I was recently up visiting the town I was raised in as a small boy. A lot of synthesis of ideas about one's life and one's world seems to happen when you go back to these places. One big realization came to me upon assessing the town newspaper, and the corresponding zeitgeist of the community. People in the town are definitely not happy people. They're rednecks in the worst sense of the word. I can see the writers of the newspaper try to be very conscientious in how they approach things... yet and still, they are failing their community. The intellectuals who write the articles, or select them from the national wire, don't see the negative impact that they're having on the zeitgeist of the community.

I think it's one of the bigger problems in our society that intellectuals assume that everybody has the maturity level to think critically about things that they read. In reality, most of society is comprised of simple ordinary people. These are people who take the world at face value, and are likely to accept what writers say at face value as well.

Consider the difference in tone between this Associated Press article:

BILLINGS - Billings police say a fire that gutted an apartment hours after a domestic disturbance call may have been deliberately set.

The fire was reported shortly after 1:30 a.m. Sunday. It caused an estimated $150,000 worth of damage, but no one was injured.

Sgt. Jason Gartner says police had been called to the apartment shortly before 10 p.m. Saturday for a domestic disturbance. A 21-year-old woman reported her boyfriend had choked her, put his hands over her mouth and held her to the ground.

Gartner says when the woman tried to call police, the boyfriend left with the phone. The woman was in a neighboring apartment when the fire started.

Nathan Searsdodd was arrested Sunday morning on suspicion of partner or family member assault.

And this article which I just found today on one of the two main news websites in New Zealand (http://www.stuff.co.nz).

The body of a New Zealand tourist, reportedly brutally murdered, has been found on a surf beach in Bali.

A Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesman said Jordan Lucas had died in Bali and his family was being provided with consular assistance.

Mr Lucas' body was found at Uluwatu Beach, a popular surf beach in South Bali.

Indonesian media are reporting that police believe he was murdered.

Police said the man, found semi-naked with his head crushed, was the victim of a murder, The Jakarta Globe reported.

"He was a lovely kid, a lovely boy who just loved Bali. He was here for four months just surfing. I've known him for a long time and that's all he loved - surfing," a relative in Bali told the New Zealand Herald.

"It's just a terrible thing. His parents are understandably just terribly distraught - they've only just found out."

The Ministry said the family had requested privacy and would not release any further details.

In both cases, the details about what occurred are in short supply - and the writers have to be very brief because of that. The New Zealand article however, is much more palatable. The tone of it doesn't alarm folks. There's a note about what kind of cool guy the victim was. There's a note about how the parents feel about the matter. There's a note about how the family is getting help from the consulate.

The AP article, on the other hand, is nothing but doom and gloom. It would be very disconcerting for a person to read that, who was just an ordinary joe or jane. A simple minded person who didn't understand how newspaper authors spin stories in order to make them more edgy would be disturbed by it. The meat of the story is hearsay - a brief sequence of events at the apartment as related by those involved. There is no broader context about how long the folks lived in the neighborhood, what they did for a living in Billings, and other things like that. Furthermore, the writer heavily favors speculation over fact. The idea that the fire was deliberately set seems to be a guess on the part of the police. The way the prose is but together, makes me think that perhaps the author would rather be a film noir movie script writer. Maybe she or he missed her calling.

The impact of the prose of each article on the ordinary reader is very different - even though, in both cases, the event being described is extremely tragic.

I honestly think that the USA would be a much better country, if its journalists were conscientious enough to consider the impact of their style of writing on the minds of people who are ordinary simple folk. Canada and New Zealand, it seems to me, are much happier societies with healthier ways of discussing social issues - and I think it's because of how journalists ply their trade in those countries.

Also, recently, I visited my sister in San Francisco, and read through the Chronicle. It's a wonderful paper if you are particularly intellectually disposed. However, again, most people wouldn't see the beauty in the prose. They would see an ugly narrative about class struggle which is woven throughout the paper's stories.

I also passed through Portland, and Salt Lake City in recent weeks. Those papers (the Oregonian, and the Salt Lake City Tribune, I believe do far better at improving the attitudes and vision of people in their cities. They do it, however, in a weird way. They deconstruct the spectres that most other papers in the nation are creating as they make people scared of criminals, or terrorists or whatever else is out there. For example, the other day the only article I saw in the Tribune about the Middle East happened to be about a flood in Pakistan. So the threat there is to the local people, from a natural disaster - rather than the threat from terrorists to people in the USA. Another example of this deconstruction was a front page story about a gentleman who was a prisoner trying to get his footing in the community after doing his prison time. I applaud the gesture of such journalists. However, they still are playing defense, as writers, rather than going on the offense. They'll still needlessly playing up drama.

We need clean, proper prose in our newspapers to encourage social health, as much as we need clean air, and clean water for our physical health.

I had a very fascinating read this morning. Someone shared this with me, which is a timeline showing the discoveries of various scientists and engineers over the course of the last four hundred years. It strikes that after Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission reactions, something interesting happened. This was the first time in the history of science when the alchemists' dreams started coming true - finally you could transmute elements from one to the other (Of course, no one to this day has figured out how to transmute lead into gold!), With transmutation, of course, you lose mass. This was kind of a startling thing, because the cardinal rule had always been that no matter what chemical reaction took place, the mass is preserved exactly as it was. If you measure the weight of the gas, and the smoke, and the remaining embers - you have the same weight on the scale. So E=MC² became an equation that was meant to measure that change in mass that happened during the trasmutation. Equations to measure the patterns that you find when you experiment are very good. This is what scientists have always done. There were people spending months and years hovering over Leyden jars measuring how much electricity was stored and then retrieved from them - drawing up complex charts of data with their pencil and paper. It's fascinating that Einstein chose to throw in the speed of light there. The number 186,000x186,000 is a constant which is about 35 trillion. And perhaps that constant just coincidentally happened to be the square of the speed of light.

People who are protégés of Einstein seem to be unaware of the fact that every famous scientist throughout history who made discoveries, also was egregiously in error in various ways. In the 1600s and 1700s, it didn't take more than a couple years - or at most ten - for another scientist to come along and challenge those former models. They would have done more experiments in their own workshop thousands of miles away. And they then proferred a different set of models. This is how scientific ideas are revised over time.

Einstein seems to have been the first big scientist dude to convey his ideas in an era where the world had become smaller because of radio, and the telephone and television. Maybe that made a difference. Somehow, we've experienced a hundred years of people studying his ideas, and no one has dared to challenge him, yet. Einstein drew up a cosmology using thought experiments. His models were not established like Isaac Newton's models were - through a copious amount of experimentation and observation. Religions, remember, are also cosmologies and are designed through thought experiments.

I know people will throw out the canard that global positioning systems prove Einstein's Theory of Relativity. However, what I've heard is that other models would explain that phenomenon equally well. Yes, it's interesting to think about the idea that gravity affects light. Black holes are a demonstration of this - and prove the concept. So if, as we see, gravity affects light - lets do what Isaac Newton did, and sit down and study the matter. Let's not do thought experiments about the matter, and daydream up a frame of reference.

TL;DR The way Einstein developed his ideas about "General Relativity" mark a significant departure from the ethic of observation, and data collection. Shouldn't we question his ideas and challenge them? And reasoning from there: isn't Einstein's thought experiment kind of like a religion, in that it reads more like science fiction, than anything else? It proffers a view of how the world exists, which was not established in the way Newton designed his laws of physics - that is through observation and data collection.

I have just, in the past week or two, discovered the BBC in Britain. It's possible to watch their programming over the internet if you pay for an internet proxy service. It's amazing programming. If the BBC would ever see fit to sell television licenses overseas, it would change the world. People in the USA always bemoan the fact that you can spin through hundreds sattelite and cable television channels and find nothing of value to watch. I think anyone comparing BBC programming side by side with the fare you can get in the States would be astonished at the difference in quality; and this competition from across the pond would force usa broadcasters and usa newscasters to improve the quality of their programming.

I was impressed when I discovered Australian television... the ABC and SBS do broadcast some of their programming freely to overseas netizens. However, the BBC just blows me away. I'm in awe. Here, I see the standards in film that I have always longed to see in mainstream media in the USA. In British and Australians I see the kind of reasoning which I admire and which I wish academics in the USA would adopt.

I've seen so many monumentally amazing programs over the past few days. One particularly interesting one that I feel I need to write about today, revolves around a relic which was produced from someone's attic in Britain. It was a child's skeleton that was mummified. Imagine keeping that kind of relic out in the family shed for two hundred years! There's a joke about that, which has even become a metaphor: we talk about people having skeletons in their closet - things in their past which they don't want to publicize to their friends and aquaintances.

So the BBC designed a television program where they researched the history of this skeleton. Apparently, there was no documenation preserved along with this relic. This program was a wonderful glimpse into all these different corners of Britain and British history. You got to see this art supply shop which still had all these traditional materials that were listed in the old books of the anatomists who wrote recipes for embalming in the latter 1700s. You got to see this church with a cemetary which was directly across the street from a hospital, and learn about how the grave robbers would provide fresh corpses for the anatomy students across the way.

The biggest thing I learned from this program, was that it gave me a chance to build a model about why British people reason differently than USAers. I have spent seasons over the past year and two and three studying different English speaking countries through their mass media - television and radio programming - which is often available over the web. And one thing that has really jumped out at me is the vast differences in how people in anglophone countries discuss their national issues, and how people reason about these things with eachother. Here, in the USA, every discussion about national issues is political in nature - that is to say - people take sides and use hyperbole and other debate tactics to win for their side in the discussion. In Canada, people defer to scientists and academics. In Australia - there is a prime directive people have, which is caring for their society - and upbuilding their communities. In Britain there's far too much complaining going on - there seems to be a conception they have that critical thought and deep intellectualism is only found in the midst of earnest complaint; however, the Brits' critical thinking abilities are amazing.

So, I'll go on to talk about my model about why the Europeans and the British reason differently than people in the States: My conclusion is, that one reason for this is the sheer amount of history in the country. The BBC researchers could not have used the "scientific method" to pull together the narrative about where this boy came from, and what happened to him. The folks working on this project needed to induce and deduce. Europeans have this wonderful history which is not always documented well; it seems that there can be these egregious holes in it. It turned out that this little boy whose skeleton they were studying was embalmed and used as a medical student specimen in the late 1700s before it was legal to collect children's corpses. Naturally, because of the illegality of the trade in corpses - the records about where his body came from would have been lost.

It strikes me that this historical time when they robbed graves in order for med students to have cadavers is a lot like this problem we have today with the illegal drug trade in Mexico and the USA. When something that should be legal is made illegal - you end up having organized crime evolve around it - and with that organized crime, you have lots of terrible things happen.

The program series is called "History Cold Case" and the segment I watched appears to be "Episode 2: Mummified Child."

It's available for streaming as long as the BBC chooses to keep it posted on their website: here

Last night I was watching this historic debate between the leaders of the three main political parties in Britain. One very poignant question was from a high school student - Joel Weiner - who complained about the very rigorous assessment regime they have for students in the UK. He said that students were "over-examined and under taught." Gordon Brown and David Cameron really pooh-poohed his concern - obviously enraptured with the idea that high test scores are synonymous with successful schools. The phrase which they used was "maintaining the level of standards" - and of course, this word "standards" is a synonym which means various things including rigorous testing practices and personal sense of ethical conduct. It's difficult to talk sense into folks who use this kind of politically-expedient language.

This last term in my university classes, I noticed that a lot of the academic research from the USA tended to use test scores to try to prove a b or c. Test scores represent a wonderfully easy data set to look at. Scientists love this kind of data - crunching numbers always makes their studies appear more rigorous. Unfortunately, one problem with science is that the data that is most presently available isn't always the kind of data which is relevant to the thing being studied. I am adamant that test scores are not a great metric of student achievement. And many educators would agree with this standpoint to some extent.

One thing I researched during the term was the school system in Australia. I was very impressed with how wholistic the education system there is. The main goal in Australia is to prepare children with what they themselves need as human beings when they go out into the world as adults at the age of 18; they call this "Outcomes Based Education." In contrast to this, states in the USA focus on academics; they go around asking professionals in various fields what they believe children should be taught about their particular academic area.

Even as a student at a small state university here in the Rocky Mountains I felt put-off by the essentialist style of my professors. It dawned on me yesterday a way to reform at least tertiary education in the States - so that students enjoy their time more, and learn more quickly and efficiently. I think we ought to separate education from assessment. I believe that teachers ought to introduce students to all the skills and concepts which are relevant to the subject area they are studying - but in a forum where there is no assessment to see how much the students are learning. If the students have to hold down a job, or if they are taking a 25 credit courseload because of special circumstances, they wouldn't be penalized for not getting work in, over the course of the term. Then, when students feel that they have gained the relevant skills and knowledge, they can opt into a two week or a month-long assessment regime - where they demonstrate what they have learned.

The way the typical university education is set up now - it's almost absurd. At the beginning of the term - you're walking into a classroom with three to eight unknown professors - each of which will demand a certain slice of your life for the next 9 to 16 weeks. And there's nothing preventing them from asking so much of your time that you really don't have the time to get the work done properly. And this wouldn't be because you aren't able to demonstrate the skills or knowledge - it's just because of the capricious schedule which is laid upon you by all the various syllabuses of your professors.

I don't know why no one seems to have recognized this, before. It's as obvious as the light of day to me that children and young people learn a lot more easily and quickly when they are not being micromanaged. Micromanagement tends to teach children how to parrot what the teacher wants from them... and on a strict syllabus schedule, you don't have time to devote to absorbing the material in a way that you would get the most out of it. Kids who are more talented either rebel against such a regime, or they just give up on all of the other things that are important in their life - like peers and social development.

Also, yesterday, I watched a PBS Frontline program on the rise of alternative for-profit tertiary institutions in the USA. I really hope one of these businesses would see the possibility in profiting off of a new model of education like the one I propose. They could really set some progressive trends.

I believe that in the West we should really separate the concepts of "teaching" as compared to "credentialing."

What educators call an "essentialist" style of instruction is very common in the USA as you go into high school, and as you go on to upper crust universities. This is a system where someone lectures, and then tests you to see if you've gained a certain requisite amount of knowledge and skills. It used to even be a common method in elementary schools. In fact, the phrase "toeing the line" was coined when children would stand up in front of the room with their toes in a neat line, and recite what they had learned.

This essentialist technique, in my opinion, is not teaching. It doesn't qualify as such.

According to my sensibilities - a teacher, by definition, cannot pass or fail or grade his students in any way shape or form. This practice runs counter to the aims of teaching. A teacher does not let the student who doesn't understand the material, or who is not gaining the skills, slip through the cracks. A teacher can assess how well he himself is teaching the children - by seeing how much they're learning. But that's a grade the teacher gives himself - not a grade he gives the students.

Now, a person offering a credential, must test the knowledge and skills of those seeking that credential. Indeed, some people will pass that test, and some will not. Certainly, passing fifth grade, and graduating from high school are both credentials - so you need to have someone there who will test the children... and assess whether they have met the requirements of the credential. But that ought not to be the teacher's job.

The fact that we conflate these two ideas - teaching, and credentialing - really hurts our society, in my estimation. All over the net you see people offering tutorials in technical trade knowledge who have no idea what teaching is. They have run through the gamut of the credential system at a demanding university, and they thought that they were being taught. In reality, they were teaching themselves well enough to get their credential.

I watched a few MIT lectures the other day on introductory computer programming. This "professor" was not a teacher, in my book. He was throwing out concept a b c and d, and expecting his students to pick up the pieces. It's shocking to me that we regale this kind of practice as if it were the best kind of teaching in the USA.

It's also disturbing to me that university students don't know how to demand a better educational product from their schools. People in tertiary education are typically fresh out of their parents' homes. They've been children their entire life. And they're used to being told what to do, and complying. They meekly accept whatever odd curveballs their department or their professors throw at them; if they can't get an assignment done because they simply didn't have enough time or resources, they are cowed and hang their head in shame, and believe it's their fault. Somehow, these young people rate their college choices based on a rating institution's assessment of the university. Youth believe that they need to work hard in order to get into a "selective university." Instead, they ought to realize that they are the customers with money in hand, who are going to give this money to a business called "a university." They, as customers, are the ones who need to call the shots - demanding the kind of educational product which they want. Uni students need to demand better pedagogy from their schools.

Recently, I've been very impressed with what I've learned about the Australian educational system. I don't know much about uni over there - but their high schools and elementary schools seem to have a really cool pedagogy. Their high schools are very much focused on vocational skills - and on what that person will need for his life when he leaves home at 18 years of age. They call this "Outcomes Based Education." In contrast, we in the USA have "Standards Based Education;" educators in North America think that the most important thing is that kids get a foundation of knowledge in science, and social studies, and literature, and so forth.

You young people at the university aren't kids anymore. Wake up and demand better professors... and yes, be willing to work hard for credentials. However, please don't confuse teaching with credentialing. They are two very separate things.

Personally, I've clearly seen the very bad effects of corporal punishment on children. It saddens me that there isn't currently a budding body of research about this, amongst educators and child psychologists.

I've worked with small groups of kids in many different settings. And what I've seen is that regular spanking of small children can cause a couple different outcomes. The child can become hyperactive - in other words, the child becomes squirrely, because this behavior is a way to get the parent in a better mood, and avoid the slap for awhile.

I've also seen elementary school kids who become bullies of their peers in school, and the neighbor kids - because that's what they're learning from their unwitting parent. The kids are learning that you ought to impose morality on others using physical agression.

Sweden outlawed spanking or smacking of kids in 1979. The law is very well written, in that it doesn't provide for any punishment of perpetrators. However, if what the parent did to the child can be defined as assault, there are laws which come into effect there.

Here's a great explanation about the Swedish policy by Adrienne Haeuser

I think I've figured out why Australian society has what they over there call: "Tall Poppy Syndrome." I've heard a lot about this - the idea that they scorn people who appear to think themselves better than others. In other words, if someone drives down the street in a fancy car, the youth will call out an insult like "You wanker!" - whereas in the States, that car would attract admiring glances.

I heard this audio clip from the Australian public broadcaster, tonight about "Cultural Cringe". The links to listen to the clip are off to the right on the ABC's webpage.

My conclusion today after listening to this discussion was that Australia is always trying to compare itself to Europe. The people down under feel very self-conscious and they squirm, and they feel that they are an oppressed minority among Western nations. They feel that Europeans are derisive of them, and this really hurts their feelings. Thus, it becomes a prevalent attitude in Australia to resent whatever might be perceived as snobbery.

I've been very impressed with how Australians discuss issues when I see or hear them on video or audio internet streams from their mass media organizations. And it seems to me that I can trace this spark of intelligence back to the schooling system. I haven't ever observed Australian schools first-hand, but I have learned, that up until now there hasn't been an intense curriculum which teachers are expected to follow. Instead, we see a Montessori ethic of teaching - where students receive a generalist's education. I don't have enough information to offer a proper critique, today... but this new "national curriculum" which is being rolled out worries me. When teachers are given a strict curriculum to follow, they stop working for the student, and start working for the state. All of a sudden, they see the extent of their job as being this: imparting content to students and assessing that content. They will often neglect the things that their department can't really measure as easily - things like nurturing students and mentoring students.

You people in Australia see how folks in the USA talk to eachother on the internet. It's not pretty, is it? People in my country of the USA don't know how to think critically. People are really silly. They don't like to read. They discuss national issues using hyperbolic exaggerations - because they think that they can prevail in a debate, if they are more emphatic about their position.

I chalk up all these effects to the fact we educate our children a certain way. I was observing a sixth grade science class the other day... and I noticed one kid in the class was lolligagging. He didn't work earnestly on the assignments in class. And the teacher's aide was very annoyed that he wasn't following suit with the rest of the class. When watching him more closely though, I saw what he was doing on one assignment where the teacher had them sketch a bicycle which was set on a table at the front of the room. The kids were to label the "simple machines" that were put together to create this bicycle. This boy was a perfectionist... He was doing a work of art on that paper of his. He had the bicycle drawn in 3 dimensions, complete with shadow, and highlight and specular. That boy should have been the jewel in the crown of that teacher. He should have been lauded, and encouraged in his desire to do his best work every time. Instead, he was seen by the adults teaching the class as the problem child.

So this, Australia, is what can happen when you start making your teachers little marionettes who have to present material in a particular fashion. You end up with schools that teach students poor work habits. Kids are taught to do shoddy work, in order to get it in on time, so that they can keep up with the class curriculum. Those who go the extra mile are discouraged. Anyone who has particular talents or gifts is told to set those things aside; those things are treated as "diversions" rather than "real work."

Teachers who are working for the state, rather than for the student, tend to become more distant emotionally from the children. They become less reasonable. They think that their job is done when they have presented the material and have assessed it. If the students didn't do well for whatever reason on the assessments... these teachers are scornful toward those students... as they see the failure as being the student's fault, rather than their own fault. The teachers who are following a mandated curriculum feel far less personal responsibility for the success or failure of their students because they have crossed every t and dotted every i when it comes to following the standard curriculum.

I'm enrolled in the teacher education program at my local university this year... and I am frankly dismayed at how the professors treat their studets - even at this tertiary institution. In my opinion, these professors need to be nurturing and mentoring their students. These people are on the road to being teachers, themselves. The professors need to be looking at the "whole student" - in much the same way that they themselves exhort us that we need to look "at the whole child" when we become teachers out in the schools. They need to be assessing the students in tens of different areas when it comes to how well they work with children in the classroom.

Instead, these professors see their job as being done when they present material and assess how well the students absorbed that material. Frankly, I can learn material on my own by going to the internet, and reading a few books. I don't need a professor to present material to me. I don't want to pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for someone to do something for me that I could do just as easily on my own. What I need, is to have real hands-on experiences with children... and I need to have professors who are masters of their trade - who can teach me the tricks of their trade, and show me the pathway which they themselves walked, and which I will be soon walking on.

So... Australia... I can see that you might have a very big diversity in the quality of education in various schools across your continent. And I can see how people would want to fix that, and bring the quality up to par across the board. But please don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. A Montessori style of curriculum which addresses the students' passions and interests - and which gives kids a generalist education where all the subject areas are intertwined with eachother is a better system than that which we have in the USA - where you teach material and then assess material - and where the student's passions, and interests and ideas become sidelined.

I am enrolled in a teacher education program at my local university. I see a big contrast with this program I'm in today, as compared with the early childhood education program I was in fifteen years ago at an Oregon community college. Yesterday for the first time, we got an opportunity to go into the campus early childhood center. I was very disturbed with how the child development center was set up, there. The rooms with the kids are on the perimeter, and in the middle there is a large common area, with big observation vestibules which have one way glass and listening equipment. The feeling this gives us students, is that we are being asked to put on rubber gloves before we get our hands into the business of working with children. And, in this preschool, one thing I noted I saw was that there was very poor eye contact between the children and the adult teachers in the rooms. The children looked like they were being herded from activity to activity, rather than being personally and passionately engaged by the teacher.

It's also fascinating to see how centrally important it is to our university department that we get finger prints, and get background checks done, and fill out papers about any criminal convictions we've had. It's very off-putting. It's fine to have these sort of things woven into the process - I understand the concerns about liability - but these things shouldn't be focused on with such incredibly intensity, because you need to make those who wish to work with children feel as if their energy and passion for working with children is wanted.

To contrast this experience with another I had here, in town:

I really liked the kind of warm welcome I got a couple years ago when I walked into one particularly nice elementary school in my town, and offered to volunteer. I immediately was given a chance to talk with the principal (who was on playground duty, that day), and he placed me with a teacher who he knew I would fit in well, with. She is extremely warm and encouraging. My positive experience at that school is actually the reason I'm going back to finish my bachelor's and become a teacher myself. The policy in that school is that anyone from the public can come and volunteer. And as long as they are working in the room with a teacher, they don't need to have a background check. When the teacher wants them to start working alone with small groups of kids, (which is highly encouraged), they need to go get a letter from the police station and bring it in to the administration building. After this, they get a little photo ID on a lanyard which looks exactly like the ones the teachers use. This means that parents really respect you, and look up to you, and ask you questions when they come to pick up their kids. The way this is set up makes for a very nice atmosphere. One of the reasons this school is such a pleasant one, is that they really engage with parents - parents are welcome to come teach little extra-curricular activities, and to come meet and talk with the teachers several times a year at little festive events. Schools should be these sorts of community hubs, in my opinion. It's really a lot more practical for teachers if they have volunteers coming in a lot to help with the classes and to do extra things with the kids.

The last time I was there at this, my favorite school - on my way out, I passed a little class of six or seven kids being taught violin in the hallway... and I stopped and chatted for a couple minutes with them, and the parent volunteer who was leading the class. I had an extra comment I wanted to tell the kids about how best to practice. It's so nice to have a cordial atmosphere.

I'm reading a Noam Chomsky essay today for a lingustics class. It's called "On language and the mind." Apparently Chomsky is seen, at least by academics in the Usa, as one of the most respected thinkers these days when it comes to issues of language, and neuroscience.

I can see why he's popular - he prods you to think in all manner of interesting ways about the elements of thinking and of the brain that you wouldn't have thought to muse about, without his prompting. He's very philosophical in his tone. Everything in this essay reflects speculation. He says, "Since we know x, shouldn't we consider y, and doesn't it follow that z?" It's good for the soul to think deeply about the things that writers like that suggest to you. However, it is not what I would call a "scientific pursuit."

One problem which I'm seeing with many academics, is that they want to approach a subject as an outsider, and try to figure it out in that manner. I would compare that to a person in the 1850s, who had never been to Japan, but who wanted to muse about what life must be like there. The person, with no first hand knowledge will invariably be wrong. The fact that he gets his audience to think about all the possibilities, and all the interesting nuances of things doesn't make him any more right.

If people want to understand how babies and toddlers develop language skills, there is only one way to find out. They have to remember clearly the day to day experiences and thoughts that they themselves experienced in those years of their own lives.

The other classic failing I see in Chomsky's musings is the one which happens when scientists desperately seek out whatever body of data is available and erroneously assume that will offer a direct way to assess the thing that they want to study. Scientists know that they cannot do science without data. So they will hastily seize upon any data set they can get their hands on, without thinking clearly about whether or not this data can actually be used to assess the things that they want to look at. In Chomsky's case, the data set he is fond of is the structure of grammar. And because that is what he is so focused on examining, he jumps to the conclusion that the mind computes grammar as it hears or reads or thinks or speaks words.

I think that this is obviously untrue. I was an exchange student in West Berlin Germany back in highschool, and one lesson about language was hammered in while I was there. Each word has its own qualities and those qualities are known, individually. Nouns, in German are each associated with masculinity, feminity, or the idea of a neutral identity. There is no rhyme or reason as to why nouns are assigned the gender which they are. It's simply a quality that is associated with that noun in the mind of everyone who is raised with the German language. The spelling of words in english is a similar kind of thing. There is no rhyme nor reason to it. You simply associate the spelling with the individual word. It would seem to me then, that the mind has an infinite capacity for words. When you think of a word, the idea of how it is spelled presents itself to you.

Three examples that Chomsky uses in his essay are these simple sentences:

• I told John to leave.

• I expected John to leave.

• I persuaded John to leave.

And then Noam takes the reader into a jungle gym of grammar analysis... where he shows how different each sentence is, although all three appear almost identical. I would say that understanding the grammar is a nice intellectual pursuit, but it is entirely unnecessary for the thinker or speaker. As my linguistics professor pointed out on the first day of class - using language is like driving a car: you don't need to know how the engine works, in order to use it as a tool every day of your life.

The fact is, that words are used to accomplish goals - and there are two sorts of goals - to communicate or to think (Thank you, Vygotsky for pointing this very important distinction out to me the other day in another essay which I read!). Those three sentences above are the type of things you would put together in order to communicate with someone something important. First you simply start with "I" - which is yourself. Then, you use a verb and an object which communicates the specific event that you want to talk about. The predicate "to leave" is like a modular part that can be placed onto any number of different types of sentences. It's handy that our language has such modular phrases like that.