Education, past and present

This weekend marks the official end of my educational career.

The career has been long and varied: two years at a private elementary school, ten years of home-education, five years commuting to a Tech University, three years of grad school at another Tech University...

What do I have to show for it? Besides a high-school diploma, two Engineering degrees (two degree programs which were as similar as they could be and yet be distinct), and an M.S. in Mathematical Sciences?

Somewhere along the way, I became self-educated. This transition happened late in the home-education phase. I do know that I was most definitely learning directly from my mother and father early on in that career--the parts that would be analogous to elementary-school work. Later on, I entered a phase where my parents taught much, but gave me projects and books which involved me doing my own research. Finally, by the time I was doing high-school-equivalent work, I was almost fully self-directed in my education.

I do suspect that I graduated high-school with some of my knowledge surpassing that of a first-year college student. No good metric existed for me to measure this. I just know that when I took the obligatory humanities classes at the first Tech U., I found the instructor teaching me things that I already knew about the historical/cultural background of the works being studied.

In the realm of mathematics and physics, I found myself in a similar position. I had studied in an extremely good math textbook, and under a grading scale that I now recognize as harsh. (My mother didn't tell me that it was harsh; I didn't have any standard of reference. After re-doing many lessons for getting less than 80% correct on the lesson, I assumed that I just needed to work more carefully..)

I sometimes wonder what course my educational career would have taken had not I suffered closed-head-trauma midway through my last year of high-school. The auto accident that caused the trauma was definitely my fault (as far as I can tell--my memory doesn't reach back to the accident, only to waking up in the hospital). The trauma definitely scrambled sections of my mind. However, I was back up to speed in my studies three months later.

The trauma seemed not to hamper my mental prowess at all; however, I emerged from the event with the social skills and emotional behavior of someone 5-8 years younger. (Of course, I had previously never cared if I was normal for my age-group anyway...so it is not clear how much a step backwards this was for me.)

But predictions about what might have been quickly bog down into incredible complexity. I can't resurrect, in my mind, the complete personality that preceded the accident. Which college or university would I have attended? What would I have studied? What choices (personal, social, academic) would have confronted me? When would those choices have been made pressing?

More often, I ponder the future. Which of the companies that I've talked to will offer me a position? What will I use to decide between alternative offers? (Pay scale, location, distance from parents/family, etc.)

Should I heed the call of duty and self-sacrifice and join the military? Should I accept a job, and join the Reserves? If so, which branch?

The choices to be made are long, and I fear that I will make the choice too quickly. But I also know that the path of hesitation and uncertainty if often the path of flinching away from making a choice. So choose I shall, when the time comes.

Controversy

I've been gone too long...

One reason that I've been slow to post recently is that a rather troublesome event happened on Tech's campus, and I was uncertain how to respond to it.

This event happened during the first week of April. As a background, during that week a large publicity push was put on a certain student group on campus. This student group--known as Kewennaw Pride--celebrates and condones many forms of alternative sexual preferences. A set of events for the week were advertised by posters, colorful chalk advertisements on the sidewalks, and by people wearing t-shirts and buttons. A defining theme for the event was encaptured in the phrase "Gay? Fine by me."

My first response was that I couldn't encapsulate my thoughts in a phrase that short. But my thoughts fermented in many ways.

I agree somewhat with David Morrison in his lengthy article about sexual behavior. He argues on many fronts. The best argument, at the end of the article, is that male human bodies aren't desiged to engage in sexual intercourse with other male humans. To put it crudely, there's no location on the male body that's been designed to receive sexual intercourse. (Mr. Morrison also freely uses arguments from theology, especially the Catholic theology of body. I wouldn't raise such arguments unless my debate opponent agreed that such theology could be authoritative.) At any rate, I didn't want to join in the celebration and support of the homosexual lifestyle. The legal status and social propriety of homosexual behavior can be in any category; I would like to have the freedom to note that male homosexual behavior appears very unhealthy.

On Friday morning of that first week in April, I walked across campus rather early. I had someplace that I needed to be at 8:00 pm.

I noticed that someone had taken over the campus "bulletin board system" on the sidewalks. Whenever the sidewalks are dry for a predictable period of time, student groups will advertise their events with chalk drawings on the campus sidewalks. This morning, someone had decorated campus with death-threats against gays. (News stories available on the local newspaper and the campus newspaper.) I counted something like 20 separate variations on that theme in my walk across campus. Since I had to transit past 90% of the buildings along the main walkway, I saw most of these drawings. Since it was before the hour of 8:00 AM, I met no other students on this walk.

My first thought was that this was a group of students who might want to study how to defend themselves against threats. This preparation would involve the following:

1. Close observation by local Police Agencies
2. Enlisting friends so that no threatened person is ever alone
   
3. Learning self-defense (with weapons or without weapons.)

The last option is the most useful. Whether or not Police or friends are there to help, self-defense skills will always be with a person. Also, they will not be subject to a 5-minute arrival delay, as Police often are.

There are problems with carrying pistols on University Campuses, though. And I suspect that this particular group of students would be more eager to declare their moral superiority by their victim status.

The President of the University sent an email to all students defaming the threats for being anti-gay. (I had thought he described the threats as being done by "homophobic people", but I can't find it in the email or in the published response on-line. Perhaps I was imagining that part of his response.)

Later, the Presidents of the Undergrad Student Government and the Graduate Student Council collaborated on a letter to the student body, outlining that hatred for such differences was wrong because it distanced the hater from the entire University community. (This is available at the bottom of the published responses referenced above.)

I had a much easier time agreeing with the response of the USG and GSC Presidents--their published opinion tried to outline the fundamental similarity of all students on campus, rather than the special status of the particular group targeted by these threats. They opined that death-threats are outside the bounds of civil discourse, and should never be used by anyone for any reason. After all, no one wants to be in a group that could receive death threats because they were different.

Currently, there is a $2,000 award for information about the people who wrote these threats. So far, it is only known that the threats were put in place sometime before 4:00 AM on that Friday, and that the first report of the threats was made by a member of the Keweenaw Pride leadership team.

Considering the imminent end of the semester (and the fact that roughly 25% of the student body is graduating, and won't be in-town after the beginning of May), I suspect that this case will remain unsolved.

This is sad, in my opinion. If the case could be solved, I would at last know whether a friend of the public-acceptance-for-gays crowd would cynically use such threats to underline their perceived need for acceptance.

Also, the people who made the anonymous threats would have to defend his deeds in court. We would learn whether their original anonymity was through cowardice or by accident. We would also have a chance to publicly ask whether there is a response to homosexual-acceptance-advocates that doesn't involve total agreement, and also doesn't involve death threats.

Because I am under the impression that any form of disagreement with such people is viewed as being intolerant. And that irritates me.

What Happened Next

Following up on the trial and execution which I posted about last Friday...

The results became one of those stories that never died.

In the annals of the Imperial government, it wasn't even worthy of a footnote. At least, among those records which survive. We can assume that the soldiers who did the work of the execution assured that the comdemned man was dead before the day was over. Two other criminals of lesser notoriety had been executed at the same time.

The friends and family of the executed preacher went into hiding, shocked that their leader would die in such a horrible way. None of them seemed to put any hope in their leader's cryptic sayings about returning from death.

But early the next week, stories began circulating among the friends and family of the executed man. An empty tomb was muttered about. Some people claimed to have seen him walking around.

The enemies of the executed man couldn't produce a body to prove that he was still dead. A squad of soldiers, detailed to guard against grave-robbery, couldn't explain how the body had disappeared. They claimed that they had fallen asleep on the job--yet no explanation was given as to why they weren't punished for falling asleep on the watch.

And the story grew. The circle of friends and family spent their time re-telling what their beloved leader had done and taught. A distinctive pattern of belief and lifestyle developed among this circle. A fervent belief that death was not final, and that their leader had come back from the grave, became the foundation for this developing belief. Overnight, the size of their group exploded from a few hundred dedicated followers to thousands of zealous believers.

The religious faith spawned by this particular man and his teachings changed the face of history. It began as a rejected, persecuted bunch of outcasts among a minority religion in the greatest Empire of the time. Surprisingly, persecution didn't shrink its size or rate of increase of the upstart religion.

Long after that Empire crumbled, this religion is one of the best-known systems of belief on the planet. Its history seems full of both the best and the worst kind of people. Yet it has had many great effects on the world.

From the survival of literacy in Western Europe after the Empire crumbled to the end of slavery in modern Europe and the Americas, this new religion has left its mark in many places in history.

Quite an unexpected result from a religious teacher being brought to trial on trumped-up charges of sedition.

However, there had been hints all along that he was not just a normal religious teacher. Before his trial and execution, he made claims that seemed to clearly indicate that he was insane--or something more than merely human. He claimed that the government that executed him did so only because a Higher Power had allowed the execution to happen.

It is a vexing question--was this man mad, or incarnate Divinity? He seems to have worked hard to eliminate other explanations.

Good Friday

As a followup on my last post, I offer this short meditation.

A man was condemned to death one Friday, nearly two millennia ago. His death was noted, in the sense that the execution was public. The trial was messy, involving local religious law, Imperial law, influential religious leaders, and a skittish Imperial magistrate.

The magistrate had been known to quell riots by force. But the angry crowd at his doorstep wasn't trying to usurp his authority and repel the Empire; they and local religious leaders claimed to be supportive of his authority for once.

The accused had, early in the week, entered town amid an improptu parade. The people of the district, gathering for a yearly religious festival, had ushered the man into town amid shouts of joy. The celebration was seditious, to say the least--it was full of inflammatory symbolism of local pride. If the man at the center of things had responded in the way people expected, they would have attacked Imperial soldiers in a fit of violence.

The potential revolt had been defused by this man himself. He had cried out in a strange lament over the city's religious history, and the parade had melted away. For the rest of the week, the accused man had been seen in and around the Temple in the city. He had angered the religious power structure by his inflammatory deeds in the Temple, but had later spent long days teaching his own interpretation of their holy books.

Those holy books, this religion--the Empire didn't allow many local religions free reign. Worship of the deities of the Empire was the only publicly-encouraged religion. This local belief, descended from desert mystics with an absurd claim of a single, all-encompassing deity, had been given a separate but equal status by the Empire. It had been permitted to exist alongside the Imperial religion, but not been officially discouraged or encouraged.

Every so often, this particular corner of the Empire would see one of the locals rise up, gain a following, and attempt to drive out the Empire. It had been done before--the previous imperial world power in this corner of the world had been driven out, three centuries ago. The current Empire had later come in and deposed the priest-king who had inherited the local throne. But the people remembered, and local zealots would occasionally spring up.

This case was strange, in that the local religious leaders were trying to tell him that they were nipping another such revolt in the bud. But the leader of the revolt appeared to be more of a religious man than a would-be king. Even in court, he boldly claimed that the Imperial law would have been powerless to execute him if it had not been allowed by the Higher Power he taught about.

The magistrate didn't need any more riots in his city. He also liked hearing the people shout that they had no King but the Emporer. He was a little surprised when the mob asked for the man to be executed. So he acquiesced, telling them that the man appeared innocent, and reminding them that any guilt for his death would fall on them. They had asked for it, after all.

So he ordered the man killed. Execution was carried out by a cruel, dehumanising method that was a trademark of the Empire. It was recorded, but not deemed overly important by the recordkeepers of the Empire.

The friends and family of the man were shocked by the death, by people who had twisted the levers of power to rid the world of a troublesome teacher of religion.

And it seemed that the world would quickly forget this trial and execution. But since there had been rumors about this religious man and his powers, a guard was posted at the tomb. The religious leaders had requested it, after all was said and done.

Few seemed aware of the historical importance of this execution, or of the importance of the innocence of the accused man. None could have predicted what happened next.

Movie Review: Courage, Sacrifice, and Small Children.

Recently, I got a chance to view a good film for the second time. The film was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, based on the novel by C.S. Lewis.

The story is s simple story. It contains danger, struggles between good and evil, the stress of danger, big battles, sadness and parting...and that's all before the children arrive at Professor Kirke's house in the countryside.

There at the house, the rambunctious children have to deal with the absent-minded professor, the stern housekeeper, their own boredom, and the stresses of being so far from home. The adventure the develops after one of the girls enters the wardrobe is quite unexpected, and leads to...more danger, more battles, much sadness, and involvement in a momentous series of events.

The film uses visual drama to full effect without making the film too violent and frightening for its intended audience. Several surprises are dealt to the viewer as the story progresses. Even the ones that I knew to expect surprised me, both times I viewed it.

One thing which the film brings to life is the way in which the children seem a little young to be wrapped up in such a dangerous situation. But they seem to mature well under the stress, and under the watchful (if not always visible) guidance of Aslan (the leonine deity of Narnia). In the end, they are coronated as Kings and Queens, and seem to begin a long, happy life in Narnia. Except that one of their adventures brings them right back to the wardrobe. They unexpectedly return to the world they left with no apparent passage of time. But they have all learned something from their adventure. And the hope remains that another adventure might befall them.

The thoughts about wrapping up children in such a dangerous situation seemed out of place to me at first. But I couldn't shake the feeling that it was important to the telling of this story. I even suspect that this idea was one of C.S. Lewis' concerns when he wrote the original novel. He wanted to tell children about his understanding of the world, of morality and belief, of the courage that was needed to make proper decisions, and the danger involved in making wrong decisions.

The children are treated to a situation where a sin that seems small--a lie, accompanied by bitterness between siblings--is revealed to play a role in a much bigger drama. The movie does not overtly mention this detail, but it hints that the lack of knowledge about the momentousness of the sin does not absolve the sinner. It also claims that no sin would go unpunished, especially the treachery that one of the children committed.

And finally, they learn the fundamental story of Christianity in a form that doesn't remind them of "one more Sunday-school story."

Whether all of this is immediately apparent to the average viewer of the film is open to question. It seems apparent to me, who have read the book (and its sequels) several times.

Unscheduled Hiatus

A confluence of school-related work, job search, and social events kept me away from blogging for the past week.

(I wish I had been able to predict this hiatus; sadly, I wasn't.)

My thoughts are many and varied--I still ruminate about the future of Islamic culture worldwide, and its interactions with Western culture. I have had many thoughts about a couple of movies I've seen recently. There's literature I've been reading, which would have produced excellent blog-material.

And then there's stuff happening that I haven't blogged about yet.

But I'm going to have to focus on something else for the moment. There's a good movie-review coming up at Grim's Hall this week.