The Street Interview

Would you pass or fail?

Finding compelling writing on Substack is getting to be as hard as finding compelling music on

Bandcamp

. Not to knock well-written articles just because they happen to be on subjects that don't interest me, but the sheer volume is quite overwhelming. And judging by my feed, algorithms don't help.

*Once in a while, however, by happenstance or happy synchronicity, I do come across riveting material, such as Bad Cattitude by El Gato Malo. In a recent essay, Mister Gato jitterbugs on the juggernauting nadir of U.S. public education. The essay contains a video of a street interviewer, which I have transcribed (I'm guessing on the ages of the respondents):

INTERVIEWER: How many days are in one year?
15-year-old BOY: Is it a thousand?
INTERVIEWER: In one year?
BOY: Yeah. Pretty sure it is.

INTERVIEWER: Do you know how many World Wars there were?
19-year-old DUDE: Four? I dunno.
INTERVIEWER: Four, or five?
DUDE: Four.

INTERVIEWER: How many letters are in the alphabet?
50-year-old MAN: Twenty-four?

INTERVIEWER: Do you know how many seasons there are?
28-year-old WOMAN: Twelve. I don't know. Twelve?

Why don't any of these interviewers ever stop me on the street? I would be like:

INTERVIEWER: How many days are in one year?

ME: Which calendar are you referring to? The Julian calendar? The Gregorian calendar? The Roman calendar? The Mayan calendar? The Lunar calendar? The Jewish calendar? The Chinese calendar? The Hindu calendar? The Islamic calendar? There are lots of calendars. Please be specific.

INTERVIEWER: Do you know how many World Wars there were?

ME: That's a matter of opinion. According to most textbooks there were two World Wars, the first one starting in 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The Second World War started in 1939. But many people say we are in World War III right now. Only it's not a war over physical lands, it's a war for control of our minds, bodies, and the resources of the earth. You know, someone once asked Albert Einstein to describe the types of weapons that would be used in World War III. "I don't know," he replied, "but I know what weapons will be used in World War IV: sticks and stones."

[Original quote: "Ich bin (mir) nicht sicher, mit welchen Waffen der dritte Weltkrieg ausgetragen wird, aber im vierten Weltkrieg werden sie mit Stöcken und Steinen kämpfen."]

(from Calaprice, Alice. The New Quotable Einstein. Princeton University Press., 2005, p. 173)

INTERVIEWER: How many letters are in the alphabet?

ME: Which alphabet? There are well over 300. If you're referring to the Latin Alphabet, which is used in English, obviously there are 26 letters. The next most common alphabet would be Arabic, which has 28 characters but they're all consonants. To write vowels you have to make alterations. I think the next most common is Devanagari from India. Sanskrit and over a hundred other languages are based on it. There are 48 primary characters. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, also all consonants. When I used to take Barry Harris’ classes, he would make us recite the alphabet backwards. But don’t get me started on the Spanish alphabet because I still don’t understand if ch, rr and ll are their own characters or not. Though ñ is definitely a separate letter. I think.

INTERVIEWER: Do you know how many seasons there are?

ME: That depends on where you are. North America has four seasons, but in lots of other countries in South America or the Caribbean, there are two: rainy season and dry season. Then places like Siberia, or Southeast Asia, you have a monsoon season, which isn't characterized by its rains but by the wind direction and changes in air pressure. Or in Florida or certain island locations you have Hurricane Season. The Inuit, in the Arctic, have winter and summer, but they divide their spring and fall into early and late. So it depends on where you're talking about.

---

Sadly, I will likely never be interviewed on the street. Anyway, if I did see someone lurking around with a mic and camera I would probably run the other way.

My dad, a chemical engineer and mathematician, once told me about a classmate of his who was a mathematical genius. But this fellow could not pass a math course. He would fail every test. The tests, like most tests, were looking for one 'right' answer. But this genius friend of my dad's would look at the question and immediately see several right answers, depending on what organizing system was used. To him, none of these answers was better than any other. They were just different ways of solving the problem.

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It is indeed a reality that education is geared toward the lowest common denominator. I understand advanced courses in public schools are being phased out, because it just wouldn't be fair if some kids got to take those courses and other kids didn't...and let’s not get started on the ubiquitous removal of arts classes, because then we’d be here all day.

The 2006 movie Idiocracy by Mike Judge is gradually attaining cult status on a par with films like Minority Report, Bladerunner, Divergent, The Thirteenth Floor, Adjustment Bureau and others. The plot of Idiocracy involves a US Army desk job recruit who is assigned to a time travel experiment and wakes up in a future where everyone is an idiot. The soldier, Joe, tries to get help for the symptoms he's suffering after being comatose for a few centuries, but he can't pay his hospital bill and gets thrown in prison. Joe is not the brightest bulb on the tree, but he's a genius compared with everyone else. It's not too hard for him to escape from prison and make his way to the White House. He soon gains notoriety and political power for innovative ideas such as irrigating the crops with water instead of the usual method of using Coca Cola.

The first time I ever came across the idea that education was actually a brainwashing tool was around forty years ago when I saw a cartoon that had a teacher in front of a classroom. I will try to recreate the cartoon: the teacher asks "Who can raise their hand and tell us the purpose of going to school?" One of the students replies "To teach us to be obedient little slaves, to regurgitate useless facts that we will forget the day after the test, to force us to submit to authority, and to teach us not to question anything you tell us."

The recent high school graduate in the street interview above, who did not know how many World Wars there had been, might be surprised to know that while the U.S. theoretically fought against the social control exhibited by their enemy Germany, it later adopted the exact same educational system to control and condition its own youth.

German public education was based on the Prussian system that had been adopted after its defeat at the hands of Napoleon. The idea was to instill training from an early age that encouraged uniform behavior and submission to authority, and discouraged individualism. Only the elite students would rise in rank. 99% would remain at the bottom of the pyramid to do the more menial jobs required in sectors like industry, agriculture, and the military. Some historians attribute the rise of Nazism in Germany to this educational hierarchy.

In 1905 John D. Rockefeller created the General Education Board with the aim of employing the Prussian education model in United States schools.

“In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into men of learning or philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters, great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, statesmen, politicians, creatures of whom we have ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

~ First mission statement of the J.D. Rockefeller-endowed General Education Board in 1906

Naturally the elite finance barons had a vested interest in preventing those of the middle class to infiltrate the financial and political territories of the very rich. This was the whole point of having a General Education Board–get 'em while they're young. Of course there were members of Congress who knew what the elites were up to. As late as 1913, coincidentally the same year the Federal Reserve was created in secret meetings on Jekyll Island, Congress issued the following statement:

“The domination of men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social services of the nation. The giant foundation exercises enormous power through direct use of its funds, free of any statutory entanglements so they can be directed precisely to the levers of a situation; this power, however, is substantially increased by building collateral alliances which insulate it from criticism and scrutiny.”

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of today's hidden agendas is that they are no longer hidden. The strategy seems to echo that of the former Soviet Union, which censored undesirable writings not through suppression, but by allowing all opinions, especially the most ludicrous, to be disseminated. In that way, truly worthwhile ideas were buried beneath a mountain of idiocy. Have we not come full circle?

Whether wielded on social media, consumer platforms or in schools, mindless algorithms have taken over. And as far as following the current trend of selling 'formulas' for creativity, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin:

Those who would give up their own creativity to purchase a little temporary formulaic success deserve neither creativity nor success.

It is painfully obvious that the creative marketplace is anything but a meritocracy. Perhaps it once was, long ago. But as I wrote some years ago in my book For The Curious, the "level playing field" notion that was sold to us when we finally could make our own records and print our own books, was nothing of the kind. Without a staff and a budget, the independent artist remains on a playing field very much tilted in favor of large companies. It's a raked stage, and gravity soon guides all the boxes of your CDs and books right to the edge, where they fall into the orchestra pit that no longer holds an orchestra, and there they lie until you move or have a garage sale, whichever comes first.

They lied to us. And the worst part is, there are still a lot of us that believe the lie.

I try to do my part by warning the young ones, but since all the statues have been destroyed they no longer know our history. And that's how the chorus keeps repeating, ad infinitum, as we vamp the walk-off for the Cosmic Comic.

How much longer are we going to keep accepting terms dictated by those who only wish to exploit us without compensation? Listen, I don't mind being exploited....but pay me! Otherwise all we get is leftovers that aren't even warm.

Well, they say revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

Let's find out.

---

*These are the lyrics to Once in a While (written by Michael Edwards and Bud Green, published in 1937. Curiously, it was Edward's only hit song.) Let's imagine we're addressing The Algorithm, much in the manner that My Funny Valentine was written for a pet parrot. Do you doubt this? Consider the intro to the song:

“Behold the way our fine feathered friend
His virtue doth parade
Thou knowest not, my dim-witted friend
The picture thou hast made
Thy vacant brow, and thy tousled hair
Conceal thy good intent
Thou noble upright truthful sincere
And slightly dopey gent“

All right, that’s enough, on to the show:

DEAR ALGORITHM:

Once in a while, will you try to give
One little thought to me?
Though someone else may be
Nearer your heart
Once in a while, will you dream
Of the moments I shared with you?
Moments before we two
Drifted apart
In love's smoldering ember
One spark may remain
If love still can remember
That spark may burn again
I know that I'll be contented
With yesterday's memory
Knowing you think of me
Once in a while