Everyman a Handyman !

A. D. Gordon

I think that all youngsters should have instruction -- formal and informal -- in basic carpentry, plumbing, electricity, auto mechanics, and similar subjects, and I think that such instruction should be consistent and prolonged. My reasons here are only partially practical.

Young children do get training in soccer, in dancing, sometimes in chess, often in music, and sometimes even in cooking. But training with basic tools ? I have never heard of it. I suppose that farm children, or at least the boys, do get such training early on. But this does not seem to happen anywhere off the farm.

The practical need for such skills is obvious. When something goes wrong around the house or apartment, or in the car, those with basic handyman skills can take care of it more often than not. Obviously, anything serious needs a serious specialist, but, in my experience, most problems of life do not rise to that degree of difficulty.

Beyond the obvious convenience of being able to solve many of life's little problems, I believe that a habit of problem solving by the use of manual skills will help develop the practical aspects of intelligence. I would think that this is the case even though I have not looked into the technical literature on the subject, if any.

So much for the utilitarian considerations. There is also an ethical, moral, and philosophical side, which is not free of problems but which, in the end, is the decisive consideration for me.

Various movements in Europe, beginning roughly in the middle of the 19th century, spoke of an ethical, redeeming value of manual labor. A. D. Gordon (1856-1922) represented this strain in the early Zionist movement, and there is no doubt his thought and life had an important influence on the kibbutzim and continue to influence aspects of Israeli thought today. Elsewhere, very similar ideas of Thoreau, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Ruskin, Marx, the anarchists, and many others, constitute one of the living legacies in Western thought.

Much of this legacy is shoddy or worse. The totalitarian movements, both Nazi and Communist, adapted snippets of manual-labor worship as part of their propaganda (consider, for instance, the "proletarian art" of the Stalin era, and the similar esthetic of the Nazi art scene). And, at least since Marx's 1844 essay "The Jewish Question," it became a staple of certain left-wing (and later Nazi) propaganda to accuse the Jews of being "parasites" because Jewish occupations were seldom manual.

So the broad "religion of [manual] labor" (a phrase associated with the thought of A. D. Gordon) had connections with all the horrors of the last two centuries. Nevertheless, I would maintain, the notion of manual work as an ethically positive should not be dismissed on account of the perversions of this idea by the totalitarians.

I do get uneasy when some of the young people that I encounter are too exclusively engrossed by techniques of amassing money and status -- the study of business administration, for example. Obviously not all bookish work in schools of business administration -- and certainly not the bookish work required for mastery in other branches of scholarship -- is to be suspected on ethical grounds. But I would like to see more of a general appreciation of manual skills to be acquired for their own sake, or at least for practical ends that are separate from those of advancing in the eyes of the world.

I cannot prove that effort and time spent on developing manual skills will make people better human beings. I cannot prove it, but I believe it nonetheless.

So -- everyman, every girl and every boy -- a handyman !

Yivo's Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe

A few months ago there occurred an event in Jewish scholarship that was not marked as it should have been: the publication of "The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe," edited in two volumes by Gershon Hundert.

A great review of this work by Professor Bernard Wasserstein, in itself a monument to Jewish scholarship, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of December 18-25, 2009. Click here for this review-article.

And here is the best part: the whole of this important work is available on-line to the public, free of charge, courtesy of YIVO. Our profound thanks must go to these folks on West 16th Street. Click here to consult the book.

Larry King interviews Bibi Netanyahu

Archives of Medical Ethics

One day, she confronted a woman and her mother, who were getting into an illegally parked black sedan with medical license plates, which often had a placard in the window. "I said, 'How do you like your parking space?'" the executive recalled. "And she said, 'I went to school for many years and worked very hard for this.' And I said, 'For a parking space?' And she said, 'Yes.' And her mother said to her, 'Close the window!'"
---Lizzi Widdicombe, The New Yorker, Jan. 18, 2010

Israel and Its Arab Neighbors

http://www.justpeaceforisrael.com/

Surprise ! Hitler less than truthful (and then there is Professor Khalidi)

Sixty-nine years ago today, the Nazi armies started their surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. I was a boy of fifteen at the time, and my strongest memory of the day was this: I was wondering what the (American) Stalinists would say to THAT ! Well , right on cue and within hours, they changed their front organization "American Peace Mobilization" (which advocated staying out of the war) to the "American People's Mobilization" (which demanded and full and energetic participation in the war).

Now, sixty-nine years later, a new detail has captured my interest. Hitler's proclamation to his people on that June 22 (read on the radio by Goebbels -- see the video above) contains the following interesting passage:

As early as 1936, according to the testimony of the American General Wood to a committee of the American House of Representatives, Churchill had said that Germany was becoming too strong again, and that it therefore had to be destroyed.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that there was indeed an "American General Wood" who testified in Washington in 1936. (In that year Stanley Baldwin was prime minister of Britain, who preceded Neville Chamberlain, who preceded Winston Churchill ... but let that pass). What relevance would that have to the Nazi invasion of June 1941 ? It seems that Hitler meant to suggest that this statement from the horse's mouth, as if "by his own admission," would prove, in and of itself, the evil intentions of the British empire.

Hitler was not in the habit of supplying supporting footnotes to his declarations, so now I can only guess at the grain of truth that may be involved here. (I have not made a thorough search of all the scholarship on Hitler's statement). In that period there was indeed a retired Brigadier (one-star) General Robert E. Wood of the US Army, later chairman of Sears, Roebuck and, more importantly, a leader of the America First Committee. So I surmise that Wood may have appeared in Washington in 1936 to speak for his isolationist agenda. What he may or may not have known about Winston Churchill at the time would be anyone's guess. In any case, his testimony would hardly qualify as reasonable evidence concerning Britain's war aims five years later.

Now fast-forward to 2009. Israel is engaged in battle with Hamas in Gaza, and a New York professor, Rashid Khalidi, finds that another general, this time an Israeli, had some years before spilled the beans about Israel's "real" war aims. Here again there are words allegedly from the horse's mouth, so to speak "by his own admission," etc. As I pointed out at the time, even if an Israeli general had said years before what Khalid attributed to him now, that would hardly have been proof positive of what Israel tried to do in Gaza. As it turned, Khalidi's alleged quotation was so completely distorted that what he reported was the contrary of what the general had in fact said. The New York Times, which published Khalidi's statement to begin with, was forced to publish a retraction. (Khalidi himself, however, never retracted and never explained.)

(Click here to see my series of four previous posts on the Khalidi affair, giving all the details)

Now, for those folks who specialize in communication with the dead, can we get Mr. Hitler to retract his reference to "General Wood," or at least explain ? That is not likely, but no less likely than getting Professor Khalidi to do the right thing.

"Accountability" for our Schools ?

Bill Gates: Working for Good or Not-so-Good ?

Let us say that a hospital were to institute incentive-based accountability for doctors as follows: 1) improvement in patient health is to be measured strictly by the numbers; 2) these numbers are to consist exclusively of fever measurements; 3) the more patients improve on fever charts, the more the doctors get paid; 4) whenever patients do not improve by a certain quota of temperature degrees, the doctors are fired to be replaced by newer, younger, more compliant and therefore "better" doctors.

What would happen under this system ? First, doctors would find ways of lowering temperatures (alcohol rubs, etc.) without improving underlying conditions. But even if temperature figures were not to get gamed in this way, any improvement in fever scores could not reasonably be interpreted as improvement in the overall health of the patients.

Well, let us hope that no such "accountability" scheme will ever be used in a public health setting. But in education ? As Diane Ravitch points out in her brilliant new book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," it is exactly such misleading "accountability" that has taken over our education system.

First, standardized tests (which, like the fever thermometer, certainly have a place if intelligently used) are systematically gamed by teachers and administrators to get desired results. Even where used without deceptive intent, they cannot possibly tell us about the total quality of instruction.

Second, the extraordinary growth of charter schools has weakened the public education system. And nobody has shown that charter school results are superior to public education.

Third, gimmickry has taken over some of our largest school systems. Michelle Rhee, the young new chancellor of schools of the District of Columbia, symbolizes the new belief in quick fixes. With all of three years teaching experience of her own, she has formulated her educational philosophy as follows: a pupil's home background is irrelevant to education; neither poverty nor health nor parental input play any role; nor does a teacher's own background or education. Some teachers are just more effective, she holds, and it is these teachers she wishes to promote. All the others she fires, or tries to fire. Obama (who sends his own children to a very expensive private school) is among Ms. Rhee's many fans. Has her system worked, even in terms of higher test marks ? Not yet, as far as anyone can tell.

But the biggest bombshell of the book is its penultimate chapter, The Billionaire Boys' Club. Guess who is primarily responsible for pushing these pernicious ideas and for financing their adoption ? Among the three prime villains there is one I had up to now thought of as among the angels: Bill Gates of Microsoft, or rather Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Neither he, nor his associates of the Walton and Broad foundations, practice any of the precious accountability that they demand of others. Here are the ultra of the ultra rich, dispensing billions with profligate abandon, dominating educational practice through ill-advised projects, but with nary a side glance at the deeper issues involved in educating our children.

On these broader issues of educational philosophy, Ravitch has all the right instincts (see her last chapter), but she lacks depth. John Dewey, one of the towering figures of American educational thought, is not found in the index. And when it comes to multiple-choice tests -- the be-all and end-all of the new fixers -- Ravitch only skims the surface of necessary criticism.

OK, she hasn't quite written the book I would have liked her to write. But what she has done is giving us a tremendous wealth of detail on what goes on, and especially on what does not go on, in America's schools. For that she deserves our gratitude.