better not
Or the Toilet Monster will put you in his cooking pot.

Edward G. Nilges 16 Dec 2010. Moral rights have been asserted nyah ha ha.

I Can No Longer

Edward G. Nilges, “I Can No Longer Teach You Kids”, pencil and pen with Gimp modifications 12 Nov 2010, A4 size. Moral rights have been asserted by the creator of this work, so don’t start with me.

I can no longer teach you kids
It has something to do with privatization and bids
Today might be the first day of the rest of your life
But it’s my last day and the start of my strife.

I see Saturn,
Ascendant.

I hear the old giant come…fee fi fo fum,
He smells the blood of an Englishmun
He will crunch your bones to make his bread
Oh children close your eyes in holy dread.

Edward G. Nilges 12 Nov 2010. Moral rights have been asserted by the author, so up yours.

Reply to “Grover” on “Teacher’s Unions”

At the discussion on New Jersey’s educational cuts at The Daily Princetonian, “Grover” writes:

The teachers’ union is the biggest obstacle to education in this country. It’s about time that a politician took it on. As someone pointed out in horror, the teachers who get pushed out from these cuts are the youngest ones. But why? In any other job it would be the worst teachers who were fired, but the union’s “last in, first out” seniority policy puts the interest of its members above the interests of students. Compensation is also decided primarily on the basis of seniority and the union puts up a huge fight against rewarding teachers based on the results they produce. Why? How does that benefit students? Or taxpayers? It’s damn near impossible to fire bad teachers (“rubber rooms” anyone?)–cui bono?

Add to these concerns the issues about neutrality, establishment, and accommodation, and note the fact that private schools can get better results while spending less money per student, and it becomes pretty clear that on pragmatic grounds alone we would ideally have no public schools at all. Obviously that ship has sailed, so the best we can do now is destroy the teachers’ union and implement a voucher system. The budget crisis can serve as an opportunity to move in that direction.

Of course teachers are going to complain about this because it hurts them. And it does look bad on the face of it: “Cut education spending? But think of the children!!!1!”. But (if you assume, contrary to fact, that government spending is usually cost-effective) cutting any program at all is going to look bad. “Cut spending on women’s health? But think of the women!!” “Cut spending on saving the environment? But think of the cute little baby polar bears?” The only place most Americans are willing to cut spending is on…foreign aid. But that’s not going to be enough, and education is something that could be more effective if less money were spent on it, making it a great place to cut spending.

Grover, firing teachers in and of itself means fewer, and not better teachers. News flash: if you fire teachers defined as “underperforming”, you still have to go through the expense of rehiring new teachers. This is a considerable expense, since certification requirements are strict, and added to this is the need to do background investigation to make sure the new teachers aren’t perverts.

Also, you seem to know who the underperforming teachers are. But it is widely acknowledged in corporations that “performance reviews” are highly subjective, and gamed by both sides. If on the other hand, you use test results, the teachers then teach to the test, neglecting most real educational tasks, and in some cases have helped the students cheat.

Of course, when you hear about this, Grover old buddy, your blood boils, and you say again, fire the bastards, écrasez l’infâme.

This is a non-lethal form of Jacobin terror, and it’s news to me that Robespierre did France any favors.

There is no queue of highly qualified, certified teachers out there who aren’t pervs just dying to teach, even if you increased salaries, which is not on in most districts. Most hot shots don’t have the patience or the temperament; many recovering Yuppies who have entered the teaching profession in recent years have difficulty with slow children.

Many other hot shots might talk anti-union talk, but themselves were educated permissively and read little, and therefore overuse lesson plans and abuse students who know more, or are more curious, than they.

And you’re right, hot shot. I do think of the children, the wasted lives, the violence and nihilism that comes in part from being unable to even think in, much less write, complete sentences such as “if I carry weed, or leap out of the car screaming at the cops, or ride with my woman when she’s mad at me, I will get my ass kicked by the cops” (cf. the very droll Chris Rock video “How Not to Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police” on You Tube).

The talk radio nihilism of écrasez l’infâme has caused America to lose two wars, and treated safety in oil drilling as an unnecessary cost that we should “cut”.

Maybe I’m old fashioned: but for me, political de-bate conducted almost exclusively from the Right in mock-falsetto, in which you attempt to demonstrate that your opponents are girlie-men (and quell your own sexual anxieties), or from the Left in a mock deep voice which repeats the Right’s shibboleths in an attempt to show their absurdity, is not de-bate: it is duh-bate.

The problem is that the Baby Boom generation, including supporters of Christie’s cuts, are themselves moronized, half-educated and aliterate by design, since the cost-cutting started when they were still in school. Left-wing nihilism of the later 1960s compounded the problem. The coup de grace was the moronization of the media necessary to convince the electorate to accept Reagan and his successors.

This means that people who can neither write nor parse a complex sentence above a low upper bound of complexity expect children to do so on tests they cannot themselves pass. They then blame the teacher, naming an unenumerable set of supposed incompetents as if their destruction would cleanse the system.

As to “rubber rooms”. The New Yorker did an article on them, I hope you read it. The zeks in this gulag have been put there by means of undefined, Kafkaesque administrative procedures, and in the rubber rooms they are not permitted to use laptops or cellphones. Yes, they are not fired because of the teacher’s unions, but this cruel and unusual punishment is the school system’s idea.

Many of the zeks say that they are in the rubber room because of politics or speaking out. Funny how we believed Alexandre Solzenitsyn’s zeks but cannot believe these teachers.

You gonna cut cut cut, pal?
Is that the grand plan, Al?
Well, all I can say to you
Is,
Don’t take any wooden nickels,
Don’t eat no yellow snow,
And don’t run around with scissors,
‘Cause sooner or later, alligator,
You gonna cut yourself,
And for the first time in your life
You will see your blood.

Problem kid

I love my job. Hong Kong has always had a semi-privatized education system originating in British missionary efforts alongside traditional Chinese free-market schools preparing kids for the Chinese civil service examination, so there’s some room for creativity.

I was defined as a problem kid. Once, my Mom actually came to me and told me not to talk so loud at home. It seems that my voice, changing in early adolescence, bothered my father, but he could not speak to me. This was, of course, unforgivable although I love my Dad.

I understand it for the same reason in literary and historical studies I am quick to forgive Shakespeare for sexism or Lincoln for racism.

The late science fiction author JG Ballard writes that pre-war British parents were unlike those of today, who are more able to express their love for their kids. Parents of his generation were primarily engaged in proving (in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and London) that they were still Bright Young Things of the 1920s as late as 1941, and children were a reminder that they were not; in Ballard’s case, they were having fancy dress balls and being Bright right up to Dec 7 1941. Likewise, my own parents had difficulties with getting older, and a teenage boy or girl is to such parents a Problem.

Long distance I treasured my children’s changes. I loved the cute babies (who doesn’t), the toilet training, teaching them the mysteries of how to use the Men’s room at O’Hare, airline food, revolving doors, and room service. I bought a Mac in 1984 and we cheered Happy Mac in my little studio near Fisherman’s Wharf. I liked the debates that would erupt on the fundamentals in their teen years.

I do not love the silence today as my son goes to Laos without stopping in Hong Kong.

Today, I deal with Asian parents who work hard to ensure that their children get into top schools. But in America, especially when I was young, parents were and are more ambivalent.

Asian parents seem to save more conscientiously for their children’s education and seem to have the funds to purchase after school programs which I teach. But as an American parent, I did not, and while my father saved more conscientiously, five children represented a potential financial disaster.

This invests the American parent, at some subconscious level, in his child’s failure, in his being predefined as essentially a problem, because then he can go, for example, to a state university.

I had the highest ACT verbal score in the history of my school, but wound up at a low-rated school through a combination of my own disinterest in tasks dictated by others, my laziness, and, perhaps, my parents’ fear of the tuition payments at a place like Princeton…at which I worked years later, and took classes, for credit. I subconsciously cooperated with the real plan, which was to seek as innocuous a middle class track as possible.

My parents were also believers, as were my uncles and aunts, in working after school, something Hong Kong kids aren’t encouraged to do. Since I was busy teaching myself things I wanted to learn, including art, mathematics and writing fugues (that very name accurately coding the effort as a “flight” from an unbearable constructed reality), I wasn’t interested, but I did see a lot of fellow students stunting their lives with long hours at McDonald’s, which opened up its first outlet in Desplaines in the 1960s.

My therapist, who seemed Frankfurt School, tried to get me to face reality: OK, the constructed “reality” is constructed and it is unbearable, so you need to do something about it. Instead, I passive-aggressively went along until it became truly unbearable, and then I blighted my children’s life by having a “midlife crisis” at the age of 31.

But I’d struggled, in my own way. I signed up for graduate school in computer science, got straight As, but then, allowed my wife to persuade me that it took too much time away from the kids. The head of department was also genuinely puzzled what I was doing in his department, and tried to explain to me that it wasn’t trying to produce scholars, only successful Loop data processors with fancy-sounding degrees.

In the 1960s, the usual compromise between parent and teenager was acceptable Bs and Cs at school, a brutal fast food job, and free time spent boozing it up and chasing members of the opposite sex, which turn into four meaningless years at Northern Illinois, early marriage, kids, and a job which most of my relatives were able to like. After four less than stellar years at Roosevelt University in Chicago, which my Mom selected but my Dad didn’t like because it was “full of Negroes and Communists” (a point in its favor for me), I who’d wanted To Paint allowed myself to be tracked into programming…which I found really, really interesting.

But I was living in Max Weber the sociologist’s “polytheistic” world, in which people learn to separate, sharply, different lifeworlds with different ultimate standards of justification. As a result, I had difficulty separating the struggle to succeed in business from family life and wound up divorced.

Fast forward. My own son did even better on the SAT. He received equally high scores on the verbal and math parts for a combined score of 1560/1600. I was thrilled, but when I tried to communicate my joy to my former wife she seemed just not to care, and more concerned with the many ways he irritated her. And because of the expenses of two households, despite the fact that I paid child support, I’d been completely unable to save a dime for myself, much less my son’s education.

He had been defined as a problem in Weber’s “polytheistic” world, where part of learning is learning to switch attention brutally and rapidly between completely different and completely unrelated subjects…in ultimate preparation for the world where the Wall Street thug is actually able to go home, and be a good father, for real.

This was because as a natural child, he was interested in what he was interested in, strongly, without limit, just as I was alternatively fascinated by Avalon Hill’s wargame Gettysburg, a book, or re-enacting Shakespeare plays with my toy Britain’s Limited “Knights of Agincourt”, or baseball. And just as my own parents didn’t celebrate this, my former wife was too overwhelmed most of the time, especially when she had to bring the kids to school and get to work, and my son was debugging his Macintosh software.

Money made all the difference. I was improvidently seeking the ideal software job up and down the West coast, using the dregs of what were supposed to be retirement packages and credit cards to ensure the child support was paid, as the software business evolved to the hellish nightmare it is today…where you can’t even program, but must attend meetings and read white papers until you want to soil yourself. My wife was working hard at one job and saving her money, but had my son been accepted at Princeton, we would have had few resources.

My boss at Princeton assured me that the University would find a way, but none was needed, since like me my son had inferior grades as opposed to SAT/ACT test scores, because getting good grades is mostly (especially in public schools) about demonstrating focus on one thing at a time.

The ironic tragedy is that SAT measures ability to benefit from education and was meant to be taken cold, without prep. I took it cold, and likewise, my son couldn’t be bothered with Kaplan. This means my son should have been given resources to go to a top school and it was a judgement on my son’s English teacher.

I’d read his snarky and idiotic comments on a paper my son had written on Catcher in the Rye. The structure of the comments was interesting, for structurally our experience, my experience, is to be the Great White Hope at first and then to let educational systems down. I’d entered high school to get straight As but my performance nosedived after Kennedy was shot to the cheers of some of the horrors I had to spend every day with (including Ted Nugent, the insane right-wing rock star in later life).

The teacher expressed disappointment that Eddie’s paper was taking an unexpected direction. He wanted to see the sort of essay you’d get today if you Googled “winning essay” but with a deep irony, my son like Holden Caulfield went his own way, and the teacher didn’t understand. So my son received a low grade. I should have been there, as my Dad was there when my own high school tried to refuse me a diploma: my Dad paid those clowns a visit, and I graduated after a summer class. It’s why I love him after all is said and done.

My son later found his own scholarship and educational support, but the family system would not let go. He is constantly subject to depression as I was: the depression, that is, of being the scapegoat and the mark for a larger dysfunction; that of the family and a society in which oil is now destroying the Caribbean Sea.

This tragedy isn’t healed by my teaching, of course, but I am pretty good with the “problems”, the kids who come in struggling with their Indonesian or Filipina helpers.

Tiger Monk (my name for him) likes to move and can moonwalk and do Kung Fu. Of course, the urge to do so strikes Tiger Monk at the strangest damned times, such as when we’re supposed to be doing Skills Book. My own sense of the absurd makes me his friend, nonetheless, they pay me for teaching attention to task, so to chill the Monk, I give him a book on dance, and he’s fascinated while the other kids do skills book.

I can even assign traditional punishments. One day, when Tiger Monk was being exceptionally obstreperous, I said, “OK, write ‘I will not be obstreperous’ 100 times, you young brute”. I sat down next to him and showed him the new word “obstreperous” and what it meant. I showed him how to write in different styles: joined up, engineering lettering, and funny. As he wrote, I sat next to him describing how in the “old days” guys in China and New York had to copy documents by hand. He wrote the sentence 100 times as we used to in the 1950s and calmed down.

Elephant Monk likewise prefers not to write characters in boxes. And when he fails, his response is to run around the room, questing. At this point, Teacher has to think like Jenny Holzer, the New York conceptual artist who writes gnomic sentences such as ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE. Thinking in isolated words, as parent in my experience, as teacher, makes you Go Crazy: HE.RUN.AROUND.ROOM.AI-YAH.

Instead, one leads the Elephant Monk (carefully), back to his seat whilst singing a merry song such as “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines”. One reflects in a complete sentence “They pay me to do this: the big boss actually sweats bullets to deposit the payroll on time for me: lo, I could be distributing flyers for Modern Toilet Restaurant in Jardine’s crescent dressed as a pile of ice cream which looks like poo, since the ‘theme’ of Modern Toilet is food as poo, eaten whilst sitting on a toilet, and I am not making this up, and isn’t Asia a strange and wonderful place to be”.

I should have been there for my kids, as a tutor and a Homework Helper, and on my kids’ ass, but regrets are pointless. I’d first learned that I love teaching because my Mom had asked me to tutor my kid brother in math. Since she paid me, I did not resent the fact that I’d received no such help, but I really enjoyed the work. But in the Eighties I was focused on trying to get rich in Silicon Valley, for the kids and, of course, for myself.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn saw the evil in American society of 1960s in the nightmare of childhood. These were dreary classrooms, Catholic or public schools, with only islands of meaning; for example, I thought sentence diagrams were cool. But mostly they were a wasteland in which boys stumbled through reading, were mocked by women, and put grease on their hair in response.

Hundreds of students at Chicago’s Our Lady of the Angels school in the 1950s died miserably because the nun in charge told them to sit still and pray rather than try to lead them to safety…or find their own way out of the burning school.

Bill and Bernardine were radicalized by this experience. Nothing since then has changed my conviction that we SDS members were right. And the system since that time has lost a war whilst killing civilians and is now fouling the Caribbean sea.

Of course, teaching the children of the wealthy in Hong Kong isn’t idealistic. I tutored homeless kids in New York but only could do so on Saturdays, and at DeVry University I taught computer science to 60 students from poor and minority backgrounds. If I get rich, which I probably won’t, I can teach for the UN, and give my helper money for her daughter to attend university.

My dad, the old monster, said it well. His office was on north Michigan avenue and it changed during the 1970s from an attractive, tree-lined boulevard with Kroch’s and Brentano’s books, Stuart Brent books, and a dime store (Kresge’s) with a lunch counter to the odious replicant it is today: it looks just like Central in Hong Kong.

He wondered what was the point of buying all this crap. All this useless beauty, when children are being neglected. But he was inside the system: he bought fancy 1960 Cadillacs.

And…someone inside the System, unlike Bill Ayers, has to say these things. Ayers doesn’t have to compromise having somewhat of an academic perch. His sons and grandsons see him every day.

And that which should accompany Old-Age,
As Honor, Loue, Obedience, Troopes of Friends,
I must not looke to haue

(Macbeth)

True “immanent” criticism in Adorno’s sense would be for Studs Lonigan, the victim/perp inside the Chicago machine, to find a voice, and not die, as does Studs Lonigan in James T Farrell’s book Judgement Day, miserably after a day of fruitless job hunting, boozing, smoking, and peepshows on south Michigan.

Studs Lonigan is what the system manufactures. He is like me an addictive personality, trivial, filled with fear and unfulfilled lusts, who has a basic savagery (EF Hobsbaum’s “anarchism of the lower middle class”) which emerged in riots on Armistice Day 1918, race riots in 1919 in Chicago, and on VE and VJ days.

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen: my kids can no longer stand me but I will speak the truth all the same. To quote Auden, then:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Why SSAT (and quondam SAT) “analogy” questions make perfect sense

Honesty is to distaste as color is to grisaille
Laughter is to annoyance as a chortle to a sigh
Picasso was to Matisse as Mozart to Salieri
Broccoli is to spinach as apple pie, to cherry
Captain is to general as corporal is to sergeant
Ice cream is to breakfast as David was to giant
Adorno was to Horkheimer as Porky Pig was to Elmer Fudd
These analogies of mine are one and all, a dud:
I gots dem low down mean old SSAT analogy
Blues.

Schools, and corporations, today, don’t oppress with sense-making. Quite the opposite: the point is getting people to Stop Making Sense.

There was for me, the slant of light in geometry class, where Father Eck (of the Viatorian order) made sense out of geometry. But the common experience of school and corporation is to destroy this: to teach mathematical analysis as a set of rules accompanied by sarcastic and cruel remarks, inspired by drill instructors in movies, about how so very few of you men will “get” this, probably because the D.I. teacher has in no wise mastered the basics, and covers this fact up with rage.

In more recent years, this use of senselessness in the service of power has turned to various New Age modes of thinking in which the student who demands some sense is told that she’s insufficiently socialized and needs to “get a life”.

These vectors happen to converge on unmentionable scenes of abuse.

Here is an example of remystification in which it is claimed that SSAT (and formerly SAT) analogies don’t make sense.

Pseudo-democratic rage against tests takes place in a historical vacuum. Tests were defined in order to open careers to talents, but this door is closing, in some small part due to the elimination of genuine problem-solving in tests and the replacement of problem-solving by rote memory, conventional answers, formulaic answers and overall a dull alienation.

This post analyzes each of the questions analyzed in an essay by one Jesse Fuchs titled, “The Worst Test in the World”. Mr Fuchs claims that none of these terribly hard analogy and synonym questions have a sensible explanation, and that this proves that analogy questions are bad and awful and mean, and the SSAT is “the worst test in the world”.

He is wrong, because as we will see the following guidelines can help us with analogy questions, synonym questions, and reading comprehension:

1. On a test select the best.
2. Tests are always unfair. So is life, you young brutes, and education prepares you for life, right? Right.
3. Multiple choice answers to analogies and synonyms can be ranked from best to worst, and ranking them is excellent practice, as is making up your own analogy questions and trying them out on your Mom.
4. The “best-ness” of an analogy question answer is your selection of a rule from many different incompatible (conflicting) rules that creates the closest “fit”. This is usually that you need the least number of words to explain your fit.
5. There’s no such thing as “one sensible rule” in life or on a test.
6. Always be test prepping. Read outside schoolwork and keep a vocabulary notebook.

Let us begin doing perhaps the hardest, if not the worst, SSAT test in the whole world.

Cage is to zoo as

Trap is to jungle
Pantry is to house
Net is to aquarium
Cell is to jail
Corral is to prairie

This one is nonproblematic. Traps, pantries and corrals are in jungles, houses and on prairies but they are accidental features of the jungle, the house, and the corral. There are virgin jungles without man’s traps. There are virgin prairies without corrals. There are pantries without houses. But in the conventional sense (where convention controls meaning for real speakers) all jails have cells. Sure, it might make sense to create a New Model prison or New Model jail without cells but in terms of conventions and standards, all jails have cells.

Some test preppers call this “conventional thinking”, and complain that it discriminates against the visionary student who, with shining eyes, looks to a future jail without cells, perhaps a park or greensward where the incarcerated could prance about like fauns in Arcady: but having been incarcerated for brief periods, I’d hazard that I, were I incarcerated in such a place, would prance right out.

I call it the modal logic of ordinary discourse: if it doesn’t have cells it ain’t, in ordinary Received English, a jail. It is at best a drunk tank.

“Net is to aquarium” is the worst choice because the net is outside and not in the aquarium.

Besides simply writing your reasoning down, diagrams can also clarify analogies: note the simplicity of the diagram for transforming “cage/zoo” to “cell/jail”.

It often makes sense to rank answers from best to worst:

Cell is to jail
Pantry is to house: this is second best (and should be selected if a better answer is not available) because a pantry forms part of a house
Trap is to jungle: Corral is to prairie: these have the same rank because they both defeat the ecological purpose of jungles and prairies
Net is to aquarium: the worst

Uproar is to silence as

Confusion is to turmoil
Motion is to fixed
Rage is to forbearance
Whirlpool is to stream
Tornado is to breeze

“Confusion is to turmoil” is easily eliminated because the two words are synonyms whereas uproar is almost antonymic with respect to silence, but then the four remaining possibilities all use antonyms. Reject “whirlpool/stream” and “tornado/breeze” because numerically speaking, a stream flows at a certain rate and wind in a breeze has a nonzero velocity: furthermore, a quiet stream can form a raging torrent downstream (if you have white water rafted you’ll know what I mean) and a breeze on a hot afternoon in Kansas can kick up later into a tornado.

Whereas forbearance as a virtue throws away all rage. The psychological issue here is that we no longer teach an ideal ethics, which may be a good thing, but modern education schools us to find the flaw in the best and merit in the worst. Therefore we don’t see that unlike a breeze or a stream, forbearance has no rage and can’t turn into rage. A merely suppressed rage isn’t forbearance.

Quack is to doctor as

Charlatan is to impostor
Pretender is to monarch
Defendant is to prosecutor
Arbitrator is to judge
Professional is to amateur

You have to see that the two terms are antonyms. Suppose you didn’t know that a “quack” was originally what professional doctors, who’d established themselves as a profession, called people without their credentials, you still should get the sense that somebody whose name sounds like a duck is the opposite of a serious doctor (in the world of the test makers, “doctor” is serious and good).

Reject charlatan/impostor. “Charlatan” sounds bad, doesn’t it, and you know that an imposter is a fake. Well, now you do: remember to always be test prepping.

Although a defendant’s interests are opposed to that of the prosecutor (the prosecutor in American and British law is supposed to find the defendant guilty) the words aren’t antonyms because they identify two smallish sets of people who play roles in a courtroom.

An arbitrator is a replacement for a judge: arbitration in fact is an attempt to save legal costs in disputes by having nonlawyers and nonjudges decide cases. Therefore, arbitrator to judge is like nurse to doctor. I know that sounds patronizing to nurses, but the SSAT makers have to reflect conventional attitudes in order to test your knowledge of English as it is spoken, and we put our conventional attitudes into speech.

Professional/amateur are like quack/doctors antonyms, in fact they are more antonymic because you’re either a professional or an amateur whereas you can be a “patient” and thus not a quack or a doctor. This leaves pretender/monarch.

Money is to tree as yen is to

Bush
Grass
Holly
Stalk
Elm

The test maker, whose evil purpose is to cause people to fail so that society can leave some kids behind (this being the objective purpose of education as long as we prefer to build toys for war, and start wars where the smart people get to stay in the rear with the gear) wants you to get confused here, because you may think of the proverb “money doesn’t grow on trees” if you know that yen, here, means Japanese money.

Strangely the test makers didn’t confuse you with another meaning of “yen”: a wish, a yearning (yen is related to this word), a hankering, cacoethes or a Jones (“I have a Jones for a Haagen Daz”: American English). Consider yourself to have gotten a lucky break.

The task is always to find the best answer. This means that in a different version of the same question “bush” might be best although there is no reason to downsize tree to bush just because money becomes Japanese money: a bush is not a type of tree except in a scientific sense. However, the test makers, any more than they can promise fairness (life being unfair and school being a preparation for life) will not make the pathway to the best answer perfectly neat.

The best answer is elm, and this makes sense, doesn’t it? Here, we step down one category. From tree to elm tree and from money to Japanese money. But remember: some questions might step down one category for one word, and two for another.

…Lincoln began in a low tone of voice-as if he were used to speaking outdoors and was afraid of speaking too loud. He said, “Mr. Cheerman”, instead of “Mr. Chairman,” and employed many other words with an old-fashioned pronunciation. I said to myself, “Old fellow, you won’t do; it’s all very well for the Wild West, but this will never go down in New York.”

When the speaker says, “Old fellow, you won’t do; it’s all very well for the Wild West, but this will never go down in New York,” it can be inferred that he believes

New Yorkers have different beliefs than Westerners
New Yorkers have higher standards than Westerners
New Yorkers are more sophisticated than Westerners
Lincoln will not travel to New York
New Yorkers will not understand Lincoln’s accent

This requires careful attention to colloquial American speech. The excerpt is from American speech of the 1860s but some turns of phrase, such as “you won’t do” remain in common use.

Americans are pragmatic. They don’t know if you can know the whole truth and instead think that what works is truth. The American philosopher William James said that truth is usefulness.

Therefore, for the same reason overall Americans spell “colour” as “color”, they want things that “do” stuff without having to fully define “stuff”.

Lincoln was a smart but self-educated lawyer who also was widely read. He met the standards of New York educationally but talked funny, a problem students sometimes feel they share. It’s obvious from the passage that the hearers understood “Cheerman”, that’s why they were amused enough to call Lincoln “old fellow”.

There’s nothing in the passage to indicate that New Yorkers have different beliefs from Westerners; Lincoln is invited to speak because his beliefs were the same as Eastern members of the Republican party. Nor does anything indicate that Lincoln won’t go to New York.

Higher standards, or more sophisticated? Lincoln met the standards because he’s invited to speak, but sophisticated New Yorkers didn’t it is clear talk like country people!

Paradoxically here the student who like Lincoln reads for pleasure will do better; in particular, a student who’s read a Life of Lincoln for school or for pleasure will ace this question, because he will identify the speaker as William Seward, a New York fancy pants pol who thought he could use Lincoln, and wound up in awe of him while serving Abe as Secretary of State, and buying Alaska.

Unfair? Not at all: students who crack a book, even as Lincoln did, get more out of school.

In fact critics of the SSAT like Fuchs will on the one hand complain that the student’s knowledge is unfairly discounted or ignored and on the other that you have to know too much. This is convenient but fallacious logic.

Synonym for pathetic

Guidance
Trash
Poor
Direction
Wretched

Since “pathetic” is an adjective, “guidance”, “trash”, and “direction” are ruled out. Be careful, however, with using parts of speech to rule words out. This is because there is no simple one-to-one correspondence between a word and one part of speech, even for uncomplicated words like “red” (“Red is a color” uses “red” as a noun, whereas “pass me the red envelope” uses red as an adjective). “Poor” itself can be an uncountable noun as in “Marat, we’re poor [adjective], and the poor [noun, seen to be such because it’s preceded by an article] stay poor” (Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade…I didn’t make that play’s title up).

So which is correct, “wretched” or “poor”? The problem with “poor” is that (as Weiss’ play has it!) that “poor” is a more permanent condition. In the play about the French Revolution, the poor complain that as the “wretched of the earth” they can’t raise capital for a small business so stay poor. Sure, even if different people are rich and poor and different times, the poor would stay poor as a class but not on an individual level.

“Wretched” is the best choice because it has no such connotation: a Yuppie can be or feel wretched because Starbuck’s is closed, but stops being wretched if Pacific Coffee is open.

Synonym for exquisite

Precise
Noiseless
Miniature
Splendid
Reticent

In many of the analogy and synonym questions, you can start by comparing the alternatives systematically, while postponing hard cases as follows.

Compare “precise” to “noiseless”. Which one of these two words is closer to “exquisite”? Precise is. Compare it to miniature: it still is best choice, isn’t it?. Ask yourself here if all exquisite things are miniature: a huge Ming vase is still exquisite, and, you often find the two adjectives together as in “an exquisite miniature painting” which means that they supplement each other’s meaning.

Oops: what about “splendid”? Underline it and move on because it looks tough.

“Precise” is closer to “exquisite” than reticent because “reticent” means, approximately, shy.

Remember that there are no true synonyms in the English language. You may know already that words can differ in connotation (the emotional associations) while having the same denotation (the meaning in the world). But it’s more complicated because a word not only has a denotation (the things it means) and a connotation: it also has rules for its usage.

Consider “dead” versus “deceased” (where deceased is usually defined as “dead”). “Deceased” has a more formal connotation than “dead”. But furthermore, “deceased” in actual usage applies only to human beings because it’s a legal word, and law doesn’t apply to wild animals. A plant or animal is not “deceased” unless we humorously, or because of our affection for it, decide to give it a funeral!

“Deceased” cannot always replace dead without a change in meaning, or intention.

“Reticent” means tending to act shy but has a more formal connotation than “shy”. Usage wise, “he is reticent” means he behaves in a way that is shy. But if Joe behaves in a way that’s shy, he may do so for a different reason than shyness. For example, he may be a reticent bank robber who acts shy. To be shy is to have a feeling.

Your analysis has narrowed the possibilities down to only one “hard case”: exquisite versus splendid. But if there is only one hard case, this is the answer!

Synonym for furious

Storm
Upset
Trash
Sneaky
Fierce

It is almost always true (where it is unwise to try to generalize) that when you’re asked for a synonym the synonym needs to be the same part of speech. However, some words (notably the words for colours) can belong to more than one part of speech: “red” is a noun in “red is my favorite colour” and an adjective in “red balloon”.

Fortunately, here, “furious” is always an adjective. This eliminates “storm” and “trash” which are always nouns (remember to eliminate words that belong to one part of speech: “upset” can be a noun in informal speech, especially about sports, as in “their upset upset the fans”, an adjective in “upset victory”, and an verb in “don’t upset your Father”).

Move through the remaining words, starting with furious/upset. The pair furious/sneaky is far more far apart than furious/upset, so move on, keeping furious/upset, to fierce.

That’s the surprise,right there, and you have found it, although SSAT tutors and English teachers are furiously and fiercely upset bad crazy nuts about this sneaky and “unfair” question, as if tests like life itself are supposed to be fair.

Yes, the answer is “fierce” because it is the best of a bad set of answers. But by “bad” I don’t mean that the test is bad, I mean your job is to find the best answer at all times.

The problem here is that “upset” as an adjective is on a scale from “upset”, to “irritated”, to “angry”, to “furious”: see Chuckie’s moods below:

However, “fierce” doesn’t belong on this scale because it doesn’t, unlike “upset”, irritated, “angry” and “furious”, refer to a combination of mood and behavior whereas “fierce” refers to behavior. This is because we’re more likely to call an animal “fierce” than “upset”, “angry” or “furious”, although at times we will call an animal one of these things.

Normally, this would cause us to reject “fierce”. But the distance between “upset” and furious is two steps and in very few sentences can you replace “furious” by “upset” and keep the same meaning. Whereas in “he was a fierce player on the pitch” you can change “fierce” to “furious”!

The problem is that in analogies and synonyms, you have to choose not only the best word but the best rule from multiple sets of rules that conflict. But, this prepares you to use different reading strategies in school, and to figure out situations of multiple conflicting rules in life.

Synonym for barrage

Attack
Throws
Flood
Depot
Defect

Do the part of speech analysis: barrage is almost always a noun although a case can be made for “to barrage me with requests” where it is a (rare) verb: attack is a noun or a verb: throws is usually a verb because it has person, tense, and number (third person singular present tense), although “throws” can be reinterpreted as a noun with a plural number: flood is a noun or a verb as in “to flood the Internet with spam”, depot is a noun only: defect is a noun or a somewhat unusual verb with a different meaning from “flaw” (a synonym for “defect”), that means “to disavow citizenship in a country and take up residence or citizenship in another”.

This is a complicated picture, so let’s “color code” the set of words as follows: nouns are black, verbs are blue.

The problem here is that World War I, so-called the Great War in Britain, changed the language, and prior to WWI, a barrage was exclusively an artificial bar in a river for purposes of flood control. Since neither a defect nor to defect (with different stress in pronunciation as shown above) has much to do with artillery or flood control, and since a depot is only part of an artillery unit (being the place for artillery stores, as well as other types of military stores), and an artillery barrage was only part of an attack (and usually futile), flood is the closest choice.

But, you may say, how am I supposed to know the meanings of words in use before World War I? The answer is that if you expect to read at prep school and university level, you’d better. The syntax of “artillery” and flood is the same (and this pair shares this feature only with “attack”, which is too broad, and in many texts said to be preceded by a meaningless, if noisy, artillery barrage) and once you look at all the meanings, flood is closest although a barrage controls a flood and is not the flood.

Synonym for plight

Danger
Leave
Bird
Predicament
Confusion

Whew. This is easy after the artillery barrage. The best choices are “danger” and “predicament” and the problem with “danger” is that a plight or predicament need not involve danger.

Synonym for jeer

Hoot
Ridicule
Turn
Smile
Flair

Since “jeer” seems to be omanopoetic and to have the sense in the sound, the test taker might choose hoot. Here, the problem is that actual usage doesn’t use “jeer” to refer to noises people make. “Cheer” is used, omanopoetically, more often to refer to collective crowd sounds. Therefore “ridicule” is best.

Synonym for congenial

Born with
Attractive
Together
Coronary
Agreeable

Here, Fuchs, the original collector of these hard questions points out that they are trying to trip-up students who have heard the word “congenital”, perhaps owing to a parent’s illness, and who might choose “coronary” or “born with”. “Together” tries to confuse the student who’s seen words such as “conglomerate” in which the “con” prefix means “combined”.

However, it’s not “unfair” to students to try to trick them, fair and square, any more than life is unfair.

Spinach is to milk as

Fudge is to cola
Wheat is to flour
Cabbage is to kraut
Mineral is to vitamin
Pitcher is to milker

This is one of the most difficult examples. It shows most clearly that the student has not only to choose the best answer in hard analogies, he has to choose the best rule. Here, nothing makes sense, the student looks in vain for a vegetarian meal including a nutritious solid food and something good to wash it down, and then, is intended, by the “unfairness” of the test, to decide that spinach contains a lot of minerals and milk has a lot of vitamins.

But this is a terrible answer, since spinach contains all sorts of vitamins and milk is the source of calcium, a mineral! It might be the best answer, and therefore the right answer, but we need to look closer.

The student has to think structurally and apply a structural rule, and only the rule that “replacing the two words in a sentence about eating yields a different result that means in the same way”. You can replace “my dinner was spinach and milk” with “my dinner was fudge and cola”, even though you have to suspend your judgement as to whether the second dinner is nutritious.

The problem is that “structuralism” is introduced as a way of doing literary theory and criticism only at university if at all. The student will have to be one of those thoughtful people who has played with language, making structural changes. Most people don’t do this, but most people aren’t qualified to take the SSAT for admission to elite private schools.

“Hamburgers! The cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast!” – “Jules”, Pulp Fiction

Song is to singer as

Bell is to ringer
View is to viewer
Smoke is to smoker
Fire is to cooker
Light is to lighter

It would be nice if “speech is to speaker” were an answer, because it would be better than most other possibilities, and all of the above. The phrase “song is to singer” sends us on a wild goose chase because we think that the rule in effect is “product to producer”.

In the goose chase we reject “view is to viewer” because the viewer doesn’t produce the view outside of certain types of “idealist” philosophy. But then we get Three Bad Answers. Singers intend to produce songs, but smokers usually inhale (they are not in the business of creating smoke). Cookers aren’t meant to produce fire. The best of the Three Bad Answers is “light to lighter”, but lighters are inanimate objects.

Recall from the above that the SSAT test maker selects a rule which gives best fit. The rule here is that while the ringer doesn’t produce the bell, the sound is a very close match, and matches in a way that is better than the Three Bad Answers. Any one of those answers might be the correct (the best) answer in a set of alternatives that didn’t include the sound match.

Clam is to calm as

Oyster is to quiet
Sent is to tenis
Scallop is to doldrum
Fish is to feel
Carp is to crap

“Oyster is to quiet”. No. And this is because you want closest distance given the rule used, and oysters have no meaningful relationship to silence, any more than clams to calm. The best answer is the one which changes the order of two letters. Yes, you have to figure out the rule.

Rose is to plant as

Pine is to tree
Daisy is to flower
Emerald is to gem
Dog is to animal
Ice is to water

When you read the first analogy, you tentatively decide (remembering that any such decision may have to be changed) that the issue here is types of things.

But simple subtype to type reasoning gives multiple answers, all of them just as good: a pine is a tree, a daisy is a flower, an emerald is a gem, and a dog is an animal. “Ice is to water” is wrong because ice, you may know from chemistry class, is exactly the same chemical compound as water: ice is a state of water.

Here you are meant to see that rose to plant jumps an obvious category, and “daisy is to flower” is your clue. It sounds “better” than “rose is to plant” and isn’t the answer.

“Dog” jumps over “mammal” on its way to animal in the same way “rose” jumps over “flower” on its way to plant.

Wily is to cunning as

Crafty is to handy
Clever is to gloomy
Sneaky is to congenial
Aggressive is to combative
Feisty is to banal

There is no guarantee that the parts of speech will be the same: here “aggressive” and “combative” are adjectives as is “wily”. The trick is that a word can belong to multiple parts of speech, depending on its position in a sentence, whether it has tense, and whether it has, clearly, plural or singular number.

The student here has to know that “cunning” is used both an adjective and a noun, and since it is an adjective when it appears before a noun or after “verbs of state” such as is or seems, “aggressive is to combative” parallels wily/cunning because both are synonyms.

“Crafty is to handy” is the second best choice because while the two words are close in meaning, “crafty” means tricky (as does wily and cunning) but “handy” isn’t close to “crafty, cunning, and wily”). If “aggressive/combative” wasn’t there, “craft/handy” would be the best answer and therefore, in this hypothetical situation, the right answer.

The rule? “Find the synonym in a language where there are no perfect synonyms”. Even such close “synonyms” such as “dead” and “deceased” as discussed in the grey box above.

Spiral is to curve as

Swirl is to cone
Twist is to pyramid
Helix is to triangle
Coil is to cylinder
Screw is to arc

Since SSAT verbal isn’t SSAT math, use the ordinary meanings of words to answer questions with math terminology. A screw is a series of arcs in space.

Morgue is to corpse as

Refrigerator is to cantaloupe
Library is to book
Hospital is to nurse
Warehouse is to automobile
Church is to pew

A morgue is for corpses: a library is for books. The problem, of course, is that modern libraries overemphasize multimedia and in some of them, the librarians or their managers are so contemptuous of mere books that many of them sell books super cheap rather than find space for them. A refrigerator is not for cantaloupes, a hospital is not a place for nurses to live, only some warehouses contain cars, and a church is not for pews.

Melon is to felon as

Mangle is to tangle
Bunny is to funny
Merry is to ferry
Cringe is to fringe
Mango is to tango

Clearly, the analogues have to rhyme, but they all rhyme. The best answer, “merry/ferry” alliterates melon/felon. You have to know two common poetic techniques to crack the question. You probably know all about rhymes, but most quality English classes will define alliteration. Or, the bright student will be curious and will have learned about alliteration on his own.

“Common sense” and “following the rules” aren’t enough. You have to have uncommon insight, you have to know that rules are changeable and made to be broken, and you have had to be inquisitive before and not after the test, using your own time to visit the library, and reading Dad’s grown up magazines and newspapers, perhaps even his Playboys.

Forward is to backward as

Advance is to return
Charge is to quit
Climb is to falter
Lift is to drop
Assault is to retreat

There are two good answers here: advance/return and assault/retreat. The problem with advance/return is that return is weaker than advance in the sense that it is used in far more contexts than “to move ahead, to go back”.

Purebred is to hybrid as

Thoroughbred is to horse
Donkey is to mule
Royalty is to nobility
Pedigree is to mongrel
Registered is to lineage

Pedigree/mongrel is better than donkey/mule . There is a part of speech change going from “purebred” (adjective) to “pedigree” (a noun meaning a known lineage). If you add a missing “d” to “pedigree” you get an exact parallel of nouns which can also be used as adjectives.

“Donkey/mule” isn’t as good a fit, because these are examples of purebred and hybrid. “Donkey/mule” would be the best answer if “pedigree/mongrel” weren’t an alternative answer. To see this, compare how much thought-work it takes to get from “donkey/mule” to “purebred/hybrid”: “hmm, a donkey and a horse give a mule which is an example of a hybrid, and I will now forget that mules can be purebred or not depending on whether we know their Mommy and Daddy” versus “hmm, change the letter d”.

For hard questions, if you have the time, try these essays to see how many words you need to transform the proposed answer to the main analogy.

Program is to computer as lesson is to

Student
Teacher
Book
Test
Plan

A student isn’t a computer, of course. But the teacher gives the lesson. The lesson is in the book. The lesson prepares us for the test. The lesson is in the teacher’s lesson plan.

Whereas the student is provided the lesson in somewhat the same way (not exactly the same way) as a computer is useless until, metaphorically, educated and taught by the programmer.

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. Best fit.

Prove is to grove as

Light is to might
Show is to tell
Drove is to stove
Trail is to trial
Slope is to slide

This isn’t a rhyming question because “prove” doesn’t rhyme with “stove”! It’s a letter change question because only the first letter is changed. The least amount of work is “change the first letter”. Show/tell have no relationship and is the worst answer. If light/might wasn’t an alternative answer, then drove/stove or trail/trial would be the answer: try to figure out which are best before proceeding to build your skill.

Ok, the “work” done to get from drove/stove consists of (1) change the first two letters, (2) mispronounce “prove”. Trail and trial are second best because middle letters are switched, but this is more complex than changing the first letter.

Finally, you should see that slope/slide is here (but only here) a bad answer.

Zinnia is to bouquet as

Truck is to convoy
Airplane is to formation
Carrot is to lunch
Branch is to tree
Paper is to ream

The best answer is carrot/lunch. The next best answer is branch/tree, then paper/ream, then both truck/convoy and airplane/formation seem to be equally good.

But first, we need to find the better of the two worst answers to build mastery. Truck/convoy or airplane/formation? Probably the latter because a truck convoy has a one-dimensional shape whereas a bouquet of flowers and an airplane formation are 3-D.

Here, the rule is that the piece of a whole has to be detachable normally. This eliminates branch and tree, and, strangely, paper and ream, the latter because they didn’t say “piece of paper” to make the uncountable noun “paper” countable and singular, like “zinnia”.

Parrot is to jungle as beaver is to

Ocean
Lake
Pond
Stream
Lagoon

In fact, beavers inhabit lakes in reality as well as streams. The problem is that we’re doing English, and not natural history, and usage follows our mental pictures of the way things are. Because we think of beavers building dams, we think of streams before lakes. The question is clearly “where animals live”, and you’re not being penalized for knowing about beavers, since to understand texts in a tolerant way, you have to agree, broadly, about actual usage.

Grape is to wine as rubber is to

Fruit
Bark
Root
Leaf
Tree

Wine comes from grapes: rubber comes from trees. There are only two operations needed to transform grape/wine to rubber/tree: reverse the words, and insert “come from”.

The other analogies, have we’ve already seen, can always made to fit by thinking of a rule, because language can relate anything to anything, including “shoes, and ships and sealing wax”. That’s what language is for: to be able to speak of novel things. If we didn’t have language, for example, we’d never see the relationship between “underarm spray can deodorant” and the South Pole, where the old propellents used in the former released complex and indestructible molecules which caused the ozone hole to appear over the North Pole.

The problem is that we often learn in school to “focus” and be “revelant” to a topic. This is important, but it also causes us to think of applying novel rules that we’ve thought up on the spot as just silly. But, in answering analogies, you have to be silly and creative. This at university gives us new insights into assigned texts.

From outside the university many people decry this. For example, they don’t see the relationship between Jane Austen and the slave trade because Jane Austen’s characters don’t discuss it, and journalists (that is, people who are paid to be grownups) often write articles about “the crazy things kids learn at Uni from those left-wing professors”. But, some of the fortunes, the inheritance of which drives Austen’s plots, were made in the slave trade, and it may be that her characters are silent on this because of a guilt or shame shared by their creator, a guilt and shame which became the movement, in Britain, to end slave trading.

We can in fact imagine an 18th century student failing to see the analogy between a slave and a man or a brother.

 
Finally, here is the comprehension question Fuchs discusses.

Even though the family name Chin means gold, it does not signify that everyone of that name is rich. Long ago, in the province of Chekiang, however, there was a certain wealthy Chin family of whom it was popularly said that its fortune was as great as its name. It seemed quite fitting, then, that when a son was born to the family, that he should be called Po-Wan, “Million” for he was certain to be worth a million pieces of gold when he came of age.

With such a happy circumstance of names, Po-Wan himself never doubted that he would have a never-ending supply of money chinking through his fingers and he spent money accordingly-not on himself, but on any unfortunate who came to his attention. He had a deep sense of compassion for anyone in distress of body or spirit; a poor man had only to hold out his hand, and Po-Wan poured gold into it; if a destitute widow and her brood of starvelings but lifted their sorrowful eyes to his, he provided them with food and lodging and friendship for the rest of their days.

In such wise, did he live that even a million gold pieces were not enough to support him. His resources were so dwindled that finally he scarcely had enough food for himself; his clothes flipped threadbare on his wasted frame, and the cold seeped into his bone marrow for lack of a fire. Still, he gave away the little money that came to him.

One day, as he scraped out half of his bowl of rice for a beggar that was even hungrier than he, he began to ponder the little money that came to him.

“Why am I so poor?” he wondered. “I have never spent extravagantly. I have never, from the day of my birth, done an evil deed. Why then am I, whose very name is A Million Pieces of Gold, no longer able to find even a copper to give to this unfortunate creature, and have only a bowl of rice to share with him?”

Each of the following words may be used to describe Po-Wan except

Confused
Miserly
Poor
Generous
Compassionate

The story in the test offends students from China because it’s an old-fashioned example of Orientalism, which violates the writer’s rule, “write about what you know”, and describes Asia from the outside; for example, Mr. John Stuart Mill, who was probably a genius but not too smart, nonetheless wrote a whole book about India without learning India’s languages. The story tells a fable, which has two levels of meaning, because in the 17th and 18th century Europeans decided on the basis of limited contact and trade with China that the Chinese liked to tell Improving Fables. They do, but so do we all, and the Chinese also liked improper stories as well.

Manage your anger because our purpose is to ace the test.

Look at each word. Po-Wan is confused and poor at the end of the story and generous and compassionate throughout the story. He’s never miserly where this means being stingy. You didn’t have to know what “miserly” meant as long as you could guess what the other words mean.

The passage is primarily about

The origin of Po-Wan’s name
How Po-Wan lost his fortune
Po-Wan’s plan for regaining his fortune
Reasons why it is foolish to share
The meaning of names and reality

The first paragraph, only, deals with “the origin of PoWan’s name”. The story tells how PoWan lost his money but without giving a lot of detail as to how or why because it’s a fable, and fables have two levels of meaning. There’s nothing about any plan for regaining PoWan’s fortune!

This brings us to the two “best” answers: reasons why it is foolish to share, and names versus reality. “Foolish to share” is not as good because the author’s language about Po Wan’s generosity uses adjectives, such as generosity itself, with a positive charge; it is hard to say “it is bad to be generous” without appearing to contradict oneself, although some self-appointed philosophers of selfishness (notably the Russian émigré author Ayn Rand) try to express this thought; in the same way in fact as certain forms of Communism, extreme political ideologies can ruin the language and make it harder for us to understand. But, no matter what, the author isn’t trying to prove that “it is foolish to share”, and this leaves “the meaning of names and reality”. Not very satisfactory, because the passage does not discuss this philosophically in a modern sense, but old philosophers from Confucius (Master Fong Fu Zi) and Plato would tell these sorts of Improving Stories.

Which of the following is the best title for this selection?

The Significance of a Name
From Prince to Pauper
Why am I So Poor?
Compassionate Names
Rags to Riches

This follows from the preceding discussion. When answering multiple questions about one passage you have to be logically consistent.

Po-Wan believes that he should still be wealthy for each of the following reasons except

He does not buy frivolous things
He is kind
His name means A Million Pieces of Gold
He does not deserve to be poor because he helps others
He comes from a wealthy family

It is clear that PoWan is old and no longer can get any money from his parents.

It is most likely that Po-Wan will do which of the following next?

Try to figure out why he is poor
Ask the people that he has helped in the past to help him
Steal some gold to support himself and share with others
Ask his parents to give him a million more pieces of gold
Stop sharing with others so that he can again become wealthy

The answer is implied by PoWan’s question. Today, we are accustomed to stories in which a reversal of fortune in the movies becomes the basis for triumph over adversity, but in the time in which the passage is set, people didn’t have this opportunity to become wealthy. If PoWan is compassionate then he is honest, probably, and won’t steal: his parents are dead, and nothing in the passage indicates that PoWan has read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged or “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, and will resolve to stop sharing.

This ends my analysis of Mr. Fuch’s somewhat misguided essay and its questions. The only problem with analogy questions is that the student is not given, for extra credit, the opportunity to write a short essay explaining his choice. Essays would cost schools lots of money, which is made scarce in America because politicians and the upper middle class pay for ski-ing trips with money meant for school. Allowing the students to write essays, or marginalia explaining their choices would mean having to hire intellectuals of all people to decipher and grade this stuff. I would not mind doing so if it meant “no child left behind”, but the whole point of the system is, all the way down and in its black heart, leaving most kids behind.

You can overcome this system, perhaps by following my advice. And then, as a grownup you can change it.