Education via Strands of Great Books

Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons is very informative and educational precisely because it weaves together, in a “braid of insightfulness,” the various truths and phenomena of a life which have to be “taken together” to form a “cluster of understanding,” which is a pillar of what we are attempting to teach.

Life as a Social Status Olympics. The Death Scene of Major Amberson

“And now Major Amberson was engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life.

And he realized that everything which had worried him or delighted him during this lifetime, all his buying and building and trading and banking, that it was all trifling and waste beside what concerned him now.

For the Major knew now that he had to plan how to enter an unknown country where he was not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson.”

(The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington, Orson Welles’s 1942 film narration)

Time and Place. The World of 1873, the Financial Crisis and the Vicissitudes and the Tempo of Life

“The magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city. In that town in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet and everybody knew everybody else’s family horse and carriage. The only public conveyance was the streetcar. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once, and wait for her, while she shut the window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the ‘girl’ what to have for dinner and came forth from the house. Too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare.”

(The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington, Orson Welles’s 1942 film narration)

Fickleness of Life and Its Ephemeral Nature

[Uncle Jack to George:] “Life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks. When they’re gone, you can’t tell where—or what the devil we did with ’em.”

(The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington, Doubleday, Page, 1918, page 435)

Entrepreneurial Psychology

[Uncle Jack:] “Twenty years have passed–but have they? … My Lord! Old times starting all over again! My Lord!”

[Eugene:] “Old times? Not a bit! There aren’t any old times. When times are gone, they’re not old, they’re dead! There aren’t any times but new times!”

(The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington, Doubleday, Page, 1918, page 97-98)

The task is to “amalgamate” the points in great books into a sort of unified “braid.” That’s deep education. Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel, The Magnificent Ambersons, is very informative and educational precisely because it weaves together, in a “braid of insightfulness,” the various truths and phenomena of a life which have to be “taken together” to form a “cluster of understanding,” a pillar of what we are attempting to teach.

What We Mean by “Towards a Composite Understanding of Education”

(MI slogan, motto or catchphrase)

Let’s be concrete and start with the title of the classic 1978 book by the Princeton professor and 1979 Nobel Prize winner, Sir Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913 (introduced in the previous essay on “Looking Backwards and Forwards at the Same Time”).

Notice the following other dimensions that have to be included to “compositize” our understanding:

  1. The period 1870-1913/4 is called Globalization I by economic historians. Globalization in this view is not about Marco Polo, but the rise of world prices, such as for wheat.

  2. Paul Kennedy (Yale), who is known for his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers classic, wrote a tighter book called The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (1980), described as follows:

    “This book gives an account of the rivalry between Great Britain and Germany in the period leading to the First World War. It gives readers a thorough comparison of the two societies, their political cultures, economies, party politics, courts, the role of the press and pressure groups, and so on. …”

  3. The first treaty between a European power and an Asian country was signed in 1902, “The Anglo-Japanese Alliance.”

    “In this book, Professor Nish deals with one of the most important aspects of far eastern politics in the critical period between 1894 and 1907. His object is to demonstrate how Britain and Japan, at first separately and later jointly, reacted to Russian encroachments in China and east Asia; he is concerned also with the policies of the other European powers and of the U.S., to whose hostility towards the Anglo-Japanese alliance after 1905 Britain showed…”

  4. The first defeat of a European by an Asian nation (i.e., the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5). The famous Indian writer Pankaj Mishra wrote a recent book on this, showing how this defeat of a European country sent shock waves through the world and especially through the anti-colonial movements of Asia and Africa

  5. Partition of Africa:

    “Between 1870 and 1914 the whole of Africa, apart from one or two small areas, was partitioned by the European powers.”

    (David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, 1978, Penguin Books, page 203)

  6. Rise of Suburbia:

    “The 1890s saw the coming of the first electric trams, the first “tubes,” and the first motor-cars. By 1914, almost any provincial city of any size had its electric trams, mostly under municipal control, and London had its buses and underground (i.e., subway). “These changes in urban transport created suburbia.”

    (David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, 1978, Penguin Books, page 202)

In other words, the world itself is a crisscrossing composite of processes at different scales.

We have growth and fluctuations, the partition of Africa, suburbanization, Anglo-German tensions, techno-revolutions (including those in urban transport), interacting with Globalization I.

All of this culminated in the “guns of August” (i.e., World War I).

We are downstream from World War I, what the Germans call the “Urkatastrophe” (i.e., original calamity), and its reincarnation in World War II and its progeny, the Cold War.

The more you can “compositize” the elements of this “historical matrix,” the deeper your MetaIntelligence will be. Hence the catchphrase for the MI site:

Towards a Composite Understanding of Education