Clara Immerwahr

During a broadcast about the chemist Fritz Haber, a scientist devoted to his Fatherland and enthralled by his own ambition, one of the hosts decided to pass moral judgment on Mr. Haber.  That judgment calls for questioning. To begin to appreciate the radical nature of the judgment, you might need what Hollywood types call the backstory, at least a bit of it, without mentioning Zyklon gas, another part of the Haber mess. According to Radiolab’s own tale, Haber himself put together a group of soldiers during World War I, and traveled with them to Belgium to experiment with chlorine gas against French, British, and Canadian troops.  With forethought, Haber and his men waited for the right conditions to release the gas on troops confronting the German forces, though using the gas was opposed by several commanders in the German military who believed that Haber’s experiment was a violation of basic human decency in time of war.  You can listen to the Radiolab podcast for a vivid description of the effects of the gas on human beings and on nature.

Upon Haber’s return to Germany after this incident, Haber found himself in an argument with Clara Immerwahr, his wife. She had heard about what he had done and was deeply disturbed. Her last name means roughly “always true (“Wahrheit” in German is truth). In short, the Cassandra story was staring Haber in the face, but he could not see it, nor could the Radiolab hosts in their retelling.  As a scientist herself, Immerwahr knew that her husband had transgressed.  She ended up shooting herself, though Haber, according to the accounts at the time, considered Clara’s interpretation of his actions to be utterly mistaken. Like the deluded Haber, one of the hosts of Radiolab decided to intervene at this point in the broadcast to provide a sterile, chilling, utilitarian arithmetic to Haber’s actions (the judgment mentioned above). In abstracted form, the ethical “thinking” inserted into the broadcast goes like this: If person X murders 2 people, but escorts 3 elderly women across the street and prevents the women from being hit by a bus, those actions combined (murdering and escorting) result in a positive integer.  One extra person lived as a result of X’s actions in those two situations, and that is what makes X a good human being.

I could not believe my ears. Two intelligent people, the hosts of Radiolab, contrary to Clara Immerwahr’s model behavior that ought to have made an impression on them, discussed blithely a formula for ethics as simplistic as the one described above, and one of the hosts concluded that Haber was a good person, because prior to World War I Haber had invented a process involving nitrogen that allowed the world to provide food to its expanding population.  The projected millions of human lives saved by nitrogen fertilizer were set against the hundreds (the exact figure was not given on the Radiolab broadcast, if my memory is correct) of soldiers and other creatures killed by Haber’s chlorine gas, and since millions happen to be larger than hundreds, you can figure out without resorting to a calculator what your ethical position on Mr. Haber ought to be.

I stopped listening to the broadcast after that, and began wishing that I had known Clara Immerwahr.

Photo by Jean-Francois Fourtou

This is the most important article in education that you will read for some time. The evidence comes from one country, but that evidence is startling. It challenges the nonsense proposed by politicians and so-called experts from professional education colleges who have convinced administrators across the United States that assessment is the panacea that will lead us away from the coming Idiocracy.  Can you think of a major American university that now lacks something akin to an Office of Institutional Effectiveness (pardon the oxymoron)?  By most  world standards, Finnish public education (there is no private option, please note — that means no charter schools, for example) is at the top of the heap.  How did they do it without interminable, mind-numbing U.S.-style assessment?

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what’s called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school. Instead, the public school system’s teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education, is the Cassandra of this tale.  He offers up a fascinating take on another educational buzzword on this side of the Atlantic: accountability.

“There’s no word for accountability in Finnish,” he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

An article about the state of education has not been this much fun since the appearance of the works of one of my old teachers Richard Mitchell.

When people ask me, ‘Why do you pick so many idiots?’, I know that I have done my job correctly.

The quotation comes from Valery Komissarov, responsible for a new Russian “reality” television program about mothers-in-law (actually, potential mothers-in-law) that apparently makes “Jersey Shore” by comparison look as if it belongs on Masterpiece Theater.

Berger’s attention to language appears numerous times, such as in this observation: “Normally, we face words frontally and so can read them, speak them or think them. This was happening somewhere to the side of language. Any frontal view of language was impossible there. From the side I could see how language was paper thin, and all its words were foreshortened to become a single vertical stroke — I — like a single post in a vast landscape” (35). Berger posits a linguistic multiverse, comparable to the description physicist Alan Lightman gives about a garden hose in connection to string theory:

String theories typically require seven dimensions of space in addition to the usual three, which are compacted down to such small sizes that we never experience them, like a three-dimensional garden hose that appears as a one-dimensional line when seen from a great distance. There are, in fact, a vast number of ways that the extra dimensions in string theory can be folded up, and each of the different ways corresponds to a different universe with different physical properties.

How delicate the world is. If you care to read more, do.