Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Margaret Wente of the Toronto Globe and Mail explores the reasons boys are doing poorly in school.
Everyone knows the girls are clobbering the boys in school. They get higher marks and graduate at higher rates. Women have stormed the gates of medicine and law. They’ve all but taken over pharmacy and veterinary work. They are focused, purposeful and diligent. Their brothers, meanwhile, are in the basement playing video games.
How lopsided have things become? In the most prestigious programs at some of our leading universities, the gender ratio has reached 70:30. Men still dominate the hard sciences and maths, but, on the rest of the campus, they seem to be headed toward extinction. …
… Boys’ existential issues are different from girls’. For a boy, the two most important life questions are: Will I find work that’s significant? And will I be worthy of my parents? When boys themselves are asked what they need, they say: I need purpose. I need to make a difference. I need to know I measure up. I need challenge. Above all, I need a meaningful vocation.
No wonder so many boys are so miserable. The modern world of extended years in school and delayed adulthood cuts them off from what they need most. As Adam Cox, a clinical psychologist who interviewed hundreds of boys across the English-speaking world, writes: “The primary missing ingredient in [their] lives – the opportunity that separates them from a sense of personal accomplishment, maturity, and resilience – is purposeful work.”
Boys long to be part of something bigger than themselves. And the bigger and more challenging the task, the happier they are. “If you tell 10 boys you need volunteers to go downtown and work all night on a big, dirty, tough job, and you still expect them to show up at school the next day, they’ll all jump up and volunteer,” says Ms. Gauthier. …
… If boys are failing schools and schools are failing boys, it’s really not too hard to see some of the reasons why. They really are fish out of water. Before the Industrial Revolution, boys spent their time with fathers and uncles, often engaged in strenuous physical activity. Now they spend their time in the world of women, sitting behind desks. If schools threw out the desks, they’d probably be a lot happier.
But schools can’t give them everything they need. Boys also need the company of men – men who will guide, instruct, esteem, respect and understand them. When asked about the happiest experience of their lives, boys often say it was the time they made something with their fathers. Their mothers matter, too – but, sometimes, there’s no substitute for Dad.
While it may not be the most dramatic entry in Pickings history, the story of the invention of double-entry bookkeeping will be interesting to many.
Our business heroes are entrepreneurs, inventors and even marketers, rarely accountants. Yet the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, which originated in Italy more than six centuries ago, is one of the great achievements of Western civilization. Without this venerable method of accounting, as Jane Gleeson-White notes in “Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance,” it is scarcely possible to conceive of our economic system.
Accountancy has a good claim to being the world’s oldest profession. The first accounts can be traced back to Mesopotamia in the seventh millennia B.C., when transactions were recorded by the transfer of small clay tokens. The ancient Greeks were avid record-keepers. So were the Romans, whose Tabulae Rationum were a rudimentary forerunner of double-entry bookkeeping, comprising twin account books, one for debits and another for credits.
It was no coincidence that double entry emerged in its perfected form among the city states of Renaissance Italy. The busy merchants of Venice, Genoa, Florence and Milan were suffering from data overload. Without a method of keeping systematic accounts, wrote the Tuscan mathematician Luca Pacioli in the late 15th century, “it would be impossible for them to conduct their business, for they would have no rest and their minds would always be troubled.”
Pacioli was an itinerant teacher and Franciscan friar who started his career as a tutor to the sons of a Venetian merchant. He propagated a new mathematics based on Arabic numerals, which were more tractable to calculation than the old Roman ones and therefore useful in commerce. In 1494, Pacioli published a 600-page encyclopedia titled “Summa de Arithmetica.” This book was written in the Italian vernacular, for it was Pacioli’s intention that his writings should be accessible to “each and every man.” Toward the end of the first volume there is a brief section called “Particulars of Reckonings and Writings,” which comprises the first treatise on double-entry bookkeeping. …
Aeon Magazine speculates about animals with a moral sense.
When I became a father for the first time, at the ripe old age of 44, various historical contingencies saw to it that my nascent son would be sharing his home with two senescent canines. There was Nina, an endearing though occasionally ferocious German shepherd/Malamute cross. And there was Tess, a wolf-dog mix who, though gentle, had some rather highly developed predatory instincts. So, I was a little concerned about how the co-sharing arrangements were going to work. As things turned out, I needn’t have worried.
During the year or so that their old lives overlapped with that of my son, I was alternately touched, shocked, amazed, and dumbfounded by the kindness and patience they exhibited towards him. They would follow him from room to room, everywhere he went in the house, and lie down next to him while he slept. Crawled on, dribbled on, kicked, elbowed and kneed: these occurrences were all treated with a resigned fatalism. The fingers in the eye they received on a daily basis would be shrugged off with an almost Zen-like calm. In many respects, they were better parents than me. If my son so much as squeaked during the night, I would instantly feel two cold noses pressed in my face: get up, you negligent father — your son needs you.
Kindness and patience seem to have a clear moral dimension. They are forms of what we might call ‘concern’ — emotional states that have as their focus the wellbeing of another — and concern for the welfare of others lies at the heart of morality. If Nina and Tess were concerned for the welfare of my son then, perhaps, they were acting morally: their behaviour had, at least in part, a moral motivation. And so, in those foggy, sleepless nights of early fatherhood, a puzzle was born inside of me, one that has been gnawing away at me ever since. If there is one thing on which most philosophers and scientists have always been in agreement it is the subject of human moral exceptionalism: humans, and humans alone, are capable of acting morally. Yet, this didn’t seem to tally with the way I came to think of Nina and Tess.
The first question is whether I was correct to describe the behaviour of Nina and Tess in this way, as moral behaviour. ‘Anthropomorphism’ is the misguided attribution of human-like qualities to animals. Perhaps describing Nina and Tess’s behaviour in moral terms was simply an anthropomorphic delusion. Of course, if I’m guilty of anthropomorphism, then so too are myriad other animal owners. Such an owner might describe their dog as ‘friendly’, ‘playful’, ‘gentle’, ‘trustworthy’, or ‘loyal’ — a ‘good’ dog. On the other hand, the ‘bad’ dog — the one they try to avoid at the park — is bad because he is ‘mean’, ‘aggressive’, ‘vicious’, ‘unpredictable’, a ‘bully’, and so on. Nor are these seemingly moral descriptions entirely useless. On the contrary, it is a valuable skill to be able to assess these descriptions when an unfamiliar dog is bearing down on you in the street. If I’m guilty of anthropomorphism, so too, it seems, are many others. .
Andrew Malcolm discovered we have a National Absurdity Day, and he makes the most of it.
Ever since we found out about it yesterday, today is one of our favorite days of the year.
That’s because today is National Absurdity Day, a day when as a nation we note some of the most totally, absolutely ridiculous things in our lives. Feel free to scroll down and add your own candidates in Comments below.
Gee, where to begin? We’re not going to rehash the recent presidential campaign, when two-out-of-three people believed the country was headed way off in the wrong direction. So voters opted to stick with the same divisive lackluster leader who got us into that mess. And keep a ninny as vice president because the president thinks it makes himself look more intelligent.
So what else is absurd?
Absurdity A: A judge for the district court of the United States of America, whose motto is “In God We Trust,” ruled that a city named for a Roman Catholic saint can ban public Nativity scenes.
In California, Federal Judge Audrey Collins ruled Monday that the holiday displays erected by a coalition of religions in Santa Monica for the past six decades can be prohibited. She halted any and all construction. …