Bob Hope, RIP

My most vivid impression of Bob Hope came not from his movies (which were shot before I was born, for the most part), nor from his many television shows (which tend to run together in my mind), nor for his work as a USO entertainer (his Vietnam shows also tend to run together indistinguishably).

It is for a slim paperback that I picked up in junior high school, titled I Owe Russia $1200. It was an outrageous title for a book (which was why I bought it, if memory serves), and the part of it devoted to his Russian trip is almost an afterthought, when you consider how small it is.

But it was funny, and remains so to this day, IMHO.

I thought the book was so funny, in fact, that I extended to Hope (or, more likely, his writers) the sincerest form of flattery: I cribbed some one-liners from the book for my presentation at a ninth grade public speaking competition (which, by the way, I lost, while learning just a little about timing).

I think the world is better off for his having been around. He will be missed.

Cheers...

A freewheel on education...

An uncomfortable theme keeps cropping up lately, which generally stated runs along the lines of: why bother teaching stuff to people who don't want to learn? To me, the idea that we should abandon (or moderate) efforts to educate people because people don't want to be educated makes about as much sense as, say, legalizing assault in neighborhoods where assault is common.

Unfortunately, most people assume that the sole purpose of an education is to teach them facts and figures and subjects that they will never use in their lives. (I recall how a former employee at the store was astounded by my use of some simple algebra to figure something out. He just "knew" that algebra was one of those subjects of no possible application in Real Life.)

Actually, the value of an education, particularly in secondary school and college, is not in the specific information that you acquire, nor even in the acquisition of skills that enable you to learn on your own, but in the choices that become available to you down the road.

I say this on the basis of my own personal experience, and that of other people I have had the opportunity to observe. Permit me to digress...

Like many students, I took French in school. Generally speaking, I didn't like it. It was, I felt, too complicated. I didn't mind the grammar rules so much, as I did the exceptions. The vocabulary was occasionally interesting, especially the idiomatic expressions. The "civilization" stuff - all about history, culture, music, literature, and so on - I could take or leave (mostly the latter, when it involved trying to ken "what the author really meant").

So, what was the worth of my taking French in junior high and high school? At the time, in medias res, so to speak, I would have told you: none. I knew no French people, didn't anticipate traveling to France (except maybe someday as a tourist), had no pressing need to know French, and had enough to read in English, thank you. If it had been up to me, I would not have been taking French in junior high and high school. (A foreign language was a requirement in junior high, and I let inertia take over in high school... which is another way of saying I was easily cowed by my parents' expectations. I was neither an ambitious student or rebellious son, though I did the classwork and got a bunch of Bs and the occasional C for my efforts in French class.)

You see, in junior high and high school, my meat was science. I was good at it and I believed myself to be a future scientist or engineer. By the end of my junior year in high school, in fact, I decided I was going to be a physics major in college. By my second semester at college, though, I had declared myself as an engineering major.

There are two interesting points in that regard: Obviously, I changed my mind somewhere between the end of junior year in high school and the end of freshman year in college. But the only way you can change the path you're on is to encounter a fork in the road; in other words: if you have a choice.

(Did someone say, "Wait a minute, what about blazing your own path?" Well, that's really hard and takes luck and tools - note the plural, you'll have to choose to use a particular tool at a particular time, so the more tools you have, the better.)

What allowed me to change my mind was the fact that I was equally at ease in physics and math, and (to a lesser extent) chemistry and earth science; in other words: I could change my mind because I had a choice open to me. As a result, changing my focus among these subjects was not that hard.

Note that my choices did not include biology, simply because I never took biology in high school. And because I never took it, I never learned whether I was good at it or not, or whether it intereted me or not, and consequently I didn't know enough about it to make a choice as to whether it might or might not offer a career path.

I'm not through beating you over the head with the "c" word, yet...

Curiously enough, though, my B-level French has turned out to be helpful in landing a paying job where knowledge of French was not the main requirement, and this has happened not once, but twice in my life so far. In other words, despite my belief, at the time, that I was wasting my time in class, I was unwittingly keeping a choice open (decades down the line, as it turns out) by taking the course and doing the work.

In conclusion we can say the following before we slide the soap box back under the day bed:

1. If you avoid education, your choices decrease.
2. If you pursue a broad education, your choices increase.
3. If you simply endure a subject that you think is irrelevant, your choices also increase.

Is lack of choice ever a good thing?

Cheers...