Teaching versus Learning versus Doing

Much ink has been spilled for decades over the concepts of teaching, learning, and doing, producing such commonplaces as “learning by doing is the best way to learn” and “let’s focus on learning, not teaching.” A couple of clarifications, however, need to be made about both of these remarks.

Consider the first one. Learning and doing, epistemologically and psychologically, are two different mental processes. They never occur precisely at the same time. Learning is the acquisition of knowledge, doing is application. Acquisition is generalization, application is deduction from the general to employ the deduction in a specific concrete situation. A child learns the generalization of balance, of shifting one’s weight, when riding a bicycle. The child applies that knowledge in practice to perfect the skill. Learning comes before doing, perhaps from a parent or older sibling who is teaching the concept of balance or through trial-and-error learning. Sometimes it might occur a split second before the doing but it still comes before.

Trial-and-error learning proceeds in this manner. Try one thing. It doesn’t work. Try something else. It doesn’t work. But there may be similarities in the two actions that did not work sufficient to make a primitive generalization. Deduction from the generalization then follows to try a new action. It doesn’t work perfectly, but it works better than the previous failures. More trial, error, generalization, deduction, and further trial then ensue. Some learners are quick to pick up through observation what has to be done to execute a new skill; others are not. The point, however, is that ideas—no matter how primitive or unformed, or even how unaware the actor may be of the ideas—precede action. Add to this that ingrained mental and/or physical habits may have to be challenged and changed before the skill can be developed.

The significance of teaching before doing is to save the time that can be wasted when going through repeated efforts of trial and error. It also may prevent injury that can result from uninformed trial and error, such as, without instruction, learning to ride a bicycle or operate a complicated piece of machinery. “Learn-by-doing”—when understood to mean practice—is essential to perfecting a skill, mental or physical, but mental understanding, even of a mental skill like logical thinking, comes first.

This takes us to the comment about focusing on learning, not teaching. To teach, however, means to effect learning, to see to it that the students understand and can apply what has been taught. Even the standard definition of teaching—the transfer of knowledge from one person to another—indicates that teaching is not achieved until learning has been accomplished.

Some of the desire, no doubt, to emphasize learning over teaching comes from distrust of the lecture as a legitimate teaching method, but a well crafted lecture framed in essentials and delivered with conviction can effect a great deal of learning in its listeners. More generally, the comment most likely stems from the tired indifference to teaching and learning, not to mention overt rudeness, exhibited by many tenured teachers and professors. The state-run school and university systems do not cater to the needs and wants of their customers. Yet that is precisely what the focus on learning means.

In marketing—and teachers, as I have written before, are sales reps—a notion called the “marketing concept” says that everyone in the company, from the president to the stock boy, should not make any decision or take any action without first considering its effects on the customer. “We are no longer in the business of selling what we make,” General Electric said many years ago, “but making only what we can sell.” This means, quite simply, whether one is a writer, a teacher, or a sales rep: “know thy audience.” Know where the students are now in the learning process, then challenge them by stretching. But the stretching cannot go too far because that produces discouragement and it cannot be too elementary because that creates boredom. Finding the middle ground is what teaching to effect learning is all about. It is not an easy task. It requires constant observation of the students and adaptation to the their needs.

Focusing on learning is what every good teacher should routinely do. Teaching and learning are separate activities, performed by different people. The teacher teaches, the learner learns. But the teacher knows what and how to teach by first tuning into the learner. Anything else is whistling in the wind.

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The Factory Model of Education, Technocracy, and the Free School Movement

The American free school movement of the 1960s and early ‘70s arose as a rebellion against the oppressive authoritarianism of state-run education, that is, the top-down, coercive, follow-the-rules and -rubrics mentality that dictates from on high what has to be done in the classroom. Various writers have referred to this authoritarian system, among other terms, as a technocracy and a “factory model” of education.

That is to say that business and capitalism usually take the blame for the authoritarianism. The last thing that free school advocates would propose is a free market in education. Yet there is much to be admired in the work of the founders of free schools: their emphasis, in particular, on decentralized organization and catering to the needs and interests of the child. Democratic management of the schools, which no doubt empowers the children, may or may not flourish in a free-market system.

The notion of free schools goes back at least to the work of a young Leo Tolstoy (1, 2), who disliked the rigidity and sterility of the European schools. The proponents of the idea, however, are mistaken about the role of business and capitalism in producing the authoritarian atmosphere they are rejecting. The factory model of education, for example, has a badly misunderstood history. Some say that the entire American public education system, dating from its beginnings in the 1840s, was modeled on the factory system.  Students, it is said, are products produced assembly-line style, then sold to the highest bidder in the labor market.*

The factory model, however, is an early twentieth-century phenomenon, coexistent with the rise of progressive education but not an essential characteristic of it. Labor productivity and efficiency were the focus of so-called scientific management (1, 2). These ideas—many of them needed at the time, as management of any kind was not well understood as a skill or taught—were transferred to the administration of public schools.

The problem was (and is) that public schools are bureaucratic, top-down, coercive institutions. Businesses are not. Businesses operating in a free market have a built-in measure of efficiency: profit earned through customer satisfaction. Bureaucracies measure their success by reference to the higher authorities in government who set the rules, laws, and budget. That is the source of the authoritarian atmosphere of public education. The factory model is bad analogy. The product of education is knowledge, values, and skills; the students are paying customers.

Technocracy was a movement in the 1930s that advocated using scientists and engineers to run government (and, therefore, the control and regulation of business). It gave us the phrase “social engineering.” The free school movement of the 1960s brought the term back to refer to the authoritarian nature of public education. This is not incorrect because technocracy is a species of bureaucracy and bureaucrats, whether expert scientists and engineers or not, call the shots over their subordinates. It is unfortunate that the free school advocates do not see the connection between technocracy or bureaucracy and governmental coercion. It is only the free market that would fully allow them to pursue their goals without further authoritarian influence from outside.

Indeed, John Holt did come to the conclusion that the only valid form of education safe from corrupting influences is home schooling, an autarchic withdrawal from the world at large. Holt never did advocate, nor would have advocated, capitalism. Other free schoolers think that their model of small, decentralized child-centered schools should become the model of public education, replacing the current authoritarian behemoths. They fail to see that any cooperation with the coercive apparatus of bureaucratic government requires compliance to rules and laws. Even charter schools that supposedly are freed from some of those rules still succumb to political football tossing and regulation. Many fail to maintain their original missions (1, 2).

The upshot of schooling is that schools are not factories that produce goods. They are high-traffic service firms analogous to entertainment businesses. Some entertainment companies, such as concert halls and sports stadiums, provide their services to thousands of people at one time. Others provide individual services, one customer at a time. There is no reason to assume that a free market in education would not provide its services on a similar scale. The methods of delivery would be the lecture and the tutorial. Customers would be free to choose which services, as described, in combination, or in other variations, they would like to buy. The market would decide. No authority would oversee, control, or regulate.



*I have heard college professors refer to their students as work in progress. When the students graduate, they are finished goods. A better description of environmental determinism—the molding of the child’s clay mind by an outside authority—could not be given. Hopefully, such professorial comments are bad metaphor, rather than serious descriptions.

“You Can Get It in the Book”

Many years ago, while being interviewed by a dean for an academic position, I became engaged in a discussion of the philosophy of education. The dean tossed out as if it were self-evident: “The lecture has been obsolete for 500 years, since the invention of the printing press. Students can read the book.” His assumption was that lectures were needed in the pre-printing press era when books were rare and expensive, but not today when they are plentiful.

While it is true that with careful reading and study one can “get it in the book,” this neglects differences between written and oral presentations, between reading and speaking. These differences give rise to the true benefit of the lecture and explain why it has not died out in 500 years.

The average rate of reading with comprehension by an adult is about 250-300 words per minute. The average speaking speed of politicians is 120-25 words per minute, and CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite spoke at the exact rate per minute of 124 words. Casual conversation is often faster, but the point about the lecture is that formal oral presentations are delivered at half the rate, or less, of the average reading speed.

This means that less information can be presented orally in one minute than what can be read in the same amount of time. Less information in an oral presentation means essentialization. A lecture that essentializes a text makes it easier for the listener to grasp the main points of the written content. With the main points in hand, the listener can then pursue a more detailed study of the written material without first having to read at length to separate the essential from the nonessential. The advantage of the lecture is its efficiency; it saves time.

Whether the speaker deliberately essentializes the presentation or not, the listener hears it as essentialized, as important. The detail in the text is understood as detail. This means that it matters what gets selected as essential in the oral presentation. It makes the difference between good, bad, and indifferent lectures.

The efficiency of the lecture, of course, can also be achieved in conversation with an expert or mentor. The real advantage of the lecture is its ability to broadcast large amounts of essentialized material to many listeners at one time. Does this mean that everyone in the audience learns and digests the material in exactly the same way, one hundred percent? Hardly.

The comprehension and learning of listeners to a lecturer is exactly analogous to the comprehension and appreciation of listeners to a string quartet concert. One member of the quartet’s audience might be tone deaf. The next might be a professional violinist from another group who frequently plays the same pieces as those being performed on stage. Similarly, some students in my classes come in with D-’s in their prerequisite courses. Others come in with A’s. Most are somewhere in between. Audience members—of lectures and string quartet concerts—take away from the experience what they want, and are able, to take away.

Fine tuning may or may not be desired. In education, it usually is, which is why Jacques Barzun declared, “A lecture is a sizing of the canvas in broad strokes. The fine brush
and palette knife must be used close up to finish the work of art” [1] and why Gilbert Highet argued that the only two methods of teaching are the lecture and tutorial [2].

The purpose and value of the lecture is mass communication. The purpose and value of the tutorial is personal communication and individual attention. Though some, perhaps many, of a lecturer’s audience may not absorb everything the lecturer intended, a few listeners may be motivated to study the subject in more detail, just as concertgoers may be stimulated to buy CD’s of the works performed and listen to them many times over in order to learn them thoroughly.

The lecture is part of the division of labor in education. The tutorial is the other part.


1. Teacher in America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), 39.
2. The Art of Teaching (New York: Vintage Books, 1950), chapter 3.

Education in One Lesson

Unjustly neglected, difficult-to-find, and significantly influential on my own work, The Real Academic Community and The Rational Alternative by Thomas L. Johnson is a kind of “education in one lesson.” Like Henry Hazlitt’s gem on economics, Johnson’s begins with the lesson and then illustrates it abundantly throughout the remaining chapters.

The lesson? That schools today (and since antiquity) are institutions not of learning, but of authoritarianism. Force and fear reign supreme. Administrators and instructors “are the authority figures who must be obeyed in every respect, and students, who are the ‘peasants’ in this establishment, must try in every way to please those who rule over them.” In short, students “must please the schools, colleges or universities, instead of these institutions having to please the students.” The power of the book is in its illustrations of the lesson and in the free-market alternative that Johnson proposes.

From the primary and secondary school level:

Discipline. The authoritarian setting, says Johnson, works against the possibility of order in the classroom. Students are forced to be there by law, directly in the lower grades and indirectly in the higher, by the hampering of a free market through regulation. As a result, “almost everything in the classroom is done by means of orders and threats.” The students are ordered to perform certain tasks and threatened with low or failing grades if they don’t comply. Cornered rats—and prisoners—rebel when squeezed too hard. Schools are scholastic prisons and teachers are the guards and wardens paid to keep order.

Drugs. In the authoritarian climate of today’s schools, where the “customers” are not permitted to pursue their own interests, boredom, resentment, confusion, and low self-esteem frequently result. Drugs are seen by some students as a way to relieve their feelings of hopelessness.

Violence. “Force is the hallmark of any authoritarian establishment whether this be a state or an institution. And wherever there is force there will always be acts of violence. They are inevitable companions.”

Cheating. Anyone who has been through today’s school system knows that knowledge is not what is being marketed. “Students, recognizing that good grades and a diploma are what is really valuable to them, will often not hesitate to cheat in order to obtain these primary ‘goods’ which the teachers and schools are really selling.”

At the college level, Johnson has this to say:

Degrees. “It is because institutions of learning give out diplomas or grant degrees that they operate in an authoritarian manner. It is because the students must please the teachers and professors, as well as the institutions, in their attempt to ‘win’ the certificates of graduation that allows the schools, colleges and universities to be the dictatorial institutions that they are. . . . The professor orders the students to perform certain tasks—read certain assignments, write specific papers or reports, give designated oral presentations, etc.—and the students either follow these orders, or else.” Professors hold the degree up for ransom and their red ink pens are their guns.

Student Government. Why does it exist? Because students “realized that matters were often in need of change at the college or university and so they decided to band together in the attempt to see what they could do to bring about the desired changes.” In a free market, dissatisfied customers can stimulate change in a supplying business rather quickly, or else a new one will soon be on the scene to meet the needs of the dissatisfied buyers. But schools are not free enterprises. “All student government could really do was to petition, that is to beg, the administration or Board for favors—like changes in rigid social rules—that would make life at a bit more bearable.”

Academic Freedom and Tenure. Similar to the plight of students in an authoritarian climate, professors organized to protect themselves against administrations. They demanded and got the privilege of lifetime employment and the license to say and write whatever they please (as long as it is consistent with state or administration dogma). In a free market, employees who disagree with their employers simply leave and go elsewhere, and perhaps start their own businesses. Education, however, is not a business; there is nowhere for the professors to go.

Titles and Robes. Johnson discusses other issues, such as honor systems, academic and social probation, dress codes, hazing, and school spirit. His crowning achievement, however, is his comment on titles and robes.

“But what do titles signify?” asks Johnson, titles such as “Doctor” and “Dean.” He answers:

Titles signify power, prestige and authority, and they have always been used to instill fear in others—to con others into thinking that the titled personage is someone special and better than others who must be looked up to and obeyed. . . . Titles . . . are almost always found where there is some degree of tyranny.

How about academic regalia—

all those Medieval robes, caps and hoods? . . . It is true that certain businesses do have their employees dressed in similar outfits, or many businesses have a particular character, like a clown, dressed in a certain way and acting as a representative or symbol of the business. But one does not find, as one does in the academic community, a group of academic “clowns”—the professors, administrators, and board members—dressed in Medieval clerical garb forming and marching in academic processions that look almost identical to religious processions. . . .


Titles and robes are always found wherever one group of people is trying to lord it over another group of people. Kings and dictators get themselves up in fancy costumes and demand that they be called by an array of titles. Military and academic personnel do the same. But not businessmen. They do not, and cannot, lord it over customers. They must win the favor of customers by demonstrating their talent and ability. Talents and robes are of no help in a rational and healthy business environment.

The rational alternative to this forceful, fearful authoritarianism is a free market of educational businesses—”private, profit-making and openly competing enterprises that are only selling instruction, not grades and degrees. . . . There would be no entrance requirements and no prerequisites. . . . There would be no grades and no diplomas or certificates.” The customers would evaluate the sellers much as is done in free-market businesses today. Teachers, the peddlers of knowledge and ideas, would not evaluate the customers.

Education and the Rent Control Model of Monopoly

Education in the United States today is a monopoly, as is the supply of rental apartments in many cities. Monopoly[1] is the restriction of a portion of a market for the exclusive use of certain select sellers at the expense of other sellers who are forbidden entrance into these markets. It is a government-granted privilege.

The delivery of first class mail is the most obvious privilege granted to the US Postal Service. When teenage entrepreneurs have attempted to compete with the post office, they have been ruthlessly put out of business by the feds. But monopoly does not have to be a single seller. It can be a monopoly of the many, as occurs in occupational licensing where the goal is to restrict supply in order to increase prices and therefore income for those who are granted the license.

In government-run monopolies, such as education, the goal is to keep price low and the supply widely available. Inefficiencies that result from the top-down, non-market focus of bureaucratic management in turn lead to high costs that are subsidized by the government. The effect is to freeze out private-sector competition—if it is legal in the first place to compete with the government-run schools. In some countries it is not. If a private-sector system of schools is allowed to exist, the costs of private education often require a quite high price.[2] This is what we have today in the United States and it is analogous to the rent control markets in such cities as New York and Berkeley and Santa Monica, California. The only difference is that the controlled apartment buildings are privately owned. City housing removes the need to call the comparison analogous.

The privilege granted to the operators of government-run schools consists of far more than the obvious lack of competition. It creates a guild of teachers and administrators who work primarily for the benefit of their own needs and wants, not those of their students. As Adam Smith[3] put it over two hundred years ago, referring to publicly financed higher education:

In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.

And:

The discipline of the colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefits of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students, in all cases to behave to him as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability.

In the privileged comfort of tenure and salary guarantees, most of today’s K-12 and college teachers seldom, if ever, have to face real competition. Opposite the intended goal of a widely available supply, bureaucratic inefficiencies and indifference create large class sizes and shortages of instructors such that students bang down the teachers’ doors begging to get into the classes that are scheduled—not because the students want to learn from the great masters, but because they need the units. Government involvement in education creates a situation in which sellers do not have to do anything to attract customers. Some sellers—the teachers—find the door banging annoying and the students a nuisance. Niceness, cordiality, and, generally, concern for the customers’ needs and wants, as a result, often go out the window. The same is true of rent-controlled apartment house superintendents.

The solution to both education and rental housing is decontrol and privatization. The privatization of the education market and the decontrol and privatization of the rental apartment market would at once increase the supply and variety of schools and rental apartments, because anyone would be free to begin offering these services and would be free to do so at a profit. The disparity between the current private and public sector prices would converge, because the abnormally high prices of the private sector would immediately drop due to the immediately increased supply (or promise of such increase).

In a free market real prices decline over time. As efficiencies and innovations emerge in the newly deregulated education and rental apartment markets, prices—in terms of the number of labor hours required to purchase a unit of the service—would also decline. Customer satisfaction would become the means to earning a profit. Niceness, cordiality, and catering to the needs and wants of the customer, not airs of guild-like smugness and superiority or indifference, would become primary.


1. Chapter 10
2. See “Dozens More Colleges Pass the $50,000 Mark This Year,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2009.
3. Book V, chapter  I, part III, article II

The Primacy of Method

The progressive education goal of teaching students how to think, as opposed to teaching them a particular content, does not mean that content is omitted or ranked third, fourth, or fifth in the hierarchy. It does not even mean that content is ranked second, for as John Dewey put it in one of his occasional business metaphors, subject matter is the working capital of thought. Taken literally, a business is not viable if it does not have working capital. In Dewey’s usage, the metaphor means: no subject matter, no thought.

If learning how to think conceptually—in principles and without a dichotomy between abstractions and concretes—is correctly taught, content must be included to have something to think conceptually about. The key point about primacy of method is that the content does not have to be any particular content or “core curriculum.” This is in contrast to traditional education that puts curriculum first.

This is also not to say that teaching how to think is not a subject matter in its own right. It is. The principles of logical thinking, generalization, application, and the creative process are content that can and should be taught throughout secondary and higher education. The problem is that the progressive movement of the twentieth century never rigorously taught the principles of thinking. In its place it put poorly designed and controlled group projects, a barrage of failed reforms, and often little if any well-organized content.

Nevertheless, the primacy of method, or teaching students how to think well, is the essential distinguishing characteristic of progressive education when it is compared to the traditional or conservative form. Indeed, the aim of the great education reformers in history, beginning with Quintilian and even including the Jesuits, was, as formulated by Rousseau, to see the child as a child, not as a smaller version of the adult. This means in particular to see the child’s mind as a child’s mind, hence the need for specialized techniques to develop young thought processes. It includes being nice to the child and catering to the child’s interests.

“Being nice” can be viewed as symbolic of the progressive emphasis on the “whole child.” The two phrases, however, mean a lot more than the clichéd versions sound. They emphasize, in addition to not physically or mentally punishing the child, the need to be aware of the child’s psychology and to encourage the adoption of life-advancing self-confident premises. The extended meaning of “whole child” is the development of an unobstructed mental and emotional life that produces independent, not just sound, judgment. Content must be there in the child’s brain, but stuffing it or furnishing the “empty vessel” with a prescribed core curriculum is not the primary goal of education. Teaching students sensible decision making (sound judgment) and the ability to perceive facts as facts and, more importantly, especially in the face of opposition, the willingness to act on those facts (independent judgment) is. Content follows, driven by parent and student, not bureaucratic, interest.

When parents and students are allowed to determine content by buying and abstaining from buying the services of entrepreneurial teachers who are unhampered by the dictates of educational bureaucrats, a system of progressive education can be fully achieved. It is for this reason that I would describe the theory of concentrated attention and independent judgment detailed in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism as a theory of progressive education without the state. Interference of the state in education—by forcibly dictating what will be learned and how it will be learned, by forcibly expropriating funds from some to pay for the education of others, and by forcibly compelling children to attend school at all—thwarts and destroys the aim of catering to the needs and interests of the child. Only a free market in education that bans the initiation of physical force against parents, students, and entrepreneurs would make it possible for this aim to be accomplished.

Primacy of method means that education is aimed at the development of the mind. A mind well trained in the functions that are its distinctive nature, namely the correct perception and evaluation of the facts of reality and the guidance of behavior based on those correct perceptions and evaluations, is a mind that has been trained in method. It is one that has been taught how to think. Content is acquired and accumulated in the process but it is not primary.

Interest and the Core Curriculum

In discussions of curriculum over the past one hundred or so years, debate has ranged from letting children choose entirely what they want to study, guided only by their interests, to forced memorization of the encyclopedia, usually called the core curriculum. “Memorizing the encyclopedia” might be a harsh characterization, but some die-hard core-curriculum advocates would not object to it.

The question is, when you take the church and state out of education and replace it with a free market, what would the curriculum be? The answer is whatever the market decides, that is, whatever the parents and students decide they want to pay money for. Just like what we find in the automobile market. The parallel question is, what would cars be like if we let the free market decide? Well, we have a (relatively) free market in automobiles today, so we have big cars, small cars, fast ones, expensive ones, cheap ones, etc. We have an enormous variety of cars but most of us do have cars and we manage to get around town and country without much hassle. Actually, with considerable satisfaction. (Those of us who don’t have cars choose other means of transportation, including walking.)

The core curriculum is a one-size-fits-all strategy and assumes that someone—an education czar or panel of education experts—knows what is best for our children. In automobiles, this strategy would give us one design, one engine, one type of tire, interior, color, etc. Maybe a modest variety of styles—two or three at most—but none that the market actually wants, only what the “experts” think they should want. In education, thoughts of letting parents and children choose what they want unleashes panic screams from the core curriculum crowd about how parents will seek out all sorts of weird ideas, or perhaps not educate their children at all, and the children will go for easy A’s and no homework. The assumption guiding the notion of a core curriculum remains that only one institution, the government, can require such a curriculum and that at the point of a gun.

A little history shows that force does not need to be brought into the curriculum debate. Hellenistic Greece is the origin of our current three-part structure broken into primary, secondary, and higher education. Governments in the ancient world rarely interfered with the educational process. Fathers paid teachers to educate their sons. The curriculum? Greeks called it enkyklios paideia or general education. Romans translated it at as artes liberalis or liberal arts. Today, we might also call this an education in western civilization. Higher education in the ancient world split into two factions that we still have to this day: professional education (rhetoric, medicine, law) versus knowledge for its own sake (philosophy). Weird ideas and easy A’s? There were mystery cults but they did not dominate the education system. And there was no grading, examination, or credential system at all. That is a product of the medieval guilds and the rise of modern bureaucracy.

Another assumption of the core curriculum advocates, especially those who would require specific textbooks and lectures on western civilization, is that the students who are coerced to be in those classroom seats would actually read the book and listen to the lectures. It is obvious to anyone who teaches in the present system that many, and sometimes most, do not do this even in elective courses. The coercive, bureaucratic environment of modern education kills interest in all but the strongest, most purpose-driven students.

Let the parents decide. Let the students decide. Summerhill and Sudbury Valley Schools have amply demonstrated how wide-ranging freedom and learning guided by interest can lead to a satisfying education for one’s chosen purpose in life (1, 2, 3, 4). The students’ education in these schools may not match the pristine dictates of the core curriculum advocates, but it does match the students’ needs and wants. That’s what capitalism is all about.

And that brings us to the “weird ideas” that core curriculum advocates fear. The problem is that “weird” depends on who you are talking to. Some fear that atheism might be taught to the young. Others fear that it might be religion. Others fear capitalism and the greedy, selfish profit motive being taught. Still others fear communism will become the core curriculum.

And therein lies the heart of the issue. Core curriculum advocates want to control the minds of the young with their particular ideas. They want their ideas to rule. When enforced by the government, however, there is only one name that can be given to the core curriculum: censorship. It forces out or removes to the margin all other ideas. Students’ and the students’ parents do not get to choose.

Let the market decide.

The Importance of Philosophy to a Successful Business Career

Understanding the broad abstractions of ethics and epistemology can instill confidence in one’s work life. Such understanding is especially helpful in a business career, not for the purpose of preaching to co-workers, employees, or customers, but to maintain clear thoughts about what is right and wrong in decision making and to correctly perceive facts in complicated situations.

Most ethical issues in business center on honesty. For example, a boss might say to a young worker, “Tell the customer it’s on the truck,” when in fact the order has not yet been processed. The assumption is that the company will scramble to get the order on the truck before a major delay occurs and customer dissatisfaction results. The problem with this stretching of the truth is that as days, weeks, months, and years go by it often gets stretched further and further from reality leading to “what the customers don’t know won’t hurt ‘em.” This can eventually culminate in an Enron or Bernard Madoff scenario. Such is the importance of honesty in a business career.

Telling the truth is the simplest solution to business problems even if it results in being yelled at or temporarily losing business. It is far better than living a life of fakery. The tricky part about honesty is that lying and dishonesty are not the same. Honesty does not require truth telling under threat of force. A misdirection lie to deceive a potential thief of the whereabouts of your money is quite honest and moral. Everyone has a right to self-defense. Everyone also enjoys a right to privacy—no one, for example, has a right to your financial situation. A negotiator might ask, “Tell me the truth. What is your rock bottom price?” or “Is this [specific amount] your final price?” You may properly respond evasively or with an incorrect specific price. This is not game playing or bluffing; it is sound, ethical decision-making.

Bribery is an omnipresent issue in the press and in discussions of business ethics. It also is an issue of honesty—because of the deception that occurs—but it is compounded by its similarity to a number of other concepts that it too often is not differentiated from. Epistemology, particularly the theory of definition, can help clarify this.

Most bribes involve a payment of money or offer of gift to influence others. But so does a perk, a grease payment, extortion, subornation, and a commission or broker’s fee. And then there is the gift of candy to children, often called a bribe, to get them to clean their rooms. How are these to be distinguished from each other? The rules of definition say that our concepts must be classified in terms of genus and differentia, that is, concepts must be put into a broad category first, then differentiated from the other items that are similar to the one being defined. This is the situation we have with bribery.

The genus of all the concepts in the previous paragraph is a payment or gift to influence others. The differentia of each does the clarifying. A perk is an above-board prize that accompanies one’s job, such as a tip or company car. “Above-board” means it is not covert or secretive. A grease payment is a modest incentive to induce foot-dragging bureaucrats to perform their normal duties. Extortion is a demand for payment under threat of force, whereas subornation is a covert payment to persuade someone to ignore or violate the law, rules, or one’s ethics. A commission or broker’s fee is payment for a job well done, such as a closed sale. The candy given to children? It’s just an incentive to action. To call it a bribe is metaphorical extension of the original concept.

So what is a bribe? Most similar to subornation, it is a covert payment designed to undermine a relation of trust. A sales rep, for example, offers an extra payment to a buyer, unbeknownst to the owner of the buyer’s company, in exchange for a contract. The deceit and breach of trust occurs by cheating the owner of the buyer’s company. Bribery is a precise concept that should not be slung around lightly and applied to all of these other actions. It is a specific type of unsavory behavior that, when not understood clearly, becomes applied to and confused with decent, respectable outcomes, such as perks, commissions, and parental management of children. Such is how philosophy, particularly epistemology, can parse complicated issues.

The resulting clarity inspires strength and conviction that paying a perk, commission, or maybe even making a grease payment are not unsavory behavior.

The most important place in which philosophy can instill confidence in one’s work life in business is in the understanding of self-interest as moral and in the guiltless acceptance and promotion of the profit motive of capitalism. For a wealth of resources on these issues, I refer readers to the works of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises.

Ignorance versus Dishonesty

A line from the 1980 movie Coal Miner’s Daughter has the young and upcoming country music singer Loretta Lynn saying something like “I’m ignorant, not stupid.” The distinction—lack of knowledge versus lack of intelligence—is significant not just for the ignorant person’s self-esteem and confidence to move up in the competitive world, but also as a matter of justice in how others, especially the more highly educated, view such a person who arises from humble beginnings. Unfortunately, some of the more highly educated who themselves have come up from within the ranks do not maintain the distinction when judging their former peers who have not become so accomplished.

A similar distinction can be made between lack of knowledge and knowingly and willingly lying or cheating. A similar lack of perspective—or quickness to condemn—among the more highly educated can also be observed when judging the actions of the less knowledgeable. This became clear recently in a discussion thread among professors in response to a Chronicle of Higher Education news blog about plagiarism. The post reported how one university is instituting a grade lower than F, the “FD,” for academically dishonest students. Over 90% of the 46 comments gleefully cheered the toughness and alleged justness of the act, including one, protected only by Internet anonymity, suggesting that the firing squad be brought back.

Whether this last was sarcasm, steam letting, or Internet silliness is not worth dwelling on, as most comments ignored the possibility that some or many students just might not know how to cite, quote, and paraphrase properly when writing papers. This indeed is the conviction of Brian Martin, who wrote in the Journal of Information Ethics, fall 1994, “Students are apprentices, and some of them learn the scholarly trade slowly.” Martin’s conviction quickly became mine several years ago when I began using an Internet-based plagiarism detection service. Students who say, “You mean a reference is needed even though I put the material in my own words?” and “I didn’t know that that needs to be in quotation marks,” are not dishonest. Far from using the service to catch cheaters, I now use it to teach techniques of the “scholarly trade.”

My students may be a special case because many are first-generation college students. They are not as worldly-wise as those who come from more highly educated families, which means many are ignorant of the ways of citing, quoting, and paraphrasing. Not knowing how to do something, however, and proceeding to do it incorrectly does not make one dishonest. That students should have learned the skills, as professors are quick to point out, in some previous course and did not, perhaps earning a passing grade of D- , does not make them knowledgeable and therefore dishonest in the present. It often means that professors are frustrated over not having students who are as knowledgeable as they are and instead of exhibiting the patience to teach them, some professors go on the offensive to condemn.

Such attitudes of professors reminds me of the cartoon showing a boy holding a report card with an F on it and saying to his teacher, “Which one of us has truly failed?” In a free market sales reps are graded by their customers, not the other way around. And since in a free market in education teachers would be sales reps of knowledge and ideas (or peddlers of ideas), the message of the cartoon is accurate. Teachers need to be teachers, rarely moralists.

There are many reasons why someone may not know what is right or wrong in a particular situation. The bureaucratic state that we live in today, including the state-run schools and universities, erects all kinds of unnatural barriers and confusion to the accomplishment of our goals. Its myriad rules and regulations make it nearly impossible to know what is right according to the bureaucrats, and students are caught in the middle of the kaleidoscope.

Throw in psychology, whether it be rationalization or evasion, selective memory and selective perception, exaggeration or literal mindedness, along with the entire cumulative nature of the formation of character, and you have a very difficult task of discerning willful, knowledgeable deceit from ignorance. The ignorance may be self-created, as in a life of evasion, but how can the judge know in the present what is the cause of an action or statement? Due diligence in gathering information and patience before passing judgment seem to be the sensible response.

Someone may step on my toe by accident or on purpose. Either way I am likely to yell. Prudence calls for patience before further judgmental action is taken.

The Ethics of Accreditation

Educational accreditation is unethical because it is government-initiated coercion to control the production and distribution of education. In the United States the control is indirect; in most other countries it is direct. Accreditation also infringes academic freedom, though that concept itself is a mixed product of government involvement in education.

Accreditation is the process of certifying a minimum level of quality in schools and colleges. A first, simple question arises. Who accredits the accreditors? Who certifies the certifiers? Or, as Ayn Rand and others have put it more generally: who protects us from our protectors? The statist assumption is that experts in the government know what is best for us because they are not motivated by the selfish profit motive. As consequence, they should have the final say on quality. This ignores that Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor applies equally, albeit inversely, to bureaucrats who proclaim their goals as serving the “public interest” when in fact the behavior invariably is led “as if by an invisible hand” to benefit the special interests that lobby them.

The first one hundred years of American public education were dominated by one special interest, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, at the expense of Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, and, often, women, plus other ethnic groups and religious and philosophical persuasions. Today, public education is dominated by the special interests of political correctness. And it has always been dominated by the premise that the omnipotent government knows best.

Who determines quality in the free market? The market! That is, all the people who participate in the process of producing, buying, and selling goods and services. Ultimately, it is determined by the value judgments of consumers through their repeated buying of products they like and abstention from buying of products they do not like. Entrepreneurial competition and the pursuit of selfish profit over time leads to better and better products that better meet the needs and wants of consumers. The same would apply in a free market in education, if such existed.

Accreditation at the university level in the United States consists of seven “natural monopolies” that regulate higher education in a particular region of the country and many specialized agencies that govern specific programs, such as health or business education. Accreditation is “voluntary” (and therefore indirect) in the sense that no school or program is required to go through the approval process, but not having such approval severely restricts the availability of government money for student loans and other uses. All accrediting agencies must be approved by the US Department of Education. This is what puts them into the government-initiated coercion category. “Cartel” and “licensing monopoly” are appropriate descriptions that come to mind. That most education is provided by the government reinforces the ethical issue. Privately funded and controlled education in other countries is extremely rare, if non-existent altogether.

In contrast, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a market-based means of validating the quality claims of the magazine’s advertisers. Very early, however, the Seal of Approval came under the watchful eye of government oversight. Similarly, Underwriters Laboratories began as a market-based testing and certifying organization, but today its operations must be approved by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Academic freedom is a pretense at protecting free-speech rights. In a free-market—in education or anything else—the entrepreneur has the right to hire and fire at will anyone he or she disagrees with. The fired employee is then free to hang out his or her own shingle to start a new business. In the practice of government-owned and -controlled educational institutions, academic freedom means the freedom to speak and write within the narrow confines of what the government approves. Accreditation contributes to this narrowness by specifying the requirements of “academic qualification,” such as the possession of certain degrees or diplomas and the publication of a certain number of papers within a certain period of time. That the entire process is one of bean counting and hypocritical is readily acknowledged. That it ignores that science does not progress strictly through one flawed form of publication, such as the peer-reviewed journal article (1, 2), or in five-year cycles is shrugged off as irrelevant.

In practice accreditation is a good ol’ boy network of deans and retired professors. Universities court them, produce enormous mounds of paper every five years, and jump through hoops to win their anointments. Being accredited keeps the government money flowing. That is what accreditation is all about.

On Extrinsic Motivation, Bureaucracy, and the Stage-Mother Syndrome

Carrot and stick motivation, especially the latter, as opposed to communication, persuasion, and appeals to inner values, are alive and well in today’s world. The question is, why are such extrinsic sources of motivation so common? A number of reasons can be given.

For example, in the academic world of professorial tenure, faculty can almost never be fired. As a result, some administrators and chairs resort to stick tactics such as making meetings “mandatory,” providing sign-in sheets to yield evidence that faculty attended, and reciting stories like “back when I started to work in business, I said ‘yes sir!’ when the boss requested something of me.” None of these work and they certainly do not endear the administrators or chairs to faculty. In rare cases, professors have been docked a day’s pay for not attending a meeting or returning from a conference a day late. Needless to say, this tactic is even less endearing. Why do administrators and chairs feel they must wield these sticks?

The easy answer is that people tend to do what they were taught by their parents and significant others. And extrinsic, coercive methods of motivation continue to dominate our culture. But the academic world, especially the state-run university, is bureaucratic. Its management is top-down with myriad rules and regulations to guide lower-level decision making. Bureaucracy is the means by which government bureaus are run. In contrast, business management is bottom-up with policies derived from the needs and wants of paying customers and the requirements of making a profit. Employees are often viewed metaphorically as intermediate customers who perform valued services for management. Coercing and talking down to employees can lead to unhappy customers and unpleasant bottom lines. The profit motive, an extrinsic source of motivation for entrepreneurs, ironically encourages appeals to inner values in employees.

Bureaucracy encourages a legalistic, rule-bound mentality. It says, in effect, you can only do what has been codified. This leads to the generation of hundreds of thousands of rules and laws to control behavior, coupled with the impossible-to-follow proviso that ignorance of the law is no defense. This is why the bureaucratic state has become the modern form of dictatorship, a system of excessive law. A truly free society, on the other hand, says you can do whatever has not been codified, i.e., you can do whatever you choose provided you do not violate the rights of others. Rules and laws are few and they are abstract principles. Communication, persuasion, and appeals to inner values become the primary means of relating to others. Intrinsic motivation is allowed to develop.

In addition to the external structure of bureaucracy as spur to extrinsic, especially stick motivation, an insecure psychology has to be another source. Local organizations, such as youth sports leagues, that issue edicts to parents that meetings or practices are mandatory, vacations are expected to be given up for sake of the sport, and games may be forfeited if a snack-bar work commitment is not met, are certainly pushing the limit of respectful communication among adults. Not that one should issue such edicts to children either.

The question is, why do the leaders of these organizations talk to other adults this way? The easy answer again is probably that they do not know better, as they have never learned alternative communication techniques. But for some the reason may be deeper, a psychological need to live the sport through one’s children to compensate for their own failings in the sport earlier in life. It is called achievement by proxy. As a result, such stage mothers or fathers—little league parents—push everyone hard, especially themselves and their children, and they brook no excuses for failing to make practice or the snack bar. Nothing is more important than the sport and they assume everyone else should have the same values. They become blind to the needs of others, especially the needs of their children.

The push for longer and longer seasons for younger and younger children, along with an apparent obliviousness to youth injuries, probably stems from this compulsive psychology. But then a similar psychology also probably operates in some (or many) bureaucrats who seem to need to prove something about themselves by issuing new edicts—new rules or laws. The more rules or laws with their names on them, the better they feel. And stick motivation seems to be all they know.

Extrinsic motivation can have its place in appropriate situations, but an excessive use of it, especially the stick part, often becomes a power trip. Appeal to inner values is the better way to go.

The Epistemology of Ethics, Salesmanship, and Basket Weaving

In a previous post I said that teachers are peddlers of ideas who must sell their wares as much as any other sales rep or entrepreneur. The process by which soap and ideas are sold is essentially the same. The method is persuasive communication and the purveyors of both can be honest or dishonest. There is nothing unique to the theory of salesmanship that makes sales reps more prone to dishonesty than teachers, and teaching in a free market is salesmanship.

In this post I would like to make a similarly iconoclastic statement about three apparently disparate fields, namely that ethics, salesmanship, and basket weaving are all applied sciences. The first anomaly, according to many hard core philosophers and scientists, is that I would dare to call any of these fields a science. The second is that I would dare to lump them together with equal epistemological standing. Let me take these one at a time.

In its broadest sense, science studies reality—not just the physical, but also the mental—and aims to describe it accurately and provide guidelines for human choices and actions. In this sense philosophy is the science of all sciences, because it identifies the broadest abstractions about reality and provides the broadest guidelines for the rest of the special sciences. The special sciences, whether physics, engineering, medicine, or basket weaving, must be consistent with the more general sciences, but they in turn describe their own areas of reality and provide guidelines for choice and action to achieve specific goals in those realms.

To explain and predict are said today to be the two aims of science. Explanation, however, implies prediction. If a ball is described as round, for example, the description predicts that the ball will roll. This positivist view of science as explanation and prediction leaves values out completely. Values are guides to action. If a ball is to be thrown accurately to a target, then it is valuable for the hand, arm, and rest of the body to move in a certain way. A scientist of ball throwing prescribes which actions have to be made in order to achieve the goal of hitting a target. To live a healthy and moral life, scientists of nutrition and ethics also prescribe certain actions that must be taken to achieve the respective goals. There are two aims of science, but they are to explain and guide. Guidance specifies a goal and the actions necessary to reach the goal. All value theories are sciences of guidance. This applies equally to ethics, salesmanship, and basket weaving. (For doubters about basket weaving as a science, a Google search generates millions of hits and refers the searcher to an enormous literature describing the principles of basket weaving.)

Value theories are applied “how to” sciences and are just as factual as any so-called hard or descriptive physical science. Value theories describe how to get things done. Ethics describes how to live the good life, salesmanship describes how to sell products, and basket weaving how to make baskets. Nothing could be more factual than that, which makes all of these fields as scientific as physics, chemistry, or biology.

For that matter, epistemology is also a how-to discipline, since its aim is to describe how we know what we know and then, on the basis of that knowledge, to prescribe how to improve our ways of knowing. As a result, there is no difference in essential methodology used by epistemology and ethics, or ethics and salesmanship, or salesmanship and basket weaving. They all use the same approach to identifying the concepts and principles that constitute their particular subjects of study. The only relevant difference among all of these disciplines is level of abstraction. The concepts and principles of epistemology and ethics are far more abstract than those of salesmanship and basket weaving.

Putting on an air of superiority simply because one works in an area of greater abstraction smacks of what Robert Fuller would call rankism (1, 2). Science is science and applied science is applied science. As much can be learned from blue-collar workers who love their jobs and approach them with attention to subtle detail as one can learn from college professors who work in the stratosphere of theoretical concepts and principles. In many cases one can learn more from blue-collar workers than from professors, because the latter are too often caught up in their own jargon to be able to relate it to the lay person. And some professors all too often have no desire to relate their work to the lay person. But everyone today in our knowledge economy holds, or should hold, equal epistemological standing in the generation and application of knowledge.

One does not pay plumbers so much for what they do as for what they know. That makes plumbers, basket weavers, sales reps, and ethicists all fellow professionals.

Life in Three-Quarter Time

This post is a paean to the arts, especially music, and especially the three-quarter time signature. In music, three-quarter time means that the rhythm of the music is played in a pattern of three beats to the bar, instead of the more common four, and usually with emphasis on the first. It is the rhythm of the waltz and carries with it a lilting, cheerful disposition. It is the seemingly silky smoothness of two dancers masterfully floating and turning across the floor to a Viennese waltz. To the listener and viewer, it is the expression and symbol of effortless joy.

In contrast, work, or labor, is not effortless, though it may be enjoyable. To be sure, the dancers and musicians who portray this effortless joy have spent hours and years perfecting their craft. The end result of their efforts is the effect the craft has on the consumers of music and dance. That effect is pure emotion, a child-like not-a-care-in-the-world fun. The effect of art is to enable us to experience this carefree joy and thereby to rest and refuel in order to carry on with life’s labors. The three-quarter time signature in music does this to me par excellence.

In a larger perspective, life in three-quarter time represents the ability to perform the tasks of one’s daily life, in both family and career, in a manner that expresses effortless joy. Not that the tasks are effortless, but that the enjoyment in performing the tasks is uninhibited by what to some appear to be enormous obstacles. These obstacles are usually mental rather than physical, such as feelings of drudgery when going to work every day or hassles and conflicts of dealing with family, bills, and chores, etc. Everyone experiences these barriers to some degree and at some times. The person who lives in three-quarter time, however, is inspired by the prospect of daily obstacles and views the challenges as opportunities with which to have more fun in life.

The impetus for this post was a recent experience my wife, daughter, and I had that enabled us to witness fifteen or so twenty-something singers, actors, and dancers who exhibited and projected life in three-quarter time. We attended a regional production of a Broadway musical and were allowed to tag along with a high school class that interviewed the performers afterward. The exhilaration and relaxed confidence of these young performers, especially right after a two-and-a-half hour staging, were obvious. Despite the fact that a show business life can be grueling with audition after audition (and rejection after rejection), every one of these performers exhibited what I call the spirit of three-quarter time. To observe it on stage and in person was a treat; it enabled us to live in three-quarter time for those few hours. That the music and memories of the performance keep playing in our minds two weeks later only adds to the experience.

It is a rare person who knows what he or she wants to do in life at an early age. It is equally rare to find someone who feels about his or her job, “I have so much fun in what I do—I’m amazed they pay me to do it!” Yet, this is precisely what these young performers exhibited and, in some cases, admitted. It is this early and untainted, anxiety-less certainty of what one wants to do in life that enables a person to overcome barriers as if they were not even there and to work tirelessly and without any evidence of labor in the many hours and years required to achieve a goal. Though actually working very hard, the appearance and, often, psychological feeling of such a person is that of floating and turning through life to a waltz.

While not everyone can regularly achieve or directly experience the spirit of life in three-quarter time, and the young performers my family and I observed may not be able to maintain it throughout their lives, nearly everyone can experience the general feeling vicariously through art, either as performer or consumer. For me it is most often achieved through music, especially the three-quarter time signature.

I do have other associations in music with three-quarter time, but they are a bit more technical: the quarter-note triplet and harmony in major thirds. They evoke in me the same feeling as three-quarter time, but perhaps they should be a topic for another day.

Why the World Is Not Going to Hell in a Basket

One of the unfortunate diseases of older age is the tendency to pessimism or even cynicism. Nostalgia for the good old days is rampant, with complaints about how the young don’t know what we knew at their age and how they are so ill-mannered and unworldly. When generalized to the political and cultural arenas, Armageddon is said to be imminent. For advocates of capitalism and admirers of Ayn Rand, it sometimes becomes a prediction of a new Dark Age.

I wish to take exception to these dire prophecies and venture an alternative scenario. One argument for the coming Dark Age is the analogy that is drawn between the twentieth and third centuries. The third century AD in the Roman Empire was a century of inflation (1, 2, 3); so was the twentieth century in the modern world, including the United States. In the Roman Empire, it was a century of war, chaotic leadership by ineffective emperors, and collapse of cultural institutions. Similar statements are made about the twentieth century of wars, chaos, weak leadership, and cultural collapse. The third century AD paved the way for the barbarians and ultimate collapse of ancient civilization. Obviously, the cynics conclude, we are headed in the same direction.

The decline of ancient Rome is a fascinating topic. I see the beginning of its end occurring about 150 BC, when Greek slaves were brought to Rome to educate the children of aristocrats. These Greek slaves were influenced mostly by the philosophy of Stoicism, the notion of turning away from the material world, and the Romans fell in love with the view. With Stoicism tapping into what apparently was an existing sense of life among Romans, the path was then prepared for Christianity and its turning-away view. By the fourth century AD, Paulinus of Nola, a Roman senator of great wealth and property simply renounced the material world and retreated to an austere, monastic life. In symbolic, if not actual, form ancient civilization sought refuge in the monastery. Turning away from material civilization is not a characteristic of contemporary culture or philosophy.

In the title essay of her book For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand said that Descartes reintroduced the Witch Doctor into modern philosophy, thus setting up an opposition between the material and spiritual that exists to this day. This opposition gave rise to Kant’s subjectivism and the resurgence of mysticism, which, Rand says, will lead to a new Dark Age.

I disagree with this interpretation. Based on conversations with my wife, philosopher Linda Reardan, I would say that Descartes made a valiant effort to bring consciousness down to earth—God being the metaphor of consciousness—and the entire modern and contemporary periods in philosophy have been an attempt to integrate consciousness into the material world and to naturalize it. There has not been a complete success, but this notion is at the root of my interpretation of John Dewey’s epistemology and the comment in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (p. 70) that the rejection of intrinsicism in philosophy began “if only as a glimmer” in the late nineteenth century. Philosophy, I conclude, has been progressing, albeit not always in a straight line.

And viewing historical progress as requiring a straight line is surely a prescription for pessimism and cynicism. The Magna Carta was signed in 1215, but it was another six centuries before the Age of Enlightenment and the American Bill of Rights came into existence. In between there was the Black Death that wiped out as much as half of Europe’s population and the Hundred Years’ War, among other atrocities, yet the spirit to live and better ideas survived throughout that period to give us the world we have today. My notion of optimism derives from taking a very long view of civilization—centuries long. I do not expect life to improve much, if at all, in the next four years of the current presidential administration. I do not expect the current (or previous) administration to be the indicator of the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. I see the twentieth and maybe even the twenty-first centuries to be a blip in the progress of civilization. My optimism in no small part is also aided by a commitment to avoid condemning someone merely for espousing ideas with which I disagree.

Good—meaning rational—ideas win out in the long run. The ancient Greeks suffered a Dark Age from about 1200 to 800 BC. When they obtained the Phoenician alphabet and learned to write, they immediately recorded their entire oral tradition, paving the way for the golden age of Greco-Roman civilization. When moveable type was invented in the fifteenth century, every extant written work that could be found was, within a hundred years, published in permanent form, making education of the masses possible. The current century is proving to be the age of digitization, the aim of which is to make every written work in existence available in electronic form. The advantages of this cannot begin to be imagined.

The twentieth century produced two enormously destructive wars, but they did not silence either Ludwig von Mises or Ayn Rand. Their ideas now flourish—not on the front pages of leading newspapers or on nightly newscasts, but they are making their way through our culture. As I frequently tell my daughter, patience is a virtue. I may not in my lifetime see any significant intellectual change in our culture, and my daughter may not see much of a change either. But barring a meteor strike that wipes out ninety-five percent of all living species—and that assumes the destruction of all paper and electronic literature—the will to live will win out and civilization will continue.