Final Paper

2018 FINAL PAPER

The beginning and the end are the hardest parts of any activity. The very laws of physics support this proposition, though every human being can confirm it for him- or herself. When you are in the middle of something, you often find it to be less arduous than you had anticipated before starting, and it can be difficult to find contentment when the time comes for stopping. This first paragraph, of this final reflection, carries the distinct burden of being both a beginning and an end. Like all of my most important essays, I am writing this by hand. I am outside, as the weather seems to have finally caught up to the calendar. And I am feeling simultaneously young and old in a way that can only come from deep reflection on a year of extraordinary experiences.

“I wanted to bounce a couple thoughts off you in terms of education.” Thus began a conversation that changed the world. Or at least my world. Years later, now, I am amazed to look back and see just how much has been done since I first read those words. Here I am, finishing off a year that I spent as a full-blown research coordinator of the greatest program to ever exist at Guilderland High School, a program that I have helped design and guide and operate. This year I met and advised some amazing students doing amazing things, wrote over a hundred thousand words developing my own theory of being human, and did so much thinking and so much learning about educational theory and practice that I doubt one book could contain it all. This has truly been the best year of my life so far, and I am so incredibly thankful to Mr. Bott and Mrs. Gergen (and the shadowy administrators behind them) for allowing me this opportunity to do such important and satisfying work. 

My real project this year has been to work with the other coordinators to guide the E=mc2 program itself, and the students within it. But I also had a project within E=mc2, which had a smaller audience than even the students’ projects, but was important to me nonetheless. Originally, this project was supposed to serve as an example, a model that students could look to when they were trying to figure out what a journal looked like, or how to progress from research to production. To that end, it was supposed to be done over the summer, and be ready for display by the time school started this year. Unfortunately, I hold myself to a very high-quality level of work, and I could not finish in the three months of summer (working two full-time jobs and training for a marathon also had a lot to do with the slow progress). 

Once it became clear that my project would not be finished in time to be of use to anyone, there came a temptation to discard it entirely. But I decided instead to keep going, to do my project just as the students were doing their projects. Part of this was based on a half-baked notion of fairness and respect; if I was asking students to write 50 journals and complete several Self-Designed Assignments and create something new from the knowledge they collected, I should at least ask the same of myself. Indeed, all of the coordinators started out the year with blogs of their own, with the idea to journal their thoughts like the students were supposed to. It seems, however, that I was the only one to really follow through, probably just because I had a topic to write about, a purpose behind my writing.

Originally, my topic was “Free Market Environmentalism,” and the goal was to show how climate change could actually be a good thing if we started thinking about it as an opportunity rather than as a catastrophe. I actually think that I created a solid foundation for such an argument. Indeed, the core of the argument is all there. Climate change is, as the name implies, a change in man’s external conditions that requires a response. This response would, of course, take the form of human action, which is the subject of study for economic science. Climate change, therefore, has a physical explanation, but is an economic problem. And, since the subjectivists have shown that economics is predominantly a matter of the human mind, it seemed to me that simply changing our perspective on climate change might go a long way towards eliminating its perceived harmful effects. After all, economic goods and economic bads are not inherently good or bad; they are classified as such by the human mind in the course of economic activity. If we could discover ways to harness climate change for our benefit, we could reclassify it as an economic good and no longer live in fear of the changes it will bring.

Once it came time to assemble hard data rather than explore interesting ideas, however, I lost some interest in my project. This has always been my tendency; I am an ideas man. I am a disciple of logic, a crafter of arguments, a creature of philosophy. I had no desire to dive into the piles of statistics that my environmentalism project was leading towards. So, in order to maintain my passion and level of effort, I changed my topic in November, broadening it into a general theory of being human. All of my work before then could actually be considered a solid contribution to such a theory, but the new topic allowed me the freedom to explore many things that I could not previously, when my topic was more narrow. This year, I had begun my research for my project over the summer by reading Ludwig von Mises’ great treatise, Human Action, which is about so much more than economics (or, rather, encompasses the true scope of economics), I was asked by a student for a review of different schools of epistemological thought (which ultimately resulted in a ten thousand word answer that created a host of new questions), and I was dedicating substantial time to another student’s project on religion, free will, and morality. As a result, I was doing a lot of thinking about deeper issues; changing topics gave me an excuse to do more reading and writing in the areas these thoughts led, which I have found quite satisfying and valuable. 

My theory of being human is spelled out with some specificity in my journals, and I do not want to spend too much time repeating it here. Briefly, my theory had three main parts: (i) an exposition of the human condition, our world of ever-present scarcity and constant change; (ii) a exploration of what makes human beings unique in this world, our imaginations and purposeful action; and (iii) an application of these things to some topics that my students were studying, like morality and education. This paper is not about my theory of being human, so the theory will not be exhibited here. However, this paper is about my own learning and growth throughout the year, so I do wish to discuss some things that I learned in the process of developing the theory.

The first lesson, alluded to above, was something that I was already superficially aware of, but was driven home through my epistemological studies: the extent to which human life is a product of the human mind. While I came away from my forays into various theories of reason unconvinced of the validity of any a priori categories of human knowledge, I do think it indisputable that the world we see around us is just as much a product of the human mind’s interpretation of our external conditions as it is of the external conditions themselves. Iron ore, for example, is nothing more than a particular arrangement of atoms until the human mind recognizes, categorizes, and classifies that arrangement as iron ore. Our observations of the external world are actually just our interpretations of the external world. Our classification of certain objects as economic goods or bads is really just a subset of our classification of certain objects as trees and roads and garbage. This reality of the human experience implies that so much of our lives are actually happening in our heads. The extra qualities that distinguish human life from the rest of the universe are totally internal, nothing more than the special abilities of our human minds. Any sense of meaning or purpose in the universe is imposed upon it by the human minds observing and acting in it. 

This lesson came to me just in time to support Alex’s discovery of the distinguishing feature of man, which I helped him realize was not just reason per se, but also our imagination. Other philosophers have labelled purpose, or action, as the distinguishing feature of man, and I agree with them. But purposeful action is just an effort to transform one’s external conditions to suit oneself better, and one needs a vision of more suitable conditions in order to be dissatisfied with current conditions and to be able to act purposefully, with an end-goal in mind, to change those conditions into something better. Human beings alone have the ability to see things unseen, to imagine alternative worlds, and to then act so as to bring these imagined worlds into reality. Humans alone are creators. Again, this indicates that human beings are the real sources of purpose and meaning in the universe. Seeing objects as means and generating the idea of ends is a phenomenon of the human mind, not of any objective aspect of our material environment. This seriously undermines the materialistic conception of a pre-ordained course of history. Human beings, then, really are special. Critics who like to say that men are just animals, or something to that effect, have failed to grasp the true nature of humanity.

This lesson also led me to realize the importance of ideas in the course of human affairs. If so much of human life is determined by the inner workings of the human mind, than the ideas at work in those human minds will no doubt have a profound effect on human lives. This recognition of the preeminence of ideas was manifest in my first SDA defining capitalism as the natural order of social organization, and other economic systems as just varying levels of human interference with and imposition on the natural workings of the economy. It also formed the basis for my critique of the public response to the events in Charlottesville at the end of the summer: my “defense of Nazis” was really an argument to focus on attacking the ideas of national socialism and white supremacy, rather than the individuals who hold these ideas, since these individuals are not inherently bad, like their ideas are, and therefore are capable of improvement and reconciliation. The importance of ideas also played a role in my discussions of other social institutions, such as religion, morality, law, and education, that help sustain society. And I think that it will continue to play a role in my thinking on educational theory and practice, as all central plans are founded in ideas. 

Other things that I learned, or at least reinforced my knowledge of, included the extent to which human rationality is a result of social processes. I’ve known for a long time that economic progress comes from increasing specialization of labor through an intensifying division of labor. And it would seem to follow that economic progress and prosperity would allow individuals the freedom to live more fully human lives (as their actions would have a greater potential for enacting great changes in their conditions). But this year I learned more that further confirmed the veracity of this proposition. First, the idea that rationality actually depends on the use of cardinal numbers, and that the existence of cardinal numbers in the production (human action) process depends on the existence of a price system and the economic calculation that it makes possible, something that could never exist without many human beings exchanging in trades with each other. Second, the idea that no body of knowledge is ever complete in and of itself, and therefore has something to be gained through the exchange of ideas known as academic argumentation. We all have a complete theory of the world, and when we argue we attempt to defend our theory and attack the theories of others. This interplay can, when the participants are sufficiently humble and genuinely curious, yield new theories derived from the strong points of each contributing theory. All of this showed me how dependent progress and human welfare are on relationships between different human beings.

I learned a great many other things through my work developing my theory of being human this year, but the last one I wish to touch upon here is the idea that the world is constantly changing, and that human beings live in a world of constant change, and, indeed, contribute to its changing. Much of standard economics studies human beings and their actions as though they lived in a static world of equilibrium, or as if the world was always tending towards equilibrium. But there is never any rest. Life involves change. The present emerged from the past and will evolve into the future. This played into a lot of other thoughts and ideas throughout the year: the need for humility in the learning process, the idea that things are never simply black or white, the impossibility of creating a perfect central plan at any level, the possibility of continuous questioning and improvement of other ideas and arguments, etc. To be fully human is to embrace this reality and use it to ensure that the changes are for the better. 

Another thing that I’d like to mention, which wasn’t something that I learned but rather something that changed about me, is my change in focus from the philosophy of Ludwig von Mises and its emphasis on human rationality to the philosophy of Friedrich von Hayek and its emphasis on problems of knowledge and ignorance. This is definitely not a development that I foresaw, especially since I began the year by reading Mises’ magnum opus. I still agree with Mises on the vast majority of his writings, and I still consider him to be the authority on a great many fundamental issues. But at this point, after all the moderation and maturation of my thinking this year, I think that it would be much more accurate to label me a Hayekian rather than a Misesian. Which I actually cringe to write, given my affiliation with the Mises Institute and their clear preference for Mises over Hayek. But I think that Hayek does make subtly different, subtly more powerful points in favor of freedom and philosophical libertarianism. Perhaps it’s my own drift into the more philosophical edges of economic theory. Regardless, it’s a very significant change in my own intellectual development that occurred through my project this year. 

So, that was my project, and those were some of the most valuable and significant things that I learned through my work on the project. Moving forward, I think that I will be incorporating a lot of what I learned and wrote in other projects, but I think that I’m done explicitly developing the theory of being human itself, except in so far as all learning related to human beings is a contribution to such a theory. I wanted this project to culminate in nine hours of classroom lectures, and I am still working on those. One or more of those lecture hours will be delivered to Mrs. Rudolph’s AP students through my annual economics guest lecture. Once those are finished, however, I plan on turning my attention wholly to my education theory, which quite accidentally became a quite comprehensive, nearly fully-developed body of thinking this year. I want to synthesize that and produce some sort of written piece that delivers the most potent message that it can to potential education reformers. Next year I plan on creating a project that studies the history of economic thought from the Marginal Revolution until the Great Recession from an Austrian perspective. So, the theory of being human is now semi-retired. 

However, as I mentioned towards the beginning of this paper, the E=mc2 program itself was kind of like another project of mine, and my work as a coordinator and philosopher of educational theory and practice taught me as much as my project on humanity did. A second theory was developed this year, a potential new philosophy for E=mc2, and as I turn my thinking (and career) more towards education, it is this theory that I am most excited about. So many principles of education have made themselves clear to me this year, principles that are actually applicable to real issues in the world today, principles that can help children in the here and now. Many of these principles I already knew before this year, at least rhetorically, but this year, through my work with E=mc2, I came to truly understand them. Working in the trenches as a coordinator actually obstructed my view of the truth for a long time this year, but it gave me some experiences that I needed in order to take a step back and actually construct a workable framework for education. I’d like to spend the second half of this paper talking about these lessons in educational theory and practice, and reflecting upon the experiences that led to them.

In my very first journal this year, I related my kindergarten experience which began my disillusioned relationship with public education. For many years, my understanding of school’s failings were rough and indistinct, and yet a potent source of rage in my life. My biggest criticism was its lack of importance or rigor, but its biggest offense, in my eyes, was that it did not care about students as individuals. When I first encountered the idea of libertarianism and started learning economics, I added compulsory attendance and lack of competition to public schooling’s list of flaws. I wrote a paper in my last year of high school, my final argument paper in Mr. Hahn’s class, arguing for the privatization of education in the United States, which just about summed up all my thoughts on the issue at the time.

I still remember very clearly walking from my car to my first class on my first day of college. It was a gorgeous day, sometime in late August. I had parked in the Dutch lot, way far away from the Podium, and I was on my way to History of Political Thought with Sean McKeever. I was excited to “think great thoughts” and learn about subject matter that interested me, at a level that would sufficiently stimulate me. I have never been more disappointed by anything than I was by the reality of the college academic experience. It was not interesting. It was not stimulating. It was not difficult in the sense that the material was hard to understand, but it was difficult to drag myself to class and listen to monotonous lectures all day long. I had hoped that college would be different from high school, better. I don’t know why I expected this; logically, it shouldn’t be. But the realization of what college was really like was an absolutely crushing blow to me. There are very few people who know this, but I almost withdrew from the University after my first year. I applied, and received an offer, to be a fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, and I was going to drop out of college altogether. Ultimately, I never made it to Atlanta. I decided to finish college, as I only had one year left, and thereby forever altered the course of my life. But this whole experience did generate a lot of questions for me, like why the education system, K-12 and college, was so bad.

School was easy in college, so I had a lot of time on my hands. I used this time to read a lot, and while I mostly read old economics treatises, I also read a lot of literature on education and education reform. My thinking on the subject had developed quite a bit by the time Bott reached out to me to talk about such ideas, and I’m sure that I surprised him with how prepared I was to answer the questions he posed somewhat out-of-the-blue. In the ensuing years, my study of education and learning continued, especially as it related to my involvement with E=mc2, and by the time I began my work as a real coordinator, I fancied myself to be a self-made expert on education reform. I had written many articles about the best way to learn, about the need for purpose in learning, about voluntary learning systems, about the changing value of educational credentials, about the economic consequences of public education, and about the need for free market innovation and competition in the world of education. A sampling of these articles have appeared on my E=mc2 website this year. Looking back, I think my views as articulated in private correspondence were even better than the articles I published. In short, I had already learned a lot about this topic. And nothing I learned this year was really new from what I already knew coming in, at least rhetorically. What this year provided was an opportunity to connect the pieces of my educational philosophy and truly understand it through my research into humanness, while also challenging me to stay true to my educational philosophy and apply it to my own work as a coordinator.

Like my theory of being human, my educational philosophy is described with some particularity throughout the writings I have published to my E=mc2 website. As briefly as possible, then, my thoughts on education are as follows: Education should be individualized to suit each child. It is most effectively delivered through conversation, not lectures. The relationship between students and teachers is much more important than we typically think.  We should be focusing on developing thinking skills in children, not instilling content that can be accessed with a simple google search. Children need to want to learn in order to really learn. This can be accomplished by instituting a punishment and reward system, but I prefer a voluntary approach wherein children are permitted to explore what they’re passionate about. Children learn by doing, when they have a purpose for doing so. Again, there is a forceful and a peaceful method of facilitating this, and I favor the peaceful one. Education and educators should serve the child, and be grounded on a radical level of respect for him or her. There should be less structure and less prescribed curriculum. Grades don’t help students learn, and, in fact, are unnecessary in a system grounded in respect for the individuality of students. I think kids should spend less time in school, as it tends to warp their minds. I think that education should focus on the development of reason and other uniquely human traits. And I think that the free market is the best vehicle for finding the right type of instruction and program for each student.

At some point this year I encountered a new idea of the purpose behind the education system itself. I doubted the truth of this claim, as it was based on the Marxist belief in material productive forces driving society, but the argument made about purpose and what the system is trying to do to kids remained with me. It wasn’t until I attended an excellent conference on economics that had a great presentation on epistemic barriers to legislation that I realized that the content of the school system’s goal for students was not as important as the fact that the school system had a goal for students, rather than merely respecting and aiding students in the pursuit of their own goals. I see now that the real problem with public schooling is that it is a central plan, which not only is ineffective at accomplishing its goal, but also destroys students’ own agency and imposes limits on their individuality and imagination through enforcement of its own standards. This new theory, of public school being a bad thing because it is a central plan, connected so much of my previous thinking and writing on the subject that it’s ridiculous. For example, in an email I sent to Jonah way back in September, I said that often when we debate privatizing education, “we're trying to figure out how the free market is going to fill a public-school-shaped hole. And I don't know that it would. Or could. Or should. But that's what we're looking for, and that's what we're trying to get when we allow private schools to operate. And when I say free-market education, I'm talking about a system that ignores the hole and provides us with something different, something better.” This hole is actually the shape of the central plan. And elsewhere I wrote that public schooling encourages passivity. But this is just lack of agency. Etc. etc.

But I’d like to focus on my own shortcomings in living this philosophy, how I discovered they were shortcomings, how these shortcomings helped me understand my philosophy better, and how I finally managed to embrace this philosophy.

The coordinators started the year by designing a class and a curriculum. Yes, students were given a lot of freedom and flexibility in deciding what they would write in journals and what they would produce in their Self-Designed Assignments. And, indeed, we had several students do unbelievably creative things through their projects due to the freedom that we gave them. But, ultimately, we were giving assignments that students had to roughly follow. And we graded them on these assignments in an effort to show them what skills we wanted them to work on. In short, we screwed up royally, pretty much immediately. I realized the flaw in our plan pretty quickly, in that it didn’t really allow for the fact that kids are different from one another. By the beginning of the second quarter, I had abolished grades in my little corner of the class, and was trying to individualize the schedule and the assignments to fit my students. But I was still trying to be in control.

When Jonah pushed back on the January Day activity, arguing that E=mc2 shouldn’t really be thought of as a class, that he shouldn’t really have any assignments, I had a counterargument all ready for him: “We coordinators are trying to teach you kids something. I don’t see how we can fulfill our obligation to do that without at least reserving the right to give an assignment. Indeed, our authority to do so is practically a priori. We coordinators create the class. Even if we decided to offer a class without any structure or assignments, that would still be our decision. This decision of whether to allow you to become autonomous is still my decision. Even if I grant your request, you would still be operating for the rest of the year at my discretion. So, if I have the inherent right to give my students assignments, then the question is just what assignments should be given. And, if I’ve already made the commitment to not give my students assignments unless I think they would help them achieve their own goals (in your case, a thesis), then it seems that asking you to participate in January Day would not violate any of my first principles.” But this was imposing on Jonah my own idea of how best to accomplish his goal. Very quickly I realized that such an imposition would indeed violate my first principles, that this argument was assuming the validity of a system that I was fundamentally opposed to, and I released Jonah from the requirement of doing any assignment other than his thesis for the rest of the year. This action also helped me take a more nuanced approach with my other students. Noah stopped having to write journals. Alex stopped having to do monthly SDAs. I maintained more control over the other boys, justifying it by saying that they were in the lower-level of the program. But the work I did with them was on a much more voluntary basis. I worked very hard to create a sense of equality in those relationships. For example, I would ask them whether they wanted deadlines for something before giving them deadlines. But there’s probably still more I could have done, though. Maybe I could have found a way to completely release them, too. 

We are all products of the system that we were raised and trained in. The schooled mindset doesn’t just affect students; teachers are also its victims. It’s easy to see that something is wrong with modern-day public schooling. Determining what it is that is wrong is slightly more difficult. Envisioning a real alternative is almost impossible. The coordinators were not ready this year. We didn’t understand the real flaw in education. We designed a program that would help students develop certain critically important skills that were not well taught in other classes, and our purpose in doing so was so that students would develop these skills. We had more noble ideas about education, about how it should be based on questioning, about how it should be student-driven, about how the teachers should not direct but advise their students. But we didn’t know how to create a class around those ideas. We didn’t know what they would look like in practice, as we had never seen them in practice before. When Jonah, after months and months of complete autonomy, turned in a short paper that could hardly be called a thesis, we didn’t know how to respond. We had never pushed our new philosophy so hard and so fast as Jonah was pushing us to go, had never wanted to push it so hard or so fast. Every instinct in us screamed to fail him, as would be the response in any other conceivable class or program or job. Even if we didn’t care about grades, surely failing him could at least teach him a lesson, right? Imagine the intellectual willpower and self-discipline it took to tell ourselves that our job was not to teach him lessons. In tough situations throughout this year, I believe that us coordinators have regularly come to the right decision, even if reaching that decision took more time than it should. But doing so was always incredibly difficult. The program today looks very little like we imagined last June. And that’s great. But it was hard to let go of our dream, our vision, and serve the students’ visions instead.

The purest statement of this aspect of my philosophy, I believe, was in one of my last posts, entitled “Free to Not Learn.” This was something that I had been saying for quite literally years. But it wasn’t until the end of this year that I truly understood what that meant and why it was so important. If E=mc2 was going to be a place where students were free to learn and do amazing things like Feb and Alex and Sagar and Rafi and Ishmam, then it had to also be a place where students were free to not learn. That’s what freedom means. And that’s what true respect for students requires. My philosophy of education requires that I abandon my plan for E=mc2, and just give students the freedom and support they need to learn what they want.

This idea, to abandon a central plan for students’ education, is radical. Practically unheard of. But its value was driven home to me by a few lines in Alex Gugie’s final paper this year. He was explaining how he learned more in E=mc2 than in any other class he’s taken. But then he notes that there’s no way to measure or grade this learning, as he was not following any curriculum. He was creating his project as he went along. Throughout the last few pages, I’ve been pretty hard on myself about my failures in coordinating this class out-of-step with my educational philosophy. But I’ve probably been too harsh; compared to the rest of the world of public schooling, E=mc2 is radically better at providing students with the freedom and respect they need to do incredible and unique things. Alex’s and Feb’s projects are proof of that. Alex’s words in his final paper implied, although unintentionally, that a curriculum in this class would have limited his learning. He would have gotten his 100 pretty easily, and then coasted for the rest of the year. Because his learning would have been molded by my vision, my vision would have limited him. Because his project was built on his own vision, because there was no mold, no external standard or stopping point, he was able to do more than I would have ever asked of him. My own work this year had led me to the conclusion that central plans in education prevented students from becoming fully human by depressing the development of their agency. But Alex had stumbled upon another element to that critique, which was inherent in my more general critique of all central plans, which is that the imposition of one plan and one vision always means the loss of any benefit from the plans and visions of others. 

There’s a lot more that I could talk about here. I did and learned so much this year. I could talk about how the truth that learning must be voluntary, that students must want to learn, was driven home for me this year. I could talk about my perspective on the kids I worked with, and how strange it was to see them do amazing things one minute and then clearly manifest the traits of childhood the next. I could write about the value of questions, or the important role of humility in the learning process, or even just return to a more fuller exposition of the theory of black and white. But to sit here and write out everything I learned or mastered this year would take far too much time. Time that would prevent me from learning more in the present, as I know that there is still so much to learn. It’s time now to turn my attention to the future.

I sincerely hope that all of my students, Feb, Noah, Alex, and even Jonah, learned some of these very important lessons alongside me this year. I hope that they see that I tried my best, and that I grew just as they did. I hope that they understand that I embarked on this exhausting, incredibly rewarding journey for them. It appears that Bott is going to keep me on the staff for next year. He might draw some more lines around my conduct and role, but it seems like I will still have a real opportunity to apply some of these lessons that I have learned this year to next year, and thereby better serve those future students. I have recently been elected to the Guilderland Board of Education, and hopefully I can teach my fellow board members some of these lessons over the next couple years, too. Maybe, just maybe, I can make a difference in the lives of the students in this town by reminding everyone that freedom in education is what it takes to be fully human.