What to do about Corona Virus
Andrew D. Todd
August 2, 2020
a_d_todd@rowboats-sd-ca.com
http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/
Corona Virus can be contained, but the price of doing so is to
recognize the truth about our own society. We are in fact an
emerging cybernetic society, dominated by telecommunications and
robotics, and a high portion of our problems arise out of failing to
recognize this.
It is a mistake to think of the Corona Virus as something from
China. It is a waste of time to ask where a virus came from. It is a
basic principle of biological ecology that if a niche exists,
something moves in to fill it, adapting as necessary. If you have
crumbs, there will be mice. The point is that we created a
propagating environment for a virus. Too many people were trying to
"monetize overcrowding," and they were doing so so competitively,
trying to make money by being more overcrowded than the other
people. Likewise, there was a phenomena of "racing the internet,"
with more and more people trying to go faster and faster, for
greater and greater distances, in competition with each other, For
some time we have had a "flu season." Influenza is constantly
mutating, enough to stay at least even with vaccination campaigns.
Once we get beyond this sort of destructive competition,
respiration-transmitted illnesses will just go away, the way
water-transmitted illnesses just went away.
I would like to make a distinction between Cheap Travel, and quality
travel. For example, if you go to China, with a backpack, a floppy
hat, a walking stick, and hiking boots; and spend six months going
from Manchuria to Vietnam, already knowing the language, visiting
people you already know at a distance, that is quality travel.
Of course, that is probably something you do as a young man, and
it's probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Cheap travel, on the
other hand, is flying in to do a deal, and flying out again the next
day, or being taken on a package tour of the major landmarks. There
is room for quite a lot of quality travel, without creating the
conditions for a pandemic. It is the cheap travel which presents the
problem. Cruise ships are a kind of extreme case of Cheap Travel.
Passenger are put in compact staterooms resembling prison cells, or
a hospital or nursing home ward, and they only go ashore for the
most narrowly supervised outings in tour buses, complete with their
own box lunches. In short, of all the possible modes of travel, they
choose one which offers the least beyond what they could get by
sitting in comfort at home and watching YouTube. The
passengers get to claim that they have been in such and such a place
without really experiencing it to the the minimal extent required to
obtain food and lodging.
Another curious case is that of the Corona Virus outbreak on the
aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, a case at the boundary
between tourism and industry. Again, the shipboard housing
conditions were more or less appalling, because that was what was
feasible, given the need to put about a hundred jet airplanes on a
ship of only 80,000-100,000 tons. And yet there is no real contact
between the five or six thousand sailors and the people in the
places the ship visits. No "Lafayette, We have come," or
anything like that. Forget Errol Flynn, these are mostly aircraft
mechanics who could be superseded by greater automation. Part of the
reason this automation has not been carried out is the traditional
refrain of "Join the Navy and see the world!" With a collection of
several thousand young men, who have been cooped up in tight
quarters for a couple of months, Shore Leave traditionally works out
to a mass-descent on the red-light district of whatever port the
ship is visiting.
The Corona virus is often compared to the 1918 flu outbreak. The
ultimate cause of the 1918 flu outbreak was that there was a world
war going on. There was a critical mass of men living in tents or
trenches, a critical mass of displaced persons or refugees, a
critical mass of people who had left their usual rural homes to work
in war industries. Housing and sanitation take years to build, and
they had not caught up with the population shift. Hence there were
the conditions for a virus outbreak.
No doubt, conditions in Wuhan contributed in a major way to the
spread of the disease, too many factories premised on cheap labor,
with employees living in dormitories on the factory roof, that kind
of thing-- but so did conditions in the United States. However, of
course in the long run, factories will use robots and not cheap
labor. Once cheap labor becomes irrelevant, many factories will
relocate closer to their customers, in order to be able to respond
faster to changes in demand. Of course, certain types of production
machinery may simply be purchased by the end-users to provide for
their own consumption, thus removing the product from the sphere of
commerce.
American Corona Virus is not the same as Chinese Corona Virus. There
is the all-important matter of different kinds of ecological niches.
What drives American Corona Virus is the same thing which drove
9/11, the attempt to bring the whole world within physical speaking
distance. That explains the skyscrapers, the subways, the
airports, the airliners, all the various elements which go to make
up a potential natural or man-made disaster. It can perhaps be
summed up thus, that an information society failed to recognize that
it was an information society and pursued futile measures on the
assumption that it was an industrial society. When this error is
corrected the cure is fairly simple.
Computers have been making office space more dense. The traditional
spacing was 250 square feet per office worker, but that assumed a
lot of paper files, etc. It was also assumed that an office would
have things like a refrigerator for people to keep their lunches in.
As paperwork becomes more perfectly computerized, and everything is
in the machine, people have been moved from offices to cubicles, and
even deprived of offices altogether, given laptop computers, and
told to scrounge a seat at the local Starbucks. Add to this an
increase in jet travel, increasingly crowded airliners and airports,
etc. The extreme case, of course, is the business traveler whose
"office" is a laptop computer in seat 49-G on a jumbo jet crossing
the Pacific.
We have been covering this increasing population density up with an
increasing insistence that people get vaccinated, but that only
works for known diseases. The old bad diseases, waterborne and
arthropod-borne, were eradicated by a program of building water and
sewer lines, and treatment plants. Florence Nightingale did not
believe in the germ theory of disease, she believed in
"miasma," or environmental pollution, but she was an energetic
"sanitation-ist," and her practical measures worked out to much the
same thing. It did not in practical terms matter _why_ the rotting
carcass of a dead donkey in the water supply at Scutari Hospital
should produce sickness, but it mattered a great deal that Miss.
Nightingale had the remains of the donkey removed. I don’t think
it’s particularly impossible to design something for an
air-conditioning system which would sterilized the air going through
it. In terms of transportation, passenger trains can be nearly as
fast as airliners over most routes, and , riding on steel rails it
is usually not a very big deal to design in a few tons of protective
apparatus. I have discussed this previously in connection with the
question of anti-terrorism. One breaks the passenger cabin down into
compartments of manageable size, each with its own protection.
We can _chose_ to have people work from home. In many cases,
it is simply a matter of _inventing_ the necessary machines to
facilitate the process, and being prepared to deal with the
unemployment which may develop during the process. We need to
remember that the core purpose of the economy is to provide needed
goods and services, not to create employment. We can print money and
distribute it.
American industrial workers are often at much less infectious
disease risk than office workers. They require much more space for
their work, and are often engaged in supervising rows of automatic
machines. Considerations of hazardous materials, workplace safety,
and product contamination often dictate the provision of advanced
air supply--ventilation systems, which are easily modified to
provide disease protection. Factories are not usually located in
dense urban areas and the workers travel comparatively short
distances to work by private automobile. The same can apply with
even greater force to construction workers, farmers, etc. The kind
of fiddly hand labor which puts a lot of workers close together is
usually low-wage labor, and is typically found in East Asian
countries,.
Many industries are on the verge of going unmanned anyway, and and
virtually any kind of modernization is likely to precipitate the
process. Take the example of the freight railroads. A freight train
has a crew of two, an engineer and a conductor. The engineer's
function is to drive the train, taking account of the fact the train
is exceedingly flimsily constructed, relative to its weight, and has
exceedingly poor brakes. The conductor's job is, most of the time,
to sit and learn how to drive a train by watching the engineer.
Occasionally, he will have to get down from the locomotive cab, and
walk along the train's length for a mile or so to perform
adjustments on the machinery which cannot be carried out from the
engineer's seat. Improved electronic controls threaten to render the
engineer obsolete, his functions being divided between computers and
dispatchers in control centers hundreds or thousands of miles away,
possibly in India. It is similarly proposed to take the conductor
out of the locomotive cab, give him a truck, and let him drive to
places where the remaining handwork needs to be performed.
Under this scheme, radically fewer conductors would be required. The
"roving conductor" would be electronically supervised, and allowed
to take his truck home with him at night, so there would be no need
for any kind of physical contact with co-workers on a day to day
basis. The railroad would be effectively immunized against the virus
while still being able to operate with greater economic efficiency
than ever before. Of course, the railroad employees would mostly
lose, and would need to be compensated, unless their response was to
be massive sabotage.
The largest American mass-production durable goods manufacturing
industry is of course, the automobile industry. Automobile have
become very durable: a new automobile's life expectancy is about
twenty years and while it may be urgent to support the income of the
autoworkers, it is not necessary to support automobile production
for a year or two. All that is required is a sufficient quantity of
unemployment insurance. In any case, the automobile industry has
been spending considerable sums of money on robots, and an attempt
to restore automobile industry employment is probably futile. At the
same time, automobiles are a declining industry, losing
"mindshare" in the face of the internet. People are beginning to
think about automobiles the way they think about kitchen appliances,
in terms of their actual utility, instead of dream-projection. It
miht be sufficient to have one automobile per household, rathre than
one automobile per adult. It is disastrous to attempt to make
society and economy act out a theatrical performance of the way
things once were. Trump-ism calls for a regime in which everyone can
have a well-paid job as an autoworker, or some other kind of factory
worker, and ignores the structural changes taking place in industry,
similar to those which took place in agriculture back in the 1920's,
on the eve of the Great Depression.
Many of the most prosperous American manufacturing industries do not
produce consumer goods at all-- they produce war materiel, for which
the government itself is the customer, or they produce medical
supplies, for which the government is now the principle financier.
We have an economy in which all the best manufacturing jobs involve
working, at some remove, for the government. This is similar in
principle to paying farmers to _not_ grow alfalfa.
There are exceptions to this general industrial immunity to
viruses, of course. American meat-packing plants seem to have been
fairly heavily hit. They are one of those industries which employ a
lot of low-wage labor, often illegal, and at fairly close quarters,
in a process which is comparatively resistant to automation, to
produce a low-priced product. This makes them an anomaly in American
manufacturing, a litle bit of the third world in a developed
country. .They are an exception which proves the rule: a third world
industry in a developed country. Oceanic fish such as tuna is a
closely analogous industry, but the logic of where the fish
ultimately comes from dictates that it is packed in Southeast
Asia It is possible to develop suitable air masks, working on
a variation of the SCUBA system, which supply fresh air, and suck
away possibly contaminated exhalations.
The plagues of the nineteenth century-- water-borne, food-borne, and
arthropod-borne-- were not beaten by epidemiology or vaccines. They
were beaten by sanitation, which we may approximately define as
making quarantine sufficiently efficient and comfortable that it can
be an everyday state of affairs, rather than something tolerated in
an emergency. Specifically, in the nineteenth century, it meant
building sewers, and pressurized water pipes, and water heaters to
make bathing in mid-winter a comfortable experience. One might add
efficient automatic laundry and dish-washing machinery, and
pasteurization and refrigerators. Legal sanctions entered the
picture, in the form of things like fit-housing laws, to prevent
unscrupulous landlords from exploiting the most vulnerable members
of society.
When Corona Virus hit, the manufacturing, farming, mining, and
transportation sectors of the economy were already in a state of
crisis, due to the rapid advent of automation. Unfortunately,
President Trump was elected on a program of putting the economic
clock back. Naturally, he proved quite unable to do so.
Technological progress did not vanish. Glutted markets for the
various consumer durable goods remained glutted. All that is
required to mend these sectors of the economy in the short run is a
program of using government money to pay the manufacturers to
produce the kinds of equipment which is actually needed to contain
the spread of Corona Virus, starting with about five billion N95
masks. This would be very much like the economic mobilization of
industry during the Second World War. Typically, things would be
produced in much smaller quantities than mass-production industry is
accustomed to doing. The hard parts of the Corona Virus problem have
to do with the parts pf the economy where people are essentially
part of the process.
In my youth, AIDS forced us to discard the idea of sex without
consequences. Some men who were relatively slow to get the message
died. There were Closet Gays who frequented bathhouses, and there
were men who slept with all their subordinates, racking up hundreds
of contacts, with what turned out to be fatal results. But
life went on.
Any place you see people waiting in lines, or sitting in ranks of
closely packed seats, that is an infection vector for an
air-transmitted disease, and must be reformed. However, these are
not what one would call humanly essential. People don't like
standing in lines; it's just that bureaucracies find it convenient
to make them do so. Life would not be appreciably worse for most
people if bureaucracies were prevented from employing what have
turned out to be hazardous practices.
One notable point has been the grocery store panic. This could
probably have been averted. The Army has fairly enormous stocks of
"Meals, Ready to Eat" (MRE's), that is, prepackaged field rations.
Without exact figures, a reasonable estimate might be sufficient to
feed a million young men, doing heavy work, and requiring three
thousand calories per day, for a year. That could support a hundred
million civilians, mostly sedentary, with the usual proportion of
women and children, for a week. President Trump could have quelled
the"run on the grocery stores," simply by causing the National Guard
to hand out large numbers of MRE's. Apart from the actual food
value, they would have been a direct and tangible demonstration that
the president cares about you, and won't let you starve, no matter
what happens. As it was, people stockpiled food on short notice out
of a fear that they would be left to starve.
However a grocery store or other "big box" store is just a warehouse
which is partially operated by the customers to save on employee
labor. Robotic warehouses are already becoming common in the
business of making up mail orders, and they will simply expand into
the business of making up orders for pick-up and delivery. They will
tend to hold inventory more centrally than a present-day big-box
store does. There are not all that many things which are so urgently
required that an extra hour or two of delivery time makes a great
difference. When the dust settles, most of food and merchandise
distribution will be unmanned, and will not present a virus problem.
Given time and money, restaurants can be rebuilt with sufficient
numbers of private dinning rooms divided by walls, independently
ventilated, so that they present no infection risk. This may reduce
their capacity somewhat, but probably a good deal less than the
six-foot rule would (*). However, the most immediate pragmatic
response has usually been to switch over the paperwork of ordering
and selling food to websites and smartphone "apps," and encouraging
people to eat in their cars. With good organization, the customer
can arrive at the restaurant door with the food already ordered and
paid for, and be seated and served within a minute or so. In many
cases, the actual delivery of the food to the customer can be done
by a robot of some kind, so there need be no physical contact
between the customers and the restaurant staff. Also, a robot can be
used to locate the kitchen, etc., in less valuable space such as a
basement or attic.That is not to say that there might not be cameras
giving the diners a view of the kitchen.
(*) Particulaly with clever designs such as a retracting table,
analogous airliner tray-tables.
This works for the kind of restaurant which can compete with home
cooking via delivery, take-out, or drive-through/ curbside. However,
many restaurants depend economically on people going out to work.
These restaurants may rely on the kind of prepared foods which are
on sale in the supermarket, and at a certain level, their stock in
trade is the fact that the customer does not have immediate access
to his kitchen. Or the restaurants may simply be located in
inappropriate places.
Once upon a time, there were stores which sold energy in the form of
coal, and they had, of course, their own sociology. It was possible
to fight over limited supplies of coal. Hoarding electricity in that
sense is practically impossible.
Movie theaters will of course have to remain closed. What applied
for the college lecture (ee below) applies with still greater force
to the movie. Movies will simply have to be distributed in a fashion
similar to books. The same applied to all but the smallest and most
informal of stage productions. Once a stage theater starts
having a costume shop and a carpentry shop, it will find
itself in competition with computer animation. Even a school drama
group may find that it is more practical to make and publish a movie
than to put on a show. The end-product is merely a thought, and
material objects tend to get in the way of the expression of that
thought.
Something similar operates for certain kinds of public amusements
such as gyms (domonated by rows of exercise machines, not boxing
gyms), bowling alleys, and so on. Given right kind of input device,
what are nomilly physical activities, but physical activities
medieated by machinery, can noneless be performed over the internet,
The same kind of reasoning applies to the "intimate architecture" of
clothing and fashion. The traditional economic logic was that by
going to a clothing store it was possible to try on a great many
clothes without having to buy them all. However, with the right
computer tools, it is straightforward to make garments out of some
cheap and expendable material. The natural locus of fashion migrates
from the store to the bedroom.
--------
The core of services, however, are those in which the customer is
also the product, notably health care and education. The challenge
is therefore to find methods by which the essential human
interconnection can be preserved, without too much propagation of
disease.
I have a particular interest in universities, having spent most of
my life around one or another. Universities are, at present, a prime
candidate for corona virus disruption, but their vulnerability
mostly comes out of accretions which are not essential to their
basic function.
In my youth, circa 1975 I remember people actually sleeping on the
floor in the hallway of a university administration building, in
waiting lines for course registration. It was
"first-come-first-served," and people did what they had to do to get
into large classes, usually elementary, which everyone had to take.
This kind of class was conducted in a room built ;ike a movie
theater--- or a sports stadium, with elevated rows of seats bolted
to the floor, and folding table-arms on each chair. The capacity of
the room was architecturally inelastic--it was designed to take
exactly five hundred students, and anyone more would have to sit on
the floor in the aisles. Each student's pro-rata share of the
professor's time was four-and-a-half minutes per semester, and
perhaps only a tenth of that was actually available for answering
questions, etc. . This was effectively a tel-course "avant le
lettre," only without the tel-course's electronic flexibility. Of
course, the enrollment of an upper-level elective course is always
somewhat elastic (one more unusually bright student may make an
improvement to the quality of the discussion), and any student
likely to contribute to the class can generally get a registration
permit from the professor. So the waiting line was confined to the
elementary courses in the liberal arts college, and sometimes to the
standard courses in the professional schools. Obviously, the giant
lecture hall is done for. Tel-courses have already become popular as
a means of inexpensively pushing such courses out to satellite
campuses. By their nature, tel-courses tend to have a strong
"auto-didactic" flavor about them. Students only do well in them if
they are self-motivated. Perhaps this can be overcome with student
blogs, discussion sites, etc.. A lot of the student's reaction may
depend on the social expectations. Taking a subject in autodidact
mode on a satellite campus because you failed to gain admission to
the main campus is one thing-- taking a subject in autodidact mode
because you are so far ahead of your peers that the college cannot
afford to offer the subject you need to take every year is quite
another thing.
However, the giant lecture was never a counsel of perfection, merely
an expedient. Nathan Glazer's 1962 essay, "The Wasted Classroom," is
a classic. He complained that students attended too mny lectures,
and read too few books. A lecture at its best is only an incomplete
version of a book, and many lectures are not even that. The counsel
of perfection in teaching has always been the seminar, the tutorial,
the thesis supervision. The disease-control people say you don’t
want to gather more than ten people together, and, by odd
coincidence, that is about as big as you can make a seminar, and
still have it function as a seminar. The justification for a seminar
includes non-verbal communication— Mr. Todd gives a certain sort of
grunt when he doesn’t think something is true, but can’t quite
articulate reasons for his disbelief. Blogs are often very much like
seminars. They tend to be a bit more contentious, because they are
text-mode, but it ia easy enough to provide video to support
non-verbal communication. The difficulties are not with people doing
seminars online, which most professors seem to agree they can
handle, but rather in moving lecture courses, which have already
been failing in their own terms, online. Of course, it is the
lecture courses which make the money for the school.
The "Wasted Classroom" repeats itself in certain types of graduate
and professional schools, notably law schools. The law professor
Ilya Somin finds that he has difficulty teaching law school classes
online. because he can't make eye contact and so on, but this is
just a secondary effect of something else. The problem of American
law schools is that they teach far more classes than students can
adequately prepare for, say, sixteen hours a week. The level of
preparation, say five or ten hours per classroom hour, at which
students often read things the professor has not read, is
impossible. Somin finds that he can teach a seminar adequately, and,
no doubt he could also give a tutorial or supervise a thesis. Corona
Virus and the internet merely bring this sort of thing out into the
open. In this case, the lawyer's chosen equivalent of the
seminar is the moot court. Like the seminar, the tutorial, and the
thesis supervision, it is generally treated as an honors course for
the especially gifted student, not as something everyone should do.
One professor teaching three three-hour lecture courses, each
taken by fifty students, who take five courses, works out to a
student-to-faculty ratio of 30:1. But the same ratio is also
represented by a professor holding ten one-hour seminars, with six
students in each, who each take two seminars.
The handful of uses Glazer could find for the lecture, were things
like the scholar informally writing the first draft of his new book
as lecture notes (this being just before the offset press came into
common use), and the rapid communication of specific factual
information. At this date, it could not be assumed that an
intellectual could type, and having him read his hand-written notes
aloud might be more practical than hiring someone to type them up.
By the 1970's and 1980's, this sort of thing had largely been
superseded by the mimeographed hand-out, and nowadays, it all goes
on a blog, or a personal website.
There is a whole level at which you can do things on the internet,
which would be impossible in physical space, due to such
considerations as travel money. If you want someone to physically
come from the other side of the world, that will cost you a few
thousand dollars. A blog-site can be funded out of petty cash. The
conversation by which knowledge is actually advanced is already
likely to take place online. When I hear that an academic has been
to a convention, I say to myself, "Aha, so-and-so isn't happy in his
present place, and wants a new job. So he is going to the convention
to be interviewed by prospective employers" And very often this is
confirmed in public hiring notices a few months later. It was
the employment which made the travel necessary.
The two parties in a college classroom are both quite comfortable
with electronic communications technology but they are not
comfortable with the same ones A professor will be comfortable with
email and blogs which allow him to maintain his membership in a
dispersed intellectual community. The students have their own forms
of electronic communication such as social media which address their
own requirements. The difficulties of electric communication in the
classroom tend to exist precisely because it is a boundary point
This is not an unfamiliar situation in the history of personal
computers. For long time there were is issues with things like
incompatible word processors.
.
Certain minor reforms are necessary. The library will have to be
reformed by the substantial abolition of copyright, so everything
can go on the internet. That’s not really a big deal— public money
will just have to be spent to pay off the affected interests, and if
the money is not spent, trans-national organizations like Sci-Hub
will simply help themselves.
One point Glazer did not address was the issue of language teaching.
He was a man of his time, the middle of the "American Century," and
he naturally tended to assume that everything of importance was in
English. In terms of this thinking, whatever languages a student
had acquired in secondary school were good enough, and there
was little stress on the learning of "difficult languages," such as
Chinese or Arabic. He certainly did not embrace the idea of
Medievalism/Classicism, that a young man should make himself one of
the few world experts in a very obscure old language with a few
surviving manuscripts, often found in the oddest places, and use
those, with a lot of very close reading, to reconstruct a lost
society. However, Glazer's critique applies with equal force to
modern language teaching. The counsel of perfection in language
teaching is to send the student off at the earliest practical age to
a place where the desired language is spoken in the street. Such
"traveling instruction" is generally only open to advanced students
who have demonstrated their proficiency in learning languages out of
a book. Of course, this is based on a realistic assessment of the
nature of an ordinary high school or undergraduate student, and his
potential for getting into trouble in a foreign country where he
knows neither the written or unwritten laws and customs. The
necessary supervision is expensive.
In the early twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead observed that
"colleges were immensely expensive institutions, compared to public
libraries, and their only justification was to connect learning to
the zest for life." With the advent of computers and the internet,
this maxim applies with even more force. It may even be applicable
to the academic secondary school, that is, a school for the
systematic teaching of languages [including mathematics and science]
by methods involving practice and recitation. The library now
includes not only books, but also archives, sound recordings,
videos, and even computer programs embodying methods of instruction.
What a college can add to a library is Whitehead's connection
between learning and the zest for life. A college can create the
kind of environment in which it is natural to read many books, and
write essays about them.
On interviewing a student in a Biochemistry class who was making
heavy weather of the transition to internet-based instruction, I
discovered that she had been in the habit of participating in
informal group study sessions in the university library, and that
these, being informal, had not been replaced by the university when
it shifted the course online. She had never heard of Schaum's
outlines (before her time), though whe knew about Khan Academy
(which presently only goes up to Organic Chemistry). So I got her a
used Schaum's Outline, and that, apparently, was a great help.
Schaum's Outlines are supplementary textbooks in the STEM subjects,
not aggressively marketed to professors or frequently updated,
and priced like paperbacks, which present the material almost
exclusively in the form of solved problems.
Another minor point is that the internet tends to prioritize
intellectual novelty over intellectual craftsmanship. Hitherto this
has not been a major issue, because most of the participants in
discussions had gotten their foundational knowledge in conventional
face-to-face schools, where their papers had been routinely
red-penciled for things like prose style, often by someone who
really did not know very much about the subject the student was
writing about. There does need to be some kind of mechanism under
which an advanced student has to satisfy a teacher who is not a
"co-expert."
There are solutions, of course. In the 1970's, the Guatemalan army
had system of artificial families, based on the last two digits of
the officers' serial numbers. The officers were all peasant
boys,with no prior connection to the Army or the national elites,
attracted by a free education which they could not otherwise have
obtained, and their sons eventually entered civilian careers.
It was a formula for maximum alienation, so they invented an
artificial kinship system as a way out. Officer 599 was officer
699's "big brother," and their "dad" was officer 299, and the
"grandpa" was officer 99. Since officer 299's actual son was going
to the national law school, as had officer 99's, and officer 99's
actual grandson was going to the United States for college, the
older men were naturally inclined to take an interest in the younger
men. American state universities could agree to set up a system of
virtual "Oxford-Cambridge-style colleges, based on three or four
digits of a person's Social Security number. (Gwynne Dyer,
"Guatemala," John Keegan, et. al., _World Armies_, 1978)
At the other end of the age spectrum, American undergraduate
instruction in mathematics, languages, and kindred subjects
can be best described as undistinguished. All we know about
the psychology of learning suggests that these kinds of subjects are
best learned at the earliest possible age, As it is, they are
unskillfully taught at the school level, where sociological
considerations preclude a competent teacher, and impractically
taught at university level, where most students are simply too old
to profit from further instruction, and are living in circumstances
which preclude concentrated mental effort. Programs such as Khan
Academy work miracles, largely by using the internet to sidestep
restrictions on who can teach whom. As the programs become more
perfect, lower division instruction in mathematicians and languages
can be expected to wither anyway.
Students whose lack of social maturity makes in inadvisable and
impractical for them to be sent abroad can be exposed, via the
internet, to native speakers of the languages it is desired they
should learn. Employers seem to desire, in college graduates, mostly
skill in mathematics and languages, that is, in the subjects most
like those taught in high school. The one obviously elite
undergraduate program is the engineering school. At present, Khan
Academy provides work through about the second year of engineering
school, and this could easily be pushed to the third year. At
present, experimental initiatives in engineering education tend to
be focused on the fashionable areas, electrical engineering.
computer science, and so on. That is where Khan Academy has made its
first efforts. However, if large numbers of engineering schools are
forced to develop online courses in areas like thermodynamics
and physical chemistry (Nature and Properties of Materials, or NAPOM
as engineers call it), Khan Academy will of course get some of them.
A continental European university begins teaching mathematics at
about the point where mathematics becomes too esoteric to be of
interest to most engineers. Likewise, it begins teaching languages
at the point where they become too esoteric to be of interest to
most businessmen. Anything below that is the province of the
academic secondary school, commencing serious work at the age of
eleven or twelve. Of course, such a secondary school may need to
provide a dormitory, adapted to the emotional needs of
ten-year-olds. A continental university will not teach you to
speak English. English is of course the standard foreign language in
the non-English-speaking countries, and is commonly taught in the
elementary school. A Frenchman, or a German, or an Italian, or a
Pole, takes for granted that he will have to learn English, no
matter what he is interested in, so English-language instruction
does not have to be delayed until the student's interests emerge and
become apparent. While universities in these countries would not
teach English, they might very well teach something like ancient and
medieval Persian.
Mathematics, and a cluster of related scientific subjects are not
only Child Prodigy subjects, but they are also Machine Prodigy
subjects, in which computer programs do work which would be
commendable if done by a human. It ought to tbe possible to
configure one of these programs as a teaching machine, at least for
promising child pupils. One could envision technical education being
siphoned away from the unversity, with more and more stuff being
done in independent organizations. The defining attribute of a
potentially valuable future scientist or engineer is his comparative
ability to self-instruct, especially with the aid of a computer
program. Formal classroom instruction will therefore be a a
discount.
The nature of American lower-division college education is
"historically contingent." By separating the academic functions of a
university from the social functions, large sections of the
curriculum might be relocated to other institutions. If every high
school, however poor, has access to Khan Academy, it follows that
every high school potentially teaches vector calculus and
differential equations, unless it makes a positive effort to refuse
such instruction.
European universities, for the most part, do not feed or lodge their
students. Official concern for the students' out-of-school life is a
distinctively Anglo-American feature.
For the undergraduate student experience outside of the classroom
what I think would work would be a new kind of fraternity. It would
be small— ten or twenty members—, co-ed, and it would recruit from
high school. Possibly, it would "belong" to a particular high
school, automatically taking any graduate of that high school who
enrolled in the university. It would not recruit students already on
campus, and would therefore not have “rushing.” It would not enforce
sobriety, an impossible task, but it could at least uphold the idea
that one drinks only with one's particular friends, not with
strangers in a tavern, who are likely to be professional tavern
habitues: thieves, professional gamblers, pimps, drug dealers, and
what have you.
Schools have an auxiliary (or even primary) function as day-care
centers. Historically, in the age of Horace Mann and Jane Addams,
schools were organized, as mush as anything, as a means of
withdrawing children from the industrial labor force. However, there
is nothing which says the schools have to be huge day-care centers,
with hundreds or thousands of children. The present size of
elementary schools reflects a mechanical system of teaching reading,
writing, and arithmetic which depends on every child doing the same
thing at the sme time. Hence there have to be different classes for
different ages, and fast and slow classes for each age group. The
result is an elementary school with five hundred or a thousand
pupils, and a high school with as many as five thousand. Intelligent
use of computers and the internet would allow schools to operate on
a much smaller scale, with mixed-age classrooms. An apartment
building might have its own little "mini-school," say preschool to
sixth grade, and this would present very little epidemiological
hazard. The school district would arrange such services as
delivering meals.
===============================================
Bibliography:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Nathan Glazer "The Wasted Classroom" (_Harpers_, Oct. 1961,
_reprinted in Jim W. Corder, Finding a
Voice_, 1973).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bianca Bosker, "The Pandemic Shows Us the Genius of Supermarkets-- A
short history of the stores that—even now—keep us supplied with an
abundance of choices," The Atlantic, July/August 2020 Issue
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/supermarkets-are-a-miracle/612244/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arianne Cohen, "MIT researchers say these are the unsafe
businesses to avoid during COVID-19, and these are okay," Fast
Company, June 15, 2020
https://www.fastcompany.com/90516328/mit-researchers-say-these-are-the-unsafe-businesses-to-avoid-during-covid-19-and-these-are-okay?partner=rss&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss
Enumerates categories of risk/benefit. A bit of special pleading in
favor of academia, and doesn't really address the question of
whether various businesses could do something to greatly reduce
their risk.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jessica Contrera, "The lives upended around a $20 cheeseburger-- a
cash-strapped rancher, a virus-stricken meatpacker, an underpaid
chef, a hungry engineer: The journey of a single burger during a
pandemic
Le Diplomate’s Burger Américain," The Washington Post, July 7, 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/07/07/le-diplomate-burger-beef-supply-chain-coronavirus/?arc404=true
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pamela N. Danziger, "Retailers, If You Think 2020 Is Bad, Wait
Because It Is Going To Get Worse," Forbes, Editors' Pick, Jun 14,
2020,05:00am EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2020/06/14/retailers-if-you-think-2020-is-bad-wait-because-it-is-going-to-get-worse/
Mall-based chains are way down, due to effects of the epidemic. Does
not cover any advanced ideas like home robotics.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ric Edelman, "A Reckoning In Higher Education: Will There Be Campus
Life After Covid-19?" Forbes, Jul 6, 2020,03:13pm EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ricedelman/2020/07/06/a-reckoning-in-higher-education-will-there-be-campus-life-after-covid-19/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charley Grant, "The Future of Fast Food Has Arrived Ahead of
Schedule Chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks are quickly learning
how to give customers what they want in our socially distant times.
Those lessons will outlast the pandemic. Analysts and economists are
paying close attention to monthly retail sales numbers as a way to
gauge how the economy may be recovering from the impact of the
coronavirus pandemic," Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2020 5:30 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-future-of-fast-food-has-arrived-ahead-of-schedule-11593163814
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heather Haddon and Jaewon Kung, "Pickup Gains Ground Over Delivery:
Many restaurants and supermarkets prefer the lower costs and hassle
of having customers collect orders at stores. Analysts and
economists are paying close attention to monthly retail sales
numbers as a way to gauge how the economy may be recovering from the
impact of the coronavirus pandemic." Wall Street Journal, [Updated]
June 25, 2020 10:59 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pickup-gains-ground-over-delivery-11593085831
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Economy & Business: Fast food catapults to the future," Axios,
Jun 26, 2020
https://www.axios.com/fast-food-coronavirus-future-89a1000e-30dd-4906-882b-668b3e4d4ae3.html
Certain fast food and grocery chains are finally becoming interested
in take=put/delivery, etc.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Laura Itzkowitz, "How Restaurant Design Is Changing As a Result of
COVID-19: In cities emerging from lockdown, restaurants are rushing
to adapt to new health and safety measures," Architectural Digest.
July 7, 2020
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/restaurant-design-covid-19
----------------------------------------------------------------------
David Jesse, "Will students show up for college in fall 2020?
Community colleges offer a hint. It isn't pretty"Detroit Free Press
Published 5:00 a.m. ET April 27, 2020 | Updated 2:59 p.m. ET April
27, 2020
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/04/27/coronavirus-community-college-fall-2020-semester-online-reopen/3005585001/
Vocational education programs tend to be relatively self-contained.
The group can self-isolate with their teachers, their necessary
tools, and their own living quarters, I know a couple of young women
who are in a Medical Assisting program, six months long and
focused on the physical skills of nursing, things like giving
injections and drawing blood. This program would seem to be designed
to produce people who can extend the reach of an internet-based
physician, an extra pair of hands at a distance of a
thousand miles if necessarry.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lucie Lapovsky, "Don’t Play Russian Roulette With Student Lives:
Colleges Should Be Online In The Fall," Forbes, May 21, 2020,09:38pm
EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lucielapovsky/2020/05/21/dont-play-russian-roulette-with-student-lives-colleges-should-be-online-in-the-fall/
A plain statement that Corona Virus is much too dangerous to play
games with.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul LeBlanc, "It’s Not The Salmon: Rethinking The Jobs To Be Done
On Campus. Part II," Forbes, Jul 4, 2020,10:40am EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulleblanc/2020/07/04/its-not-the-salmon-rethinking-the-jobs-to-be-done-on-campus--part-ii/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Keenan Mayo, "13 Things You'll Never See at McDonald's Again--
If the company brings its new experimental social-distancing designs
near you, that is," Eat This, Not That, July 7, 2020
https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-covid-19-pandemic/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim McGregor (Contributor, Tirias ResearchContributor Group),
"Once You Go Remote, You Should Never Go Back," _Forbes_, May 22,
2020,05:20pm EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2020/05/22/once-you-go-remote-you-should-never-go-back/
One of the people who has been working from home for years, and has
long since become disenchnted with business travel, shopping in
stores, etc.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson, "For parents who can afford it, a
solution for fall: Bring the teachers to them," Washington Post,
July 17, 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/fall-remote-private-teacher-pods/2020/07/17/9956ff28-c77f-11ea-8ffe-372be8d82298_story.html
Well-to-do people clubbing together to set up one-room-schoolhouses.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Melba Newsome, "More Than 60 Colleges Hit With Lawsuits As Students
Demand Tuition Refunds," Newsweek Magazine, 06/23/20 at 6:00 AM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/more-60-colleges-hit-lawsuits-students-demand-tuition-refunds-1512378
Lawsuits claiming the schools promised much more than on-line
power-point slides.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Quintana, "Rethinking college, or at least fall semester,
during coronavirus? You risk not graduating," USA TODAY May
17, 2020
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/05/17/coronavirus-fall-semester-2020-low-income-college-students-graduation/5196478002/
Mostly on the possibiliy of people deciding to drop out, or at least
enroll in a less expensive public college.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ilya Somin, "Coronavirus:Some Tentative Suggestions for Safely
Restarting In-Person Teaching at Universities-- In-person teaching
has major advantages over the online version. Here are some ways to
restore it, while mitigating risk," The Volokh Conspiracy-- Reason
Magazine | 5.23.2020 4:37 PM
https://reason.com/2020/05/23/some-tentative-suggestions-for-safely-re-starting-in-person-teaching-at-universities/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marjorie B. Tiven, How to make online schooling work, CNN,
[Updated] 9:32 AM ET, Tue July 14, 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/14/opinions/how-to-make-online-schooling-work-tiven/index.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Siva Vaidhyanathan, "Coronavirus outbreak: America is not prepared
for schools opening this fall. This will be bad
Siva Vaidhyanathan," The Guardian, Mon 13 Jul 2020 05.30 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/13/america-schools-coronavirus-covid-19-children?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
---------------------------------------------------------------
James D. Walsh, "The Coming Disruption: Scott Galloway predicts a
handful of elite cyborg universities will soon monopolize higher
education," New York Magazine, May 11, 2020
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/scott-galloway-future-of-college.html
Galloway has a rather odd businessman's approach to education. He
thinks of universities vas "brands," and compares them to silicon
valley companies which he fails to see are over-extended. One
obvious error he makes it that the first school you attend matters
for "branding" purposes, when in fact, it is the last one. What I
think is going to happen over the summer is that a great many high
schools will hastily put together post-graduate years, using
resources such as Khan Academy, offered at no cost, which will award
"International Baccalaureates." This will give the students a year's
breathing time, to let the Corona Virus situation sort itself out,
without geting into debt in the meantime. The persistent problem
with "Gap Years" is that they are very hard to organized
constructively. Like high-school work-study, they tend to result in
students being employed as cheap casual labot. The gap year students
would wind up being Uber or Instacart drivers.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wesley Whistle, "Colleges Will Struggle To Reopen Safely,"
Forbes, Jul 2, 2020,11:19am EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/wesleywhistle/2020/07/02/is-it-possible-to-reopen-colleges-safely/
Emphasis on Historically Blaxk Colleges, stresses the colleges'
economic desperation, the greater vulnerability of the students,
etc,
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Whitcomb and Rich McKay, "Health News: Trump calls COVID school
closures a 'terrible decision' as cases and deaths rise," Reuters,
July 14, 2020 / 2:54 PM /
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-idUSKCN24F1Y9
School systems are deciding to close, and damm Trump.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark, Wilson, "Coronavirus: There’s a key way to curb the spread of
COVID-19. But no one is talking about it-- Fix your indoor air.,"
Fast Company, June 15, 2020
https://www.fastcompany.com/90515931/theres-a-key-way-to-curb-the-spread-of-covid-19-but-no-one-is-talking-about-it?partner=rss&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss
Basic sanitation, as applied to airflow.
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Wilson Wong, Coronavirus-- COVID-19 turned college towns into ghost
towns and businesses are struggling to survive: 'When a university
sneezes, the town gets pneumonia. Now when the university has
pneumonia, what does that mean for the town?' one professor
said,"NBC News, July 13, 2020, 8:33 AM UTC
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/covid-19-turned-college-towns-ghost-towns-businesses-are-struggling-n1233521
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