Expectations

"So how does this Christmas thing work then?" Thus Susan to me this morning. Her family has no Christmas traditions of its own, and she's anxious to help make sure it meets my expectations. Bless her.

"Well, you wake up early. Not too early, but it's still dark. Then you check out the sock you hung up at the foot of your bed, you take out the things one by one. There's nothing very exciting in there, usually, but it's Christmas and you're a kid so everything is good. There's no whistle or anything to make that much noise, because my parents aren't complete idiots, but all the same you try to keep it down. But still you're excited, and you might sneak downstairs to look under the tree and see all the presents there and wonder which ones are yours, even though your parents have absolutely forbidden that.

"Other people get up and you start asking about the other presents, but nobody's going to get those until after everyone is washed, dressed and breakfasted, and that takes a long time because your brothers don't have the same sense of urgency as you do. The eldest, in particular, is a lazy bugger who's also as bloody-minded as Jack the Ripper, and you know if you try to speed him up he'll go slower on purpose.

"About the only thing that ever worked was telling him that Christmas dinner was almost ready. But even that only worked once.

"Eventually you're allowed into the living room, you gather round the tree, and your dad sits at the foot of the tree and reaches for the packages, one by one, and throws or slides or passes them to whoever they're addressed to. Sometimes there's a little show of rattling or weighing or sniffing or some other sort of diagnosis, but not much, because your dad mostly wants to get it over with. You unwrap each present as you get it, and some of them are really cool. Your parents remind you to thank people, and then you're left to your own devices to play until dinner."

"You mean lunch."

"It's called dinner. There's a colossal amount of food, I've told you about it all before, it takes two hours or more to get through it and probably two-thirds of the food is left over. Eventually the table gets cleared, the washing up gets done - you have to help with the drying - and your mother gets out her inevitable 1000-piece Christmas jigsaw and starts sorting out the straight-edge pieces, which means the dining table is now occupied for the next two days, but that's okay because it'll be that long before you're hungry again anyway. Until about nine o'clock at night, when it's time for tea and Christmas cake."

I stopped. I'd got quite caught up in my account, but there's something in Susan's eye that expresses roughly equal parts amusement and frustration.

"I should have asked your mother," she sighs.

Responsibilities

It's challenging, being a householder. We don't even complete the deal for another two months, and already I'm dropping behind in my commitments.

Local by-laws, at my place of employment, dictate that someone who makes such a major commitment as buying a house (or getting married, giving birth etc.) is required to bring in a celebratory cake for the rest of the team. Local by-laws in my own household stipulate that any such cake must be home-made, not shop-bought.

But what kind of cake? The laws are silent on that.

Anything with chocolate and/or cream is too much like hard work. Ditto anything that requires obscure or specialised ingredients, such as - well, anything I don't have in the apartment at the moment. I've never got the hang of meringue.

For my last birthday, I made Westmorland pepper cake, which went OK but not favourite. I'm thinking something sweeter, perhaps something quite unlike what you can get in any corner bakery. After dredging my childhood memory, I hit on: cardamom cake, with lemon glaze.

Hey, I never claimed to be a great cook, it doesn't have to be imaginative. But on the web, even simple recipes can become complicated...

Most cardamom cake recipes I can find involve random other ingredients - orange, pear, apple, pecan, you name it, all of which would I'm sure be delicious but they're not what I'm looking for. The closest I can find is this one, which stipulates when to use a food mixer (quite unnecessary), and actually forgets to put the cardamom in at all, and then smothers the whole thing in a thick lemon icing, rather than a thin transparent glaze. Not confidence-inspiring, but let's give it a try.

So I settle down to it, inserting spice where it seems to make most sense, doing the beating by hand Just Like Mother Taught Me, making the glaze with just lemon and sugar. The result isn't bad, but needs more cardamom.

Trying again, I suffer 'second-attempt syndrome'. This is what happens when you don't follow the recipe closely enough any more because you think you can remember it, only you can't, not in the right order anyway. We're eating through the results of that now.

I'll get it right later this week.

Celebration vs commemoration

Today, I see, is St George's day in England. (My desk calendar says "(UK)", but I'm assuming that's just because it's published by some ignorant American. It's not like it's an actual holiday, anyway. Actually it's St George's day in a lot of places, such as Cyprus and Catalonia and Moscow, that take him way more seriously than England.)

More importantly, Saturday is ANZAC day - the second of New Zealand's annual national days.

Because it falls on a Saturday this year, we don't get a day off for it. Boo. But anyone who imagines I'm dragging my idle backside out of bed at 5 a.m. to go to a dawn remembrance service on a Saturday...

To be fair, that's not something I've done for a couple of years now. Just once, for the experience - and it was quite an experience, solemn and sad and cold, communal and tremendously uplifting. Religious, in fact. More people should do it. I should do it. Maybe in 2011.

Cobblers to the world

I don't suppose that shoemaking is quite immune to the recession, but it's not at the top of the list of industries clamouring for our money to prop up its business plan. After all, most cobblers went out of business decades ago.

And yet they're still out there. What high street doesn't have a shop advertising, among random other services, "shoe repair"?

Not ours, I'm delighted to say. This shop also offers to repair handbags and other random leatherware, but shoes feature prominently in its advertising, which is good. It's a lot of work to find a really comfortable pair of shoes, I'm glad there are still people out there who can extend their lifespan, and I was delighted, this morning, to have the chance to give them a bit of business.

"They're my wife's", I explained as I dumped the bag on the counter. Just in case they might be under any misapprehensions, you understand. Like any heterosexual male, I personally have never owned more than two pairs of shoes concurrently.

The cobbler was an elderly man - not perhaps old enough to be the Wandering Jew, but certainly old enough to remember a time when "service" wasn't a dirty word. He pulled out the shoes and examined them critically. Susan had helpfully tucked a note into the boot explaining what was wrong with them, but on examination it wasn't hard to see.

"Sandals - $30 to 40. It's fiddly, you see, taking the sole apart, you can never tell what's going to happen. The boot, that's easy - $20."

"Perfect", I replied. "I'm authorised to spend that much."

He grinned and gave me two tickets, stamped "THURSDAY" - which, after some thought and debate with his colleague, he crossed out and replaced with "MONDAY". "They're in good hands, sir," he assured me as I left the shop.

I'm not sure what it was that made me feel so good about this transaction. Perhaps it was the warm glow of repairing two of Susan's most-loved items of footwear. Perhaps it was the old-fashioned service ethic - the man was all but tugging his forelock as I left. Or the surprising sense of smugness from knowing that, once again, we were mending something rather than throwing it away. Whatever it was, it left me positively looking forward to visiting again.

The road to hell is paved with - Cosmo surveys?

Here's one for the gender warriors: men and women - or at least observant Roman Catholic men and women - "sin differently", according to a shiny new report from the Vatican.

It's a bizarre survey, conducted by Fr Roberto Busa, a 95-year-old Jesuit priest, and based on data from an undisclosed (to me, at least) sample of confessions. Apparently, men tend to enjoy lust, gluttony and sloth, while women are more likely to indulge in pride, envy and anger.

Note that the stereotypically macho vice of "wrath" makes the top three for women, but not for men - although without quantitative data we can't really deduce anything about it. "Greed", also called "covetousness" or "avarice", appears to be firmly at the bottom of the pile.

"Sloth" is an interesting sin, and one of my personal favourites. According to one view, it's the inverse of "avarice" - you're unlikely to make much money while sitting about on your backside. On the other hand, what's the point of making money, beyond bare survival needs, if not in anticipation of enjoying some sloth at a later date?

I haven't been able to find if this kind of survey has ever been done before. The Vatican's official theory is that, while environments and circumstances change, basic human nature is constant, so they might argue that these findings would never greatly change. But really I find it hard to believe they'd be that naïve. In harder times, surely avarice would be more popular.

(I do want to know more about Fr Busa's sample. Was it purely local, around Rome, or nationwide, or wider? Was it weighted towards any particular groups, such as religious communities? But I can't find this data. The original publication, in the Vatican's weekly L'Osservatore Romano, doesn't seem to be available online, and none of the summaries I've found goes into that kind of detail.)

Also not mentioned are the "new sins" published last year, listed as "environmental pollution, genetic manipulation, obscene wealth, infliction of poverty, drug trafficking, morally debatable experiments, and violation of the fundamental rights of human nature." I'd love to know how often men and women confess to each of those.

Dumbing-down for idiots

So I'm innocently rummaging about YouTube when I encounter, for the first time, the name of Charlotte Iserbyt, author of The Deliberate Dumbing-Down of America.

I've always been kinda wary of people who talk about "dumbing down". To me it's a code-phrase that translates, roughly, as "I'm perfect, therefore any change in the system that produced me must axiomatically be for the worse". But this woman has credentials. She's a "former Senior Policy Advisor in the US Department of Education". She's author of a book billed as "without doubt one of the most important publishing events in the annals of American education in the last hundred years." A "Barnes & Nobel #1 Bestseller", no less. I was curious to see how you earn that kind of publicity.

Looks like the easiest way is to write it yourself.

False modesty is not one of Iserbyt's faults. In the first chapter of her tedious diatribe, she sets the tone by informing us: "Undoubtedly, this chapter may be one of the most important since the philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wilhelm Wundt, and John Dewey et al."

Excuse me?

Actually, on a closer reading, she's not claiming what I first thought she was trying to claim. What she wants to say, what she would say if she were capable of stringing together a coherent thought, is more like: "Although short, this chapter lays the key philosophical foundation for the whole book. It explains how the philosophies of Rousseau, Wundt, and Dewey et al. reflect a total departure from the traditional definition of education."

"Traditional definition of education"? Yes, that's her own phrase. And that -- fully two sentences into the thesis of this 738-page essay -- is where the gangrene sets in. She cites The New Century Dictionary of the English Language (Appleton, Century Crofts: New York, 1927):

The drawing out of a person's innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, scientific reasoning, history, literature, rhetoric, etc. -- the channels through which those abilities would flourish and serve.

Hmmm... 1927. What exactly makes Messrs Appleton, Century Crofts more authentically "traditional" than Rousseau, who predated them by more than a century and a half? If their ideas differ from Rousseau's, doesn't that imply that they are rejecting him, not vice-versa?

This she contrasts with "the new, dehumanizing definition" used by twentieth-century educational psychologists. The remainder of her book is packed with countless interpretations of this "definition". What she seems to object to, in them, is summed up in Prof Benjamin Bloom's dictum: "The purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students."

Of course, to define education is a challenge that has flummoxed far better minds than Iserbyt's, over the centuries. Charles Dickens, for instance, devoted a lot of ink to ridiculing the educational theories of his day, which favoured the teaching of hard facts (Hard Times) and practicalities (Nicholas Nickelby). The closest he comes to approving of any schooling is the classics-based, "character-forming" liberal education received by David Copperfield.

Waitaminute -- "character-forming"? Wouldn't that be another word for "changing the thoughts, feelings and actions" of the subject? Admittedly, Copperfield's character is formed less by his teachers than by his peers in the school; but still, given the paragon that he grows into, Dickens must feel that his school is doing something right.

Or let's see what Montaigne has to say of education. Turns out, he also favours a, make no bones about it, liberal education with the emphasis on the teaching of sound and virtuous habits of mind, and with the pupil given great freedom in determining and shaping his own learning; he advocates "a tutor, who has rather a well-made than a well-filled head".

Let's go back further: beyond Dickens, beyond Rousseau and Montaigne. Plato believed that the highest purpose of education is "knowledge of the Good": that is to say, the ability to recognise the quality of virtue itself, the essential property that makes something -- anything -- "right" or "wrong". Or, in other words: it is to instil a moral sense. To change not merely the "thoughts, feelings and actions", but the very values and desires of the students.

Iserbyt's "traditional" definition of education is, in fact, anything but: it is a deliberate rejection of the ideas of those, in earlier generations, who have bothered to think about the subject. Like so many nineteenth-century "traditions", it was made new and radical by and for the Victorians; it is a dysfunctional product of a dysfunctional age.

In case you're curious about the other 737 pages of Iserbyt's work: I have, at considerable personal discomfort, skimmed through the meat of it (about 425 of those pages). She seems intent to prove that US education policy in the 20th century has been hijacked by Communists (she points the finger in particular at such anti-American subversives as Roosevelt and Eisenhower, although she also regards Reagan, Bush and Nixon as pansy-waisted sell-outs), and directed to the aim of selling out the US to some kind of ill-defined supra-national government. The cast of the conspiracy, and the precise nature of this "government", shifts from chapter to chapter: but she is in no doubt. Whoever They are, They're all in it together: traitors to her country.

Whatever that is.

In her YouTube video, shot by who-knows-whom, she casts herself as a naif suffering from a devastating failure of self-awareness. She is outraged to learn that to hold a political position, she is expected to know about practical politics. She is aghast to find herself being trained in the rudimentary techniques of persuasion and crowd manipulation -- tactics that will be familiar to anyone who's ever worked for a company with more than 100 employees. She is indignant that teachers are expected to "challenge and change" their student's views.

Among the training she received was how to silence "resisters" (dissidents) by elisting them to serve on committees, flattering them that their opinions are important, while still ignoring them. I think the most telling testimony to her own obliviousness is this: that it still, to this day, doesn't seem to have occurred to her, how she became a "policy adviser"...

I don't know if she's insane, an idiot, or just plain lying. I do know that her YouTube video has been viewed more than 50,000 times, and has a five-star average rating.

He came down from tumpty tumpty

The BBC is ridiculously proud of its oldest Christmas tradition: Carols from King's, a highest-of-high-church festival of carols and bible readings. For 80 years, the Beeb has been broadcasting it every Christmas Eve.

I heard it circa 1993, at 3p.m. on Christmas Eve when driving home, and for the first time, I understood the appeal of church choirs. As soon as the first soloist struck up, the pure countertenor voice seemed to take me back to a time when Christmas wasn't a matter of preparation and panic, but anticipation and peace. Ever since, I've tried to time my Christmas Eve journeys to catch that broadcast. When the service begins, I can feel once again the peace that comes with knowing that -- Christmas is come, my deadline is passed, there is nothing more to do save drive through the gathering dusk, on fast-emptying roads, to journey's end, warmth and welcome. Home.

That's what "Carols from King's" means to me. Or rather, meant. (I have no interest in the TV broadcast. You listen while you're doing something else -- that's the whole point.)

Because the BBC, with its astonishingly lopsided sense of priorities, doesn't podcast it.

Of course there may be sound business reasons for that. It might worry that a podcast would damage its CD sales, but the poxy CD versions only offer the carols, not the readings, otherwise I'd buy it with pleasure. It's broadcast on the World Service, but -- well, if you can find a schedule and frequency details for that in New Zealand, let me know. ("Asia-Pacific" forsooth.)

This Christmas I tried to look at the New Zealand equivalent. The choir sang carols, for want of a better word, that I've never heard (and frankly never want to hear again), and the "lessons" were delivered by moralising clerics talking about doing good in the Real World. Very worthy, and tortuously dull.

This morning I was dreaming about setting up an equivalent carol service in New Zealand. We were rehearsing the traditional processional carol, "Once in Royal David's City", and I was following the words on a hymn sheet, when I found myself reading a verse I'd never heard. It was beautiful: it fit the meaning, rhythm and rhyme of the carol, it was haunting and lovely and perfect, and when I woke I couldn't remember a word of it.

All I know now is that my subconscious can write better poetry than I can.

Happy New Year, everyone.