Rational Philosophy

Education Issues: On the dangers of paying for improved test performance. The psychology of value.

“An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all”
– Socrates

Researchers at Duke have determined that a high-price tag placebo works better than a low-price tag placebo, even though the two pills have the same active ingredient (i.e., no active ingredient). The perceived price of the pill increases the psychological expectation of positive results. “If it costs more, it must be better,” our brain tells us.

Schools across the country have begun to experiment with programs that reward schools, teachers and children for good test scores. The Times paints a somewhat anecdotal picture of the enthusiasm children have for this approach, but it is not hard to imagine that the picture is largely accurate.

When first read this story, I had a strong and immediate negative reaction to the idea of paying children to do well on tests. As I read about the apparent promise of the programs, I tried to put my negative reaction to one side. But it lingered.

Psychologically, I think, I am reacting to the idea that children are being paid to learn. There is, it seems, a placebo effect at work. With good intentions the program architects and educators want to achieve better scores by paying more for them. But do better test scores reflect a perceived improvement or an actual improvement? Test scores, after all, measure the ability to score well on tests. Scoring well on tests is symptomatic of a good education, but not the same as a good education.

Just as a placebo makes the perception of pain go away. So, too, improved test scores make the perception of subpar education go away.

I don’t want to overstretch the analogy. The other profound misgiving I have also relates to the psychology of value.

Once you pay a child to study, in the child’s mind studying and learning become fused with reward or compensation. (And the research on the perceived value of placebos demonstrates just how powerfully our minds connect value and reward.) What happens when that child finds himself in a situation in which he won’t receive any immediate reward for studying or learning or growing? Will he be in a worse position than a child who hasn’t been paid to do well? Quite likely.

And, as adults, while what we do to improve our understanding comes with reward in the workplace, that’s not true in life generally. Will these children grow up to be less likely to apply themselves when there’s nothing to be gained from it?

Education is a long term investment. It’s very easy for legislators, professors, administrators and educators to get caught up in the need to improve school performance, to get children’s test grades up. But ultimately this is not the goal of education. Education aims to foster the acquisition of knowledge. If we turn our schools into factories that churn out paid learners, we are creating a generation of adults who will be confused about the real value of knowledge and learning. And that is a worrying thought.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On Stanley Fish’s views on the humanties, and congress’s obsession with baseball.

Stanely Fish has this to say about whether studying the humanties can change us for the better: “Do the humanities ennoble? And for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any other area of academic study, to save us? The answer in both cases, I think, is no.” Fish argues that the humanities serve no purpose whatsoever, but that this is OK, since “an activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good.”

To which feel moved to give a short rebuttal (”bullshit”) but feel a sense of duty to respond with something longer and more thoughtful. Back to that in a minute.

The other matter that has me scratching my head again today is all the fuss in congress over baseball drug use. Perhaps this is one of those cultural or political gaps that comes from being born and raised elsewhere, but why on earth does the government feel it should spend taxpayers’ money investigating drug use in baseball? Roger Clemens has been desperately defending himself against the allegations in the recent report. And he should be held accountable if he’s sullied the name of baseball, but by the government?

How does this relate to Stanley Fish and his misapprehension of the value of the humanities? Well, you can find echoes of Kafka and Beckett and Heller in the congress’s pursuit of the baseball players abuses, just as you can find echoes of Kafka and Vonnegut and, yes, Heller again in the Bush administration’s press to invade Iraq and chronic abuse of human rights.

Over the weekend I saw “Charlie Wilson’s War.” Granted not a film of any great artistic merit, although effectively done, but it helps illustrate the point. I came out of the theater with a renewed sense of urgency about the value and hidden dangers of the political process, with a new sense of outrage at the current administration’s deliberate mishandling of the current war and manhandling of our rights. Could I have reached the same sense of outrage without the movie? Sure, but that’s not the point.

The humanities, along with news media, word of mouth, personal observation, government and independent reports, etc., give us a picture of the world we live in. In some cases, the humanities give us a picture that we couldn’t get in any other way (because it’s purely imaginitive or impressionistic or surreal). I would pose the reverse question to Fish. If humanities don’t serve a purpose, why do they exist?

We strive to create art because we want to represent something — an emotion, an impression, an urge, a feeling – that seems important to us. Art is the tangible manifestation of our humanity. Without art we have no tangible manifestation of our humanity. Some can live in such a world, perhaps, but most of us cannot.

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(Or Reading, Writing and Ramifications…)

“The Fall” by Albert Camus was the first book of literature I read by choice. (Before that I think I’d read mostly books from Ian Flemming’s James Bond series,
Agatha Christie’s detective series, science fiction, and the like). “The Fall” opened up for me a whole new world of reading. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it also opened up a whole new world of thinking.

A new study has shown that the flu is more common in the winter because the virus remains more stable and lives longer in cold dry weather. The debate about why the flu was more common in winter had raged for decades. The researcher’s clue to testing the flu’s communicability under controled conditions (more explicitly, what animal to test on — Guinea Pigs) came from reading a report from 1919 about a flu pandemic in New Mexico. (The author of the report noted in passing that Guinea Pigs at Camp Cody had succumbed to the flu.)

And in a New Orlean’s court case today, where the defendants may be asked to present their genitals for review in order to help prosecute a rape case, Defense attorney Robert Jenkins made the comment “I’ve never seen it before. Even in fiction, you don’t see this kind of stuff.” Which, when you think about things you do see in fictionalized court cases, is a statement as bold as the prosecutor’s request.

My wife, a lover of purchasing books if not always reading them, has set herself the challenge of reading ten books while she’s pregnant. When she asked me if I had any suggestions Camus’ “The Fall” was right up there. It’s a short book and she’s about half way through. Last night she felt so affected by what she was reading that she paused and read out loud a passage in which the narrator recalls a traffic incident in Paris. Stopped at a traffic light behind a stalled moped the narrator, who saw himself as the victim of events, ended up being seen by everyone around him as the villain. I don’t remember enough of the book to summarize its themes and aims, but my wife has been struck by the way that Camus exposes the layers of psychology that enwrap our everyday lives: Why do we try to be nice and good? Do we have an ulterior motive? Is that our only motive? How do we know? What makes up a person, his actions or his thoughts?

Camus, Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Graves, Gunter Grass, James Joyce, Proust and so many other great writers wrote fiction that provokes inquiry and thought about the nature of the human condition and, in many ways, the nature of existence. Reading such texts communicates this process. We don’t need to agree with the writer’s perspective, and rarely is the writer’s perspective explicitly declared or even implicitly declared, but it is difficult to read the books of such writers without pausing to reflect. And it is difficult to reflect without acquiring some new insight.

The flu researcher makes his own case for writing down points of interest that may seem incidental at the time (such as Guinea Pigs with flu), but that can open up whole new realms of insight for readers in a dim, distant and indeterminate future. “Sometimes it pays to read the old literature,” says Dr. Palese, who made the discovery.

And the Defense attorney in the New Orleans court, unwittingly I think, points to the value of fiction as a way of expanding the realm of the possible. Fiction has been instrumental in changing what’s acceptable, possible, and conceivable. That the Prosecutor in the case has outdone fiction is a credit to his imagination if not his legal prowess.

All of which makes me want to go and read.

But before I do, I must stop to consider the flip side of this literatic love-fest. Even the best of texts can be misunderstood and misused. And the worst of texts can be downright dangerous in the wrong hands. The intent of the writer and the perspective and persuasion of the reader will determine whether a particular text generates more good than ill.

And what’s considered a dangerous book by one generation may be lauded as a groundbreaking work of innovation and courage by the next. (James Joyce’s Ulysses springs to mind; although it may not be the best example unless the sample group happens to be students of modern literature.)

Can we say then whether the overall value of literature and writing is in general positive, negative or neutral?

(This reminds me of a discussion I had earlier this year with someone who questioned, since truth and scientific understanding is not absolute, whether we can say that science has made progress.)

The question, in practice, is clearly unanswerable. Even if we were to agree on definitions for positive and negative, how would we compile a quantitative inventory of all of the positive and negative influences of things written and read?

Which reminds me that things written, while they should stir and prompt our own thinking, should not replace our own thinking. Whatever dangers exist in things written don’t derive from the writing itself, however inciteful and twisted, but from our being influenced by them without sufficient reflection and questioning. Just because we read Justine doesn’t mean that we’ll become amoral. Although if we swallow de Sade’s words without reflection, we may well come away worse off than when we arrived. But surely that would be our fault, not de Sade’s?
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Monet’s “Le Pont d’Argenteuil” at the Orsay Museum in Paris - badly damaged by intruders Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007.

(You can see the 4 inch tear below the bridge.)

In a related article, the French Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, calls for better security and tougher sanctions against people who commit such acts of vandalism because, as she said “they are attacking our history.”

Another interesting aspect of the report is that it seems that the painting can be repaired. Presumably it would be impossible for a future museum visitor to know whether the painting had been repaired or not.

This reminds me of two other incidents: One from a New Yorker article, and one from my own life.

The New Yorker, September 24, 2007, article on Marie-Laure de Noailles - The Surrealist’s Muse, at one point describes how one of Marie-Laure’s lovers — a Spanish painter named Oscar Dominguez — made money by by copying Marie-Laure’s Picassos and selling the originals, leaving his forgeries in their place.

My wife bought me a lovely old Alfa Romeo “Spider” sports car for my birthday. It turns out that the car’s floor is rusted, a fatal problem. But in the course of investigating what could be done, if anything, to repair the damage, I discovered that, with old cars, enthusiasts value authenticity, including authenticity of a repair, so highly that an inauthentic repair (using a modern, custom-shaped floor panel rather than an original panel) would render the car practically worthless.

Is Albanel right in saying that an attack on a work of art is an attack on history? If a clever forgery can fool its owner, does the value of a work lie in the art or its pedigree? And if a car looks and drives as if it were intact, does the knowledge that it is patched with a modern piece of material diminish its inherent value?

All of these questions seem interrelated. The core question seems to be how and why do we attach the concept of value to an object or the idea of an object?

We may have several reasons for perceiving value in Monet’s painting of a bridge: We find the painting itself aesthetically pleasing. We find Monet’s work generally pleasing and therefore value this work as part of the body of his work. We value the effort and skill exerted in producing such a work of art. We find value in the work of art as a component of our cultural history… I’m sure there must be several other distinct reasons for perceiving value in the painting.

Likewise with my Alpha Romeo. I value it because I like the way it looks and drives. An enthusiast may value it for its authenticity and degree of intactness. A scrap metal merchant may value it as a heap of smeltables.

The concept of value in a forgery is a little trickier. Before we know it is a forgery, we may believe we value it for its place in a body of work, or for the skill of the original artist. But knowledge of its true pedigree makes it impossible to value a forged Picasso as a Picasso. (Although we could still value it as a skillful copy.)

All of which results in two important clarifications: When we think or talk about the value of a thing, it helps if we’re clear about the ground of the value, what is it based on from our perspective, allowing that others will have their own perspectives. The second clarification is that when we attach our sense of value to the idea of a thing (its pedigree, its place in a greater body of work, etc.) we are no longer valuing the thing itself, but an idea of the thing.

This second point, I believe, resolves the paradox that we can at one moment believe something very valuable, only to realize a moment later that it is worthless. The thing itself hasn’t changed, but our idea of it has.

For a work of art to have inherent value for us, then, that value must be attached to something immediate, such as its aesthetic impression.

This brings me back to my original conundrum. While I feel the emotional tug of the sentiment expressed by the French Culture Minister, that those who damage works of art should be more heavily sanctioned, I can’t find the logical support for it. What the idiots did was to damage a painting. Any attack on history resides only in the minds of those who perceive the idea of Monet’s painting as a part of French cultural history. Should criminal sentencing be influenced by something so subjective?

Does art (any kind of art — painting, sculpture, literature, music…) serve a purpose? And if so, what is that purpose? Why do we create art? And must the judgment of art be entirely subjective?

On Sunday, I visited the Brooklyn Book Festival. One of the booths housed The Aesthetic Realism Foundation. (I misread the sign at first and thought it said Atheistic Realism — this brought me up short. But even after I’d read it correctly I stayed to ask what Aesthetic Realism is.) Aesthetic Realism proposes that we can better understand our lives through the application of aesthetic principles. The booth staffer gave the example of the aesthetic practice of balancing heavy and light — being aware of the need for this balance in life can come through an understanding of its balance in art.

To me, this approach seems fascinating and insightful (and very worthy of the foundation’s efforts — for instance, they are hosting a forum on the social and personal value of Rock ‘n Roll, how cool is that?), but completely backwards philosophically; wherefrom do aesthetic principles derive if not from life?

When we ask whether art serves a purpose we ask a conceptual question. Can we relate art to a concept or set of concepts, and do these concepts give us insight into art’s possible purpose?

The answer to the first part of this question seems obvious if we think about who creates art — primarily people (and some particularly intelligent animals — larger primates and elephants). Since art requires the abstraction of ideas or impulses, it requires a conceptual process (whether subconscious or conscious). Without the product of the artistic process, which is not itself but what it represents, we have no art, therefore art relates to a set of concepts.

And herein, I believe, we have the answer to the second part of our question: The concept to which art consistently relates is abstraction! (This would still apply to representational art, in which the artist abstracts the idea or impulse of what he or she observes and transfers it to the medium of their choosing in a representational manner.)

And we also now have a clue as to a possible purpose of art. If art rests on the concept of abstraction of an idea or impulse. The artistic urge is the urge to abstract an idea or impulse. What is to be gained by acting on this urge?

Does the artist gain anything from acting on the urge? Do others gain anything from the result of the abstraction?

If we again go back to the concepts we can delve further into the concept of abstraction. Abstraction is the recreation of certain elements in another form. Abstraction is a form of reduction or refocusing. It draws out and emphasizes some aspects of the original idea or impulse.

We can say that the product of the artistic process aims to communicate this refocusing. It communicates the artist’s particular point of view on the idea or impulse. And these ideas or impulses similarly become concepts or representations themselves as they are abstracted.

If it is successful, art helps us better understand the world around us and ourselves. The more successful it is at aiding this understanding, the more valuable it is.

Hence, we have a dilemma. Art that is derivative and of little deep value in helping us better understand life’s complexities may still have mass appeal (most pop music). Whereas art that delves deeply and profoundly into complex matters may have very limited appeal.

Does the value multiply out over the number of people affected? Can an equation be drawn this simply?

More for later!