The Other Chuck–I’m going to try “On the Sensations of Tone.”

This is what I was talking about. It’s not that people are getting dumber. It’s that groups of people who didn’t use to graduate high school are now given high school diplomas, and groups of people who didn’t use to go to college are now pushed in and through and given degrees.

There was a time when a high school diploma or a university degree implied some level of knowledge and competence, and this is no longer true.

We are not worthy.

Even so, it still takes all kinds.

the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education

On the face of it, it’s absurd because it’s talking about an intellectual education, not a vocational one. The average student no more deserves a shot at intellectual education than a shot at an athletic job. Only above-par people really have any business pursuing an athletic life or an intellectual life.

Then it occurred to me that not that long ago, there may have been professional teams but people still often got together for amateur games on their own level. Nowadays, that’s much rarer. You get coach potatoes who are Monday-morning quarterbacks.

These students are intellectual coach potatoes.

“It’s an explosive rush to see how things fit together, like receiving a vision.”

After the pressure of the draft and Vietnam was gone, and after the sobering gauntlet of military service, I returned to college in the early 70s just for the fun of it. The post-graduate courses, all music or related, were only those that interested me like Form and Analysis, Composition, Music Theory, Organ, and Acoustics. Those 5 years of prior college were brought together. It was my own little “coda”.

While I had read von Helmholtz “On The Sensations of Tone” previously, that masterwork of music theory and basis of acoustics was, as you say, like receiving a vision when taught as the center of Music Theory. What JS Bach and the other masters of Counterpoint had done instinctively, historically, now made perfect sense.

Without government holding a gun to your head, learning can be such great fun.

I make the mistake of asking for 2/3ds of a pound of ham at supermarket Deli counter.

College age deli worker turns to her older coworker and asks, “how much is 2/3rds?

Thanks for the tip. I just ordered Nick Lane’s most popular book using neo’s Amazon link.

Sometimes we’re lucky enough that the topic itself is so exciting (or we are so wired as to find it exciting for no obvious reason) that our brains are fully in gear without an additional incentive. For me, some learning is such an intense pleasure that it’s a rush that competes successful with all other pleasures in life. What beats an author or lecturer who makes surprising sense about a fascinating new topic? I’m always trying to get people interested in reading Nick Lane’s popularized cell biology books: the man can really teach laymen. I have no earthly practical need to understand cell biology better, but it’s joy to see how something works and to understand how other people cleverly figured it out from obscure clues. It’s an explosive rush to see how things fit together, like receiving a vision.

School only sporadically offered me any of this. The accelerated classes in my high school often did pretty well. Things got uniformly better in college, when I was surrounding by other students motivated to learn and thus enjoyed classes with appropriate subject matter and pacing. Even there, though, there were courses whose point could be difficult to grasp, not because the material itself was lacking, but because the presentation was opaque or perfunctory. Law school was very hit and miss.

Somehow, happily, whether because my father took such an intense and natural joy in learning or because the thing is inborn, the experience of learning has mostly lit me on fire for my whole life. It’s joyful fun. Some teachers and schools helped with this while others hindered.

To return to the question of what’s changed: An almost-30-year-old fellow of my acquaintance, the son of an old friend, is every bit as well-educated and capable of speaking and writing logically as anyone I know who was educated between 1920 and 1990. I suspect his secret is having been homeschooled, besides enjoying considerable genetic gifts and the example of intelligent family members who love learning.