Dear readers, friends and all,

Some days it feels as though there’s nothing left to say—it’s all been said so many times. Reading the NY Times Sunday Review (March 30) was a revelation. There’s a great piece by Bruce Ackerman on Dignity. An interesting and important insight in a piece by Timothy Egan “A Mudslide, Foretold” that suggests a dismal ending. And Deborah Hargreaves on “Can We Close the Pay Gap?” (She points to an example of a German board consisting of half employees and half shareholders who voted for a pay cut for its CEOs.) It ends on a more optimist note, but…. the very idea of workers having a say on company policy would be a huge (utopian?) leap forward in the USA—a touch of democracy we view as utterly beyond our imaginations.

But best of all was an essay by Lewis Dartnell entitled “Civilization’s Starter Kit.” It reminded me of a personal story from long-ago. It was the 1950s when we were all protecting ourselves from the possibility of a world-wide atomic disaster. I was driving on Chicago’s “outer drive” from my south side habitat to the north side, along Lake Michigan. I imagined that the whole world was—almost—wiped out. The only remaining adults were me and some “primitive” islanders (this part of the story I had a little trouble with). Somehow we connected and, lo and behold, I was their one hope of trying to reconstruct the modern world rather than go through it all over again. There couldn’t be a better-educated but more useless remnant of a lost world to have survived “to tell” the story. I could tell them great literary stories and discuss literary theory, contemporary politics, even ancient history but… I had no idea how to help them with what they wanted—to re-invent electricity, or automobiles, or the telegraph or telephone, much less e-mail. I couldn’t even start a fire, or suggest better agricultural tools or methods. And alas, few if any of the graduates of the schools I was later to “invent” would have done much better.

That’s what astrobiologist Lewis Darnell takes up.

“My father,” he writes “used joke that I had three degrees, but didn’t know anything about anything, whereas he graduated summa cum laude from the University of Life.” He imagines my scenario—if he were a member of a small society of survivors. His degrees fit him to do research into what factors planets need to support life. How to pass that on, he asks. His list includes reinventing germ theory, and all that follows (like washing ones hands, etc). Then comes stockpiling staples so that they can be used later. Then, of course, the millstone. Tuning clay into bricks and fire-proof pots. Not to mention the invention of iron and steel knives. Or there’s “plain old glass” or its close kin —soap. Just a few “ordinary” substances” brought together in a certain ratio, et al. and – we have glass! The author indulged himself—by learning how to make glass. “I may never have to practice the alchemy that transform sand, soda and quicklime into this miraculous transparent membrane, but the world feels closer and more in focus for the knowing.”

There’s an aim that lies totally outside of our educational ideas—although actually John Dewey’s Lab School over a century ago dabbled in this kind of reconstruction! But, today? Imagine proposing such a list of essential practical knowledge, plus experience, into the so-called Common Core.