The Unsettling of America

 Wendell Berry

In this 1977 publication, Berry describes and bemoans the state of agriculture in the US, which had gone through much transformation in the previous 20-30 years, and makes a number of dubious claims about the impact on society of these changes.

THE PROBLEM:

Many family farms have disappeared and others have consolidated and grown in order to not disappear.  Those remaining largely shifted from balanced farms holding a range of both animals and plants to farms that produce a single crop.  With the loss of animals, the farmers had to turn from manure-based fertilizer to chemical fertilizer, and with the loss of plant diversity, crops became more susceptible to pests, therefore requiring chemical pesticide.  Farmers have had to pay much more up-front than previously, and many have gone into increasing debt as a result.

Besides dependence on these chemicals, farmers have also become reliant on the petro-chemical industry for gasoline needed to power tilling, planting, harvesting, etc.  Politicians, government policy and the land-grant college system have encouraged this.

The topsoil on the farms has suffered and farming communities have dissolved as former farmers and their children have moved to urban areas and into non-farming professions, or at worse, become unemployed and unemployable, becoming "wards of the state".  As more people move off farms, and farms become larger and less community-based, more people have lost connection to the source of the food they consume.  The values that farming communities held when communities were healthy have been eroded away, and replaced with a lack of morality that characterizes urban life.

THE SOLUTION:

Basically, something of a return to the small family farm system would alleviate most of these problems.  Some farmers do practice an alternative to chemical-based monoculture farming and have been successful.  Their farms raise animals whose manure is used to fertilize plants, practice crop rotation, and use nitrogen-fixing legumes to further enhance soil health.  Growing a variety of crops provides natural pest control.

MY IMPRESSIONS

Great read with tons of ideas to consider, many of which are easily dismissable (like how superior the morals, the character, and the utility of rural people are compared to urban people), but many of which are trending and accepted even today (health benefits of whole-wheat over white bread, among others).  The discussion around soil health improvement did encourage me to start saving kitchen scraps for composting in a new tumbler composter, which I ordered promptly after finishing this book.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

 Paulo Freire

Background:  I purchased this book during the summer break between years one and two of teaching high school in Mississippi, but never fully read cover-to-cover until the current spring season of 2022.  This book embodies a few different areas of interest that have waned or waxed in the last twenty years of my life, but overall offers me very little benefit in my life of today:

1) The work of a Latin American thinker: less interesting to me today than before

2) Societal analysis before, during, and after revolution: much less interesting to me today than before

3) Pedagogy/education: of interest to me now, but shifting more to early childhood education rather than adult education

Impression:  Twenty years ago I was very interested in the prospect of educating and empowering people that feel powerless and trapped, and of course, the fulfillment of this would balance out disparities in society still today.  However, Freire really only focuses on these powerless classes of people that are actively and directly being kept down.  Instead of rote-memorization-based education, he proposes a process to define the exact elements responsible for maintaining people in this subordinated state (through a "problem-posing" education), having dialogue with the people to determine ways to overcome these barriers, and taking action to alleviate the solution.  In order to achieve Freire's pedagogical goals, a revolution must occur, and he spends considerable time explaining this.  This is fine for a post-colonial, newly independent third world nation in the 1950s or 1960s, but is not applicable to the US in 2022.

Conclusion:  This books deals with actual pedagogy very little, despite its title, and instead uses quite difficult language and complicated ideas to attempt to explain and justify a mind-set shift and subsequent action needed by oppressed people to overcome their situation of oppression.  The fact that Freire at some point attempted to implement his ideas in Guinea-Bissau and failed miserably, for me, supports the opinion that his ideas are probably too complicated or too impractical to actually be implemented, despite his repeated emphasis that a solution requires both theory and action.

Protagoras

plato

i've always felt that reading platonic dialogues stimulates my logical mind like few other forms of writing do.  unfortunately after years of working in IT and becoming one who only skims documentation, due to its poor quality, time considerations, and the need to only extract out very specific information, i have to make a really concerted effort to follow the arguments set forth in plato's works.  that said, i think i followed the arguments put down in this 73 page book, which i'll try to now describe.

protagoras is a famous sophist in athens who takes on students for pay, in order to teach them "virtue".  socrates brings a potential student to protagoras, and questions whether virtue can be taught.  the two identify five components of virtue (temperance, justice, holiness, wisdom, and courage) but debate whether they are separate parts which together form virtue or whether each is equal to the other, and to virtue itself.

protagoras makes the unfortunate statement that the ignorant can be courageous, and socrates pounces.  courage and cowardice are opposites.  only the courageous are confident in their knowledge of danger, while the coward has a false confidence ("base confidence") in their understanding of danger, which originates from ignorance. therefore the ignorant displays cowardice, and not courage.

socrates builds the argument in a more subtle and elaborate way than this of course, in order to trap protagoras into renouncing his original assertion, and succeeds.

in my reading of the dialogue, the arguments are not convincing as to make me believe the claim set forth.  the five components of virtue are not truly and rigorously defined and the lack of differentiation allows socrates to make this "equality" or "equivalency" claim on them to support his argument.  in this way, much of the argument just seems like word-play built into a drawn-out logical chain.  while i am saying this as a criticism, it still must have been novel for the time plato sets this down, and these same principles are employed in philosophy today, only in a more rigorous/mathematical way, in my very rudimentary understanding of analytic philosophy.

miscellaneous points that i found fascinating for roughly 400 BC: (1) the good for a person is pleasure either now or later, and the bad for a person is pain either now or later.  this line of argument spans a few pages and almost sounds like the basis for the Utilitarianism of bentham and mill in the 1800s.  (2) "But the art of measurement would do away with the effect of appearances, and, showing the truth..." plato explicitly states that experiences must be somehow recorded in a quantifiable and therefore objective manner, which today is fundamental to the process of defining repeatable experiments in science.  (3) manure is recognized as a good fertilizer when "laid about the roots of a tree".  (4) olive oil is recognized as good for human hair and the human body.  though relevant and admitted today, perhaps this was merely product placement for greek exports to the rest of the mediterraean...

jean piaget, para principiantes

adriana serulnicov and rodrigo suarez
I must have purchased this book in the latter half of 2002, during a period of time when I taught English in Latinamerica, but was almost more interested in subjects on the periphery of education, like instructional theory.  Since after that time, I immediately delved into computer science, those interests largely fell away.  Most likely this book sat on my shelves for almost thirteen years, and there is no evidence that I ever attempted to read it.

Why does this book exist on my shelf?  While teaching in Mississippi, I faintly recall studying or reading about his four "stages of cognitive development", which, as this book mentions, are sometimes used by educators to assess their students' level of intellectual development, and thereby determine appropriate activities for stimulating those students' development.

While his stages of cognitive development represent his most widely-known and widely-applied ideas in the field of "genetic psychology" that he is credited for creating, I won't delve into taxonomy, but rather point out a few observations that seemed relevant to me at this time in my life.

Philosophy/epistemology: epistemology is the study of knowledge, how it is obtained, and how true it is.  Broadly speaking, there is rationalism, which holds that truth and knowledge can be arrived at seemly through logical thought, in the mind, and there is empiricism, which holds that knowledge can only be gained through experiences with the world external to the mind.  The divergence can be traced as far back as to Plato and Aristotle, respectively.  For Piaget, in studying children as the learn about the world, knowledge comes from both; experiences in the world, and the mental activities which process those experiences.  He calls this Constructivism, as the child constructs his/her own version of knowledge of the world.  Personally, this explanation of knowledge makes the Rationalism vs. Empiricism debate seem ridiculous.  If you want to how knowledge originates, obviously you should watch how a child develops knowledge.

Conservation: Much of the source for Piaget's theories come from interviews with children.  "Piaget on Piaget" is an excellent short film from 1977 that captures many of these and post-interview explanations.  One topic for these interviews is the concept of Conservation.  Given a certain quantity of clay, water, sticks, etc, when the material is reshaped or divided up, younger children often recognize the new form as either more or less in quantity.  The answers the children give to why they believe the quantity is different provides an insight into the child's thought processes, and can determine to which stage of intellectual development the child belongs.  Numerous interviews showed to Piaget that children follow surprisingly similar paths of development.

Intelligence: Piaget defines intelligence as the capacity to adapt to new situations.  I like this idea and the opposite which would say that someone unwilling to change or unwilling to try to understand the situation of a person dissimilar to him/her is not pursuing intelligence.  I would not say that this person is not intelligent, just that he/she perhaps embraces ignorance a little too readily.

Errors: To Piaget, when a child makes what to an adult would seem to be a logical error, the child is making a valid determination of truth based on the knowledge that the child has developed up until that time in his/her life.  In other words, he/she has not erred.  One example dialog from the book:

- ma, i want peaches
- there are no peaches, they ripen in the summer, and it is winter
- what is this?
- peaches in syrup
- great!  summer is here!
- ???
...
- (ma took peaches out of a can... it is not summer...)
- in summer there are peaches and ma buys them at the fruit stand.  in winter i can eat the ones from a can.

In this type of interaction, the child modifies his knowledge, and comes away with a more comprehensive theory.

As far as practical applications, Piaget inspired the "Active School" movement, which I am not familiar with, but would guess encourages small group activities, and discourages excessive reliance on mechanical and repetitive teaching and learning.  In my 2.5 years of teaching, I was definitely moving away from rote memorization techniques to methods more popular in the educational community such as requiring a more active role on the part of the student, including group activities, and I tend to now think that Piaget had a part in this movement.

Outside of education, I think that a parent of a small child could use some of these insights in order to encourage the intellectual development of their child.  In brief: keep the child stimulated.

brief history of the caribean

jan rogozinski

traveling along the northern coast of honduras and to the bay islands recently made me curious about the broader caribean. roatan had supposedly hosted 5000 english pirates at one time and also served as a deposit point for escaped slaves captured on st vincent island. when these garifuna arrived on st vincent, they adopted arawak customs that those now settled on the northern honduran coast still practice.

since columbus, much of the development of the caribean islands has been strongly influence by wind. the trade winds from africa in the east enter the caribe at its southeast, around barbados. they then flow clockwise, to the north on approaching the central american mainland around nicaragua/honduras and continue north skirting along the eastern coast of the yucatan. excepting another clockwise pattern in the gulf, they winds heads back to the east between florida and cuba, climb up north to the carolinas, and then back east to europe. these winds facilitated the arrival of the european and africans as well as the shipments back to spain of gold and silver from mexico and peru. by the 1700's, they enabled the "triangle trade" route which sent sugar and rum from the caribe to europe, guns and manufactured goods from europe to africa, and slaves from africa to the caribe. this idea was taught to me in elementary school (4th grade?) and again in world history in high school (10th grade) but has new meaning to me since i've learned to sail myself and understand winds.

most islands were inhabited by arawak and/or the more warlike carib. these groups had come from the south america and practiced an agricultural method called conuco. in this system, a section of brush was burned, the ashes piled into mounds, holes poked in the mounds, and cuttings from various root vegetables placed in the holes. crops included arrowroot, peanuts, peppers, gourds, tabaco, maize, beans, and squash. fruits included pineapple and guava.

while the spanish initially dominated the caribe, by the later 1500's, english and french pirates began to challenge spanish control with attacks on convoys and port cities. pirates at various times operated out of the bahamas, haiti, jamaica, and some of the smaller islands. constant wars between the european powers meant ownership of the islands often changed hands. well-fortified islands could fend off attacks as long seiges usually failed as the european seigers often had to withdraw due to disease epidemics.

sugar was first successfully grown in barbados in the 1640's where the first plantation society emerged, characterized by intensive african slavery. sugar production was widespread across the caribean islands by the 1700's.

slavery on the sugar plantations was brutal and slaves escaped to form maroon colonies, often in the non-arable mountain regions of islands like st vincent, dominica, jamaica, hispaniola, guadeloupe, and cuba. utilization of the conuco system kept them fed. slave rebellions were common and the largest occurred in saint domingue in 1789 and resulted in the black republic of haiti.

in the 1800's, programs of amelioration and emancipation were carried out and sugar production consequently lessened. trinidad opted to bring in thousands of indians as indentured servants to work its plantations during this time.

the main events of the 1900's in the caribe involve the independence of most of the islands from their former european rulers. some countries followed socialist courses and others dictatorial ones. many ran up debts and had to privatize in order to get IMF assistance. sugar became less important economically as the industries of tourism, off-shore banking, oil refinement, and drug smuggling grew.

the lost colony of the confederacy

eugene harter

the result of the civil war was, of course, the abolition of the economic system based on slave labor but also the weakening of the economy due to destruction of crops, infrastructure, housing, etc. faced with this dire economic situation, hopelessness for future economic improvement, and harassment by (and forced subordination to) the political system controlled by northern interests, many southerners (mostly white, some black) decided to emigrate in the following 10 years or so. while some went to mexico, a larger group (perhaps 20,000) set sail for brasil (literally; some of the ships that took them from new orleans or mobile to the port of rio de janeiro lacked powered engines).

many groups went as part of colonization societies. often these were led by religious ministers. typically a scouting party would find and buy land in brazil before returning to the US to arrange transport to the colony for the recruits.

though slavery was still legal in brazil, few of the immigrants purchased slaves and this is discredited as a motivation for relocation to brazil by the author. the presence of cheap labor, however, was attractive. slavery was abolished peacefully a few years later through a system that compensated former slave owners for the monetary investment their slaves had represented.

the confederates contributed technical knowledge to brazilian agriculture as well as introduced the watermelon to that country.

over time, the separate and isolated enclaves of the confederates largely dissolved as its members moved to urban areas and generally merged into brazilian population.

Shame of the Nation: the Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

Jonathan Kozol

Much of the inequality among schools and many of the problems with public K-12 education in the US stem from the way in which schools are largely funded from local funds. Somewhere around 45% of these funds are collected from local taxes by my last knowledge. I remember this being something of a revelation when I was a 22 year old teacher but now I have accepted it and feel like most people are aware that the system is structured in this way.

Kozol does not propose taking money from richer districts and redistributing to poorer districts outright. However, he does ridicule the idea of the funding of poorer districts being raised to an "adequate" level. This may be where I disagree with him. I think bringing inadequately funded schools to a funding level adequate to allow students and teachers to fully prepare for the accountability-based tests that have since even before no-child-left-behind would be a huge victory for education. Of course, it is ridiculous that this is not the norm.

However, the subject of this book is not primarily funding inequalities. Instead, Kozol hammers away at the point that in the inadequately funded, urban school systems that were once integrated racially and now lack white students, the black and hispanic students are not being prepared to be successful in a country in which whites are the majority because they are not learning how to interact with whites in their formative years. on the one hand this seems like common sense and on the other it would seem hard to prove empirically.

I highly recommend this book as it does what good books do: provoke a lot of thought and contemplation on possibilities and make one think that something could possibly come of you reading it.