We study how they lived and thought not to learn how to solve their problems, or even our own, but to learn how to go about solving problems in general. Its a form of meta-knowledge, or learning how to learn.

We can’t design our societies the way the Greeks and Romans did, but we can learn to avoid the mistakes they made, and preserve the insights and triumphs they achieved.

Now that I’m getting older, I am slowly coming to a great realization, a way of looking at the world I lacked as a young man, but that now is starting to become increasingly clear. There is a real world out there, but the world we live in, the one we inhabit, the one that really matters, is largely one of our own creation. It lies inside us, not external to us. We live in a primarily subjective reality. Its not that objective reality is false, its that it is mostly irrelevant.

No, we don’t get to pick and choose what is real and what is not, but we have total and complete control over what really matters to us, and what does not. This is the reality that “political agendas” attempt to dictate for us. They don’t try to tell us what is, they try to convince us what matters. They seek to control us by trying to alter our priorities. This is what the Greeks and Romans knew and what they taught our founders, and what they can teach us.

The Enlightenment broke with the conservative, orthodox Christian dogma of their time precisely because they understood the wisdom of the Pagan past. The Medieval, Renaissance and even Reformation view of the world was regressive, reactionary, it was the Classical thinkers that preceded them who were truly progressive. Democracy, republicanism, humanism and free-thinking deism were already thousand of years old when we rejected the monarchies and theocracies of Europe. Bringing the concepts of the Age of Reason to government was the triumph and genius of the American Revolution.

EXCEPT, they learned how to think, they learned what Great Thinkers in the past had figured out, they learned there are multiple ways to approach problems, they learned their place in the world is only one of many, and so on.

The insistence of immediate relevance to a particular job is the inevitable result of regarding the individual human as a worker and consumer with no other importance. (Guess which political agenda that describes.)

The list is endless.

When I went to school, we were expected to pick up “Data Science” on our own, in industry, or to take a few courses from the Systems Engineering Department. In those days, programming was considered an engineering discipline, or a useful skill for scientists, not part of the business curriculum.

Who wants to study science, anyway? Its hard, and its certainly not kewl. And of course, lending money to students to pay for today’s inflated tuitions has become a booming cottage industry these days, and subsidized by government loan guarantees. Have you seen how they advertise the new brand of private diploma mills these days on TV? Its all about “getting that job”. And the kids in the ads always seem to be black or Hispanic.

There’s a special place in hell for the “educators” behind this obscenity. It all started back when the State Board of Regents was abolished a few years ago, and the professional educators and academics that composed it were replaced by “community business leaders and entrepreneurs”. A friend of mine went to the public ceremony when the new body was invested. One of the speakers, in his address, said “The purpose of the University is not to teach students how to think, but what they need to know.” Presumably, that means “get a marketable job skill business has a shortage of right now”.

From the Wikipedia entry…

“In 2012, the Florida State Legislature created the school, the state’s 12th public university, while dissolving the University of South Florida Polytechnic campus. Florida Poly was created with an entrepreneurial focus, concentrating on the applied, not theoretical, side of the core STEM disciplines.[6]

In a letter that accompanied the signed legislation (SB 1994[7]) creating Florida Poly, Governor Rick Scott noted that Florida Poly, with its strong focus on STEM programs, will be a key component of the State University System of Florida meeting the goals outlined in its 2012-2015 Strategic Plan. The strategic plan requires the State University System to increase STEM degree production from 9,605 to 22,500 per year by 2025.[8]“

“Stem degree production”, indeed. Its become a fucking process, like digestion.

The buzzword is “entrepreneurial”, you can sell anything these days as long as “entrepreneurial” is in the advertising copy. That’s Latin for “If you can’t hack the math, get a STEM degree”.

The State university systems used to be how we educated the children of the working and middle classes. They are rapidly becoming bootcamp for corporate drones, turning out “STEM techs” who can barely do long division or multiply two fractions, and a means for tapping into the billions of guaranteed loan dollars. Not to worry, if we need real chemists, we can always sub out the work overseas.

Man, I’m so glad I never had children.

ER’s pointed out the inherent lunacy of such an “idea.” Data Science is comprised of a mix of existing skills (primarily stats & coding), but its rise as a stand alone discipline will allow a great deal of money to change hands…hence, the idiocy surrounding it.

I’ve used trig in my hobby of navigation more recently but that was strictly for recreation.

But without trigonometry, you can’t do calculus. And without calculus, you can’t do modern engineering and science. Without calculus our technology would still be stuck in the 17th century. There would be no coding because there would be no computers, and computers would not exist because there would be no electronics, because electronics comes from Maxwell’s equations and that is all about differential equations and vector calculus.

Coding, programming, data processing, information technology, whatever you want to call it, is not science, its not even engineering, it barely deserves to be called technology. Its home electrician stuff, shade tree mechanic stuff. An illiterate can learn to overhaul an internal combustion engine, but he can’t design one from scratch because he doesn’t understand the physical processes involved in its operation, or their mathematical description and optimization, except perhaps at the most purely simplistic and elementary level.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a great deal of respect for anyone who can overhaul an internal combustion engine. I know I wouldn’t know where to even start. And I haven’t a clue as to how to do even the most routine house wiring task; I’d probably burn the place down if I tried. But that’s not science, and its not engineering. I’m a good sailor but I’m no naval architect. But I do know enough about both to tell the difference.

Come to think of it, I’ve never used any of my calculus or differential equations except at school. But I’ve never been employed as a real scientist or engineer, either. I was a programmer, and that is just technician work, regardless of my fancy job titles.

Its the classic business major mentality. THEY are the ones who take the risks, make the decisions, show TRUE creativity–what’s the latest buzzword?—Innovation. They see themselves as true generalists, renaissance men, commanders, entrepreneurs, Captains of Industry. People who actually know how to do something are simple minded, narrow, limited–workers. The rest of us are just worker bees, employees. Our skills are interchangeable, plug-in, disposable and replaceable, and we are by nature lazy, greedy, larcenous, and not too bright. They can always acquire more of that commodity on the open market, or import them from overseas, or subcontract or outsource the work, even reconfigure the workplace itself so they don’t have to depend on the rest of us, so they can deal with the real intellectual work; sitting around an office, shuffling paper spreadsheets and making lofty executive decisions.

These people forget that human labor means using human brains and hands to turn the resources of the earth into useful goods and services, everything else is just overhead. Sure, organizational and administrative skills, management and leadership activities are all a vital part of this, but they are not the only part, they aren’t even the main part. Work cannot be divided into manual labor (shop)and intellectual brilliance (office). There is a very gradual and shifting boundary between the two. We have developed a managerial/executive class that has nothing but contempt for the vast majority of people that work for them. They just lump them all into “the 47%”.

The sad thing is that these people (I call them “the business majors”, but not all of them are in business, and there are many businessmen who are genuinely talented and committed) are so ignorant in how the world works that they can make that kind of absurd statement about coding and trigonometry. Trig is not like an ancient language we must learn merely to maintain an academic tradition. It is a vital part of the technology that has given us the Digital Age. Mathematics isn’t something we have to suffer through in high school so we can take our first coding classes. These folks are so clueless that they don’t understand that an education in mathematics has made the modern world of science, engineering and technology possible. Coding is a narrow skill with a short shelf life you should be able to pick up on the job.

It used to be that people worked themselves up to leadership positions in their industries by struggling up from the bottom, by learning the most basic skills in the factory and then undergoing a stern apprenticeship and stiff competition to make it to the executive suite. If you ran a railroad, you could do every job on that railroad. Today, we see management, or business administration, as an abstract frame of mind, an attitude you can pick up in college, or that you inherit from your parents or social class, or pick up at feelgood management seminars or read in inspirational executive hygiene manuals. Once you have it, you can operate any kind of business, at any level. So if you can run a railroad, you must be qualified to run a chain of supermarkets. Is it any wonder these people have nothing but contempt for the employees who work for them, that they see them as, at best, spare parts? They see themselves as the Makers, the Job Creators, the folks that matter, the people that make things happen. They imagine themselves a noble elite, those of us who just work here don’t matter all that much–in fact, we’re potentially dangerous.

We’re in deep shit.