A couple of decades ago—or more, I can’t remember—the university where I worked decided to revamp the general curriculum—a rather periodic process in universities as they attempt to correct the ineffective general curricula adopted in their previous revamping. I remember two major curriculum revisions and a couple of minor ones during my four decades in academia. Driven by perceptions that students were not reaching the erudition promised by the universities and by shifting national, state, and local standards, those motivated to change general curricula usually succumbed to the prevailing avant-garde movements, most of them based on tried-but-not-true temporary experiments run in schools from kindergarten through first-year college. Of course, history shows that curriculum revisions are the stuff of burgeoning managerial staffs, each new position requiring in a world that produces no physical gizmo some proof of worth, some reason for the managers to hold their jobs.
Curricula revisions aren’t just a recent phenomenon. Someone way back, maybe even at Bologna, where the modern university system arguably started, probably said after about a half millennium of same-old-same-old, “Should we incorporate this new information…allora…this Galilean stuff into what we teach?” And later, “Should we incorporate this…allora…Newtonian stuff into what we teach?” All the while the idea of a commonly held body of knowledge persisted: Basic readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic, the skills needed by everyone to survive among “civilized” people. Yet, how to acquire those skills became increasingly a matter of trial-and-error, with error being the key focus of faculty a couple of decades after introducing a revision to the curriculum.
Thus, Americans experimented with such novelties as open classrooms, outcome-based education, and even student-designed curricula. In the 1970s, under the push by a few in my university, the administration settled for a while on allowing students to choose whatever courses outside their majors they wanted to take, a policy that led to emptied Composition 101, Introduction to Philosophy, and Biology and Physics 100-level classes and filled Batik and Tie Dying classes as the process from the student’s perspective became one of acquiring not knowledge, but rather credits. After a period of worsening student performance, the administrators—again eager to show they were on top of modernizing—decided it was time to revamp again. The last major revamping in my career centered on “teaching across the curriculum,” a philosophy that tried to reassemble the cracked egg’s spilled specializations.
So, at my university, the general curriculum was supposed to center on certain fundamental skills and themes, skills like writing, reading, and math-ing being applied to five chosen themes. Energy was not among the themes. I argued that there was no more cogent theme than energy. But the illustrious committee rejected energy as a theme that should run through all major curricula.
Quick, name something you can do without energy. Right, you can’t even think without the expenditure of energy. All that stuff you eat goes into energy production--for which the brain thanks the mouth and the body's distribution system. Without energy you are no more active than a rubber chicken--and even that analogy limps since the molecules in the chicken constantly vibrate.
And yet all of the committee members who rejected the theme of energy had either lived through or been born during the Carter years. Energy if you remember the most famous equation ever written is the other side of the Cosmic Coin. But lost in the intellectual movements of the day, my colleagues put curricular focus elsewhere, leaving students of a generation or two to discover on their own the significance of energy in their lives and in the life of their civilization.
As one who did research for the now defunct Pennsylvania Energy Office, I think I gained some sense of energy’s role in maintaining the Commonwealth. From studies on coal, greenhouse gases, and green technologies, I realized that prudent energy policy on a state and federal level is as important to the life of the people as a whole as energy policy is for individuals and families. The effect of high energy costs, for example, reveals itself in fewer leisure trips and more expensive products. That just seems to be commonsense. But it isn’t, at least it isn’t for the people running a number state governments and running the federal government. And I wonder whether someone like the Transportation Secretary and the Governor of California were part of a student body who never learned much about energy because they were learning about how utopian the world would be if only we could rid ourselves of fossil fuels so we could save the planet. And the lessons on energy that might have been learned if it were a principal topic in college might have even been absorbed by the President as he went through school at the same time I was in college.
Now, I’ll admit that typically only those involved in majors like physics, chemistry, biology, and geology (particularly petroleum technology) had some focus on energy in the past. Possibly economics majors also perceived its importance, but I have my doubts on the familiarization with the subject among those taking courses in the humanities and the social sciences. So, here we are, decades after Jimmy Carter initiated a Department of Energy, and just a couple years after energy independence, finding ourselves as a nation once again importing energy—into a country whose energy resources are immense.
But I’m not arguing that those enormous reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas are the only sources on which Americans should rely. Instead, I’m arguing that necessity is the mother of invention and that it is a mother who discovers as they behave what her children need. In other words, when little Johnny is listless, he might have a vitamin B-12 deficiency, so Mom needs to give him some. She sees the symptom, and reacts with a cure. Not so with the listlessness in the Biden economy and under the Biden energy policies.
We have a whole country that has a symptom caused by a deficiency, but Mother Joe, Mother Pete, and all the other Administration Mothers can’t recognize their children are ailing or see the cause of their lethargy—the Administration’s own folly hampering domestic energy production and relying on foreign sources while trying to make an abrupt change to “green” energy in underdeveloped technologies and insufficient infrastructure. Like university administrations and faculty, the current Biden Administration wants to rewrite the curriculum, the energy plan, based on the ideals of the day. But as every generation discovers, the ideal often conflicts with the real, and changes made because of contemporary ideas, don’t necessarily result in improvements—as educators have discovered through many curricula revisions.
It’s the same old, same old. Maybe one of Christ’s parables sums it up. In Luke 16: 19-27, Jesus tells of the rich man and Lazarus, the pauper at his gate. When the two die, the poor guy goes to the “bosom of Abraham,” whereas the rich guy goes to Hell. So, the rich guy asked Abraham to send someone to warn his five living brothers to change their ways. “And Abraham said to him, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hearken to them.’ But the rich guy says, ‘No, Father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ But he says to him, ‘If they do not hearken to Moses and the Prophets, they will not believe even if someone rises form the dead.’”
One wonders. If those who suffered through the energy crisis of the Carter years, could rise to speak their wisdom to the Biden Administration, would anyone hearken? Probably not. After all, Biden himself lived through the high inflation and energy woes of the Carter years. He certainly can’t hear the voices of the prophets of that day, and obviously he can’t remember—he does have like that rich man in the parable a beach house worth two million or more in Delaware, and he seems unlikely to have seen the “Lazuruses” on the ground outside his gate. He has, like those universities, decided to try what hasn’t worked before or what is based on ideals without proven sustainable successes because he, like those university administrators, believes “it will work this time.” Except that the last revamping of the energy sector that actually led to energy independence and net exporting of energy instead of importing is the very policy he overturned. It’s as though the university finally devised a curriculum that achieved the goal of erudition among its students and then went to the unsuccessful curricula designs of the past.
All the words have been spoken. The “Moseses” and other “Prophets” plus the actual history of the American energy sector has stood as a lesson for decades. It’s a fundamental lesson, one that transcends the vicissitudes of a managerial class seeking to prove they know better than their forebears and that they are wise. But just as readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic have been staples of education for centuries, so prudent energy policy, not fashionable energy policy, is the only way to achieve economic stability now and into the future. Energy, can’t live without it. Hearken!
Curricula revisions aren’t just a recent phenomenon. Someone way back, maybe even at Bologna, where the modern university system arguably started, probably said after about a half millennium of same-old-same-old, “Should we incorporate this new information…allora…this Galilean stuff into what we teach?” And later, “Should we incorporate this…allora…Newtonian stuff into what we teach?” All the while the idea of a commonly held body of knowledge persisted: Basic readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic, the skills needed by everyone to survive among “civilized” people. Yet, how to acquire those skills became increasingly a matter of trial-and-error, with error being the key focus of faculty a couple of decades after introducing a revision to the curriculum.
Thus, Americans experimented with such novelties as open classrooms, outcome-based education, and even student-designed curricula. In the 1970s, under the push by a few in my university, the administration settled for a while on allowing students to choose whatever courses outside their majors they wanted to take, a policy that led to emptied Composition 101, Introduction to Philosophy, and Biology and Physics 100-level classes and filled Batik and Tie Dying classes as the process from the student’s perspective became one of acquiring not knowledge, but rather credits. After a period of worsening student performance, the administrators—again eager to show they were on top of modernizing—decided it was time to revamp again. The last major revamping in my career centered on “teaching across the curriculum,” a philosophy that tried to reassemble the cracked egg’s spilled specializations.
So, at my university, the general curriculum was supposed to center on certain fundamental skills and themes, skills like writing, reading, and math-ing being applied to five chosen themes. Energy was not among the themes. I argued that there was no more cogent theme than energy. But the illustrious committee rejected energy as a theme that should run through all major curricula.
Quick, name something you can do without energy. Right, you can’t even think without the expenditure of energy. All that stuff you eat goes into energy production--for which the brain thanks the mouth and the body's distribution system. Without energy you are no more active than a rubber chicken--and even that analogy limps since the molecules in the chicken constantly vibrate.
And yet all of the committee members who rejected the theme of energy had either lived through or been born during the Carter years. Energy if you remember the most famous equation ever written is the other side of the Cosmic Coin. But lost in the intellectual movements of the day, my colleagues put curricular focus elsewhere, leaving students of a generation or two to discover on their own the significance of energy in their lives and in the life of their civilization.
As one who did research for the now defunct Pennsylvania Energy Office, I think I gained some sense of energy’s role in maintaining the Commonwealth. From studies on coal, greenhouse gases, and green technologies, I realized that prudent energy policy on a state and federal level is as important to the life of the people as a whole as energy policy is for individuals and families. The effect of high energy costs, for example, reveals itself in fewer leisure trips and more expensive products. That just seems to be commonsense. But it isn’t, at least it isn’t for the people running a number state governments and running the federal government. And I wonder whether someone like the Transportation Secretary and the Governor of California were part of a student body who never learned much about energy because they were learning about how utopian the world would be if only we could rid ourselves of fossil fuels so we could save the planet. And the lessons on energy that might have been learned if it were a principal topic in college might have even been absorbed by the President as he went through school at the same time I was in college.
Now, I’ll admit that typically only those involved in majors like physics, chemistry, biology, and geology (particularly petroleum technology) had some focus on energy in the past. Possibly economics majors also perceived its importance, but I have my doubts on the familiarization with the subject among those taking courses in the humanities and the social sciences. So, here we are, decades after Jimmy Carter initiated a Department of Energy, and just a couple years after energy independence, finding ourselves as a nation once again importing energy—into a country whose energy resources are immense.
But I’m not arguing that those enormous reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas are the only sources on which Americans should rely. Instead, I’m arguing that necessity is the mother of invention and that it is a mother who discovers as they behave what her children need. In other words, when little Johnny is listless, he might have a vitamin B-12 deficiency, so Mom needs to give him some. She sees the symptom, and reacts with a cure. Not so with the listlessness in the Biden economy and under the Biden energy policies.
We have a whole country that has a symptom caused by a deficiency, but Mother Joe, Mother Pete, and all the other Administration Mothers can’t recognize their children are ailing or see the cause of their lethargy—the Administration’s own folly hampering domestic energy production and relying on foreign sources while trying to make an abrupt change to “green” energy in underdeveloped technologies and insufficient infrastructure. Like university administrations and faculty, the current Biden Administration wants to rewrite the curriculum, the energy plan, based on the ideals of the day. But as every generation discovers, the ideal often conflicts with the real, and changes made because of contemporary ideas, don’t necessarily result in improvements—as educators have discovered through many curricula revisions.
It’s the same old, same old. Maybe one of Christ’s parables sums it up. In Luke 16: 19-27, Jesus tells of the rich man and Lazarus, the pauper at his gate. When the two die, the poor guy goes to the “bosom of Abraham,” whereas the rich guy goes to Hell. So, the rich guy asked Abraham to send someone to warn his five living brothers to change their ways. “And Abraham said to him, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hearken to them.’ But the rich guy says, ‘No, Father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ But he says to him, ‘If they do not hearken to Moses and the Prophets, they will not believe even if someone rises form the dead.’”
One wonders. If those who suffered through the energy crisis of the Carter years, could rise to speak their wisdom to the Biden Administration, would anyone hearken? Probably not. After all, Biden himself lived through the high inflation and energy woes of the Carter years. He certainly can’t hear the voices of the prophets of that day, and obviously he can’t remember—he does have like that rich man in the parable a beach house worth two million or more in Delaware, and he seems unlikely to have seen the “Lazuruses” on the ground outside his gate. He has, like those universities, decided to try what hasn’t worked before or what is based on ideals without proven sustainable successes because he, like those university administrators, believes “it will work this time.” Except that the last revamping of the energy sector that actually led to energy independence and net exporting of energy instead of importing is the very policy he overturned. It’s as though the university finally devised a curriculum that achieved the goal of erudition among its students and then went to the unsuccessful curricula designs of the past.
All the words have been spoken. The “Moseses” and other “Prophets” plus the actual history of the American energy sector has stood as a lesson for decades. It’s a fundamental lesson, one that transcends the vicissitudes of a managerial class seeking to prove they know better than their forebears and that they are wise. But just as readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic have been staples of education for centuries, so prudent energy policy, not fashionable energy policy, is the only way to achieve economic stability now and into the future. Energy, can’t live without it. Hearken!
RSS Feed