Typically stupid media-engendered flap, but indicative of the current perception of education as an economic engine:
      In a (hopefully) off-the-cuff speech at a GE plant in Wisconsin, our President said, "folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”
      Predictably, there was a barrage of distraught protestations from Art History Departments. And just as predictably, our President – whose aplomb early fell victim to the pressures of the job – offered a lame response, writing to one of the whinging art history professors that “art history was one of my favorite subjects in high school.” (What a lucky boy was Barry, going to a high school with art history in the curriculum.) He went on to say, "I was making a point about the jobs market, not the value of art history."
      There can be little question that a mastery of the history of pictorial art – except for the lucky few who can find jobs at Sotheby’s or Christie’s or, in the pyramid scheme which the humanities have become in the academic world, teaching art history – has no economic value.     
      Nevertheless, like virtually all educators,  who sometimes twist themselves in knots in order to join the economic bandwagon, the art history professor to whom Obama replied had defended her field, in her e-mail to him, as helping to “challenge students to think, read, and write critically.” Fair enough, but that’s true of almost any course in college, high school, and even grade school, if it is taught well.
      The funny thing is, that in his reply to the art history professor’s e-mail, Obama assigns a non-economic value to art history, a totally useless benefit when it comes to earning enough money to make one a good middle-class consumer: “As it so happens, art history was one of my favorite subjects in high school, and it has helped me take in a great deal of joy in my life that I might otherwise have missed.”
      The “joy” that a person who paid attention in his high school art history class might experience during an afternoon in an art museum is just an inkling of the lifetime of “joy” that a serious student of art history, even an impoverished one, would experience exploring the range of art, the depths of art, discovering a facet of art with which he felt a particular affinity and devising his own unique interpretation of the works within it.
      There may be no economic value in serious academic work in the humanities, but is there any social value in it? On the face of it the answer is no. Why should there be?  The aim of what we call a liberal education is the enrichment of the individual. There are plenty of institutions – including numerous education disciplines, such as medicine, science, engineering --  which not only have an economic value, but contribute materially to the social welfare. But art history? What good is that?
      More good than ever. The study of the humanities – art, literature, music, philosophy – are more important today than they have been for 1,300 years.
      We are entering a new Dark Ages, with Western, or Judeo-Christian, or European (whatever you want to call it) Civilization in the grips of a cultural revolution more destructive than Mao’s – not cruel, like Mao’s, but really quite pleasurable, camouflaging the destruction of the culture in addictive gadgetry just as the Church, in the Middle Ages, hid its depredations behind gratifying sanctimoniousness. It will be the academic humanists – the art historians, the literature professors, the classicists, the music historians, the philosophers and the historians of philosophy – who will play the role that the Irish monks played in the previous Dark Ages. They will keep the fires burning until, a century, or two, or four from now, a new Renaissance will recognize the value – the basic importance and beauty – of what every day, every hour, every moment, we see – almost literally see --  slipping away.

      There are some things which I just do not understand. I’ve had them explained to me numerous times, but the logical connections behind the explanations just do not compute in my brain.
      Up to a certain point, my reasoning powers are – if I say so myself – excellent. In high school, mathematics was one of my best subjects. I have to admit that by the time we reached trigonometry, the logic which had made the rest of mathematics such a breeze for me began to break down. Eventually, I did figure out trigonometry, but just.
      Believing that math was a strong point of mine, in my freshman year at college I signed up for a course in calculus – which then followed trigonometry on the path to higher mathematics. I clearly remember sitting in my first calculus class and having the instructor chalk the delta symbol on the blackboard, saying that it represented the tangent between a curved line and another line. With this remark – which I have been told was not a good way to introduce calculus, although I do not think there would have been any good way to introduce it to me – my mind closed down. I dropped the course.
      Subsequent failures of understanding when faced with difficult scientific concepts have lead me to believe that there is a structural deficiency in my brain.
      I loved algebra – first encountered, I think, in the seventh grade. It seemed like a sort of literature, in which alphabetical symbols became metaphors for numbers. I got so far as to be able to see the logic behind solving what I’d thought were called “binary equations” but which Wikipedia tells me now are called “quadratic equations.”  At sines and cosines my mind began to wobble. Beyond that, I could not go.
      I attribute my inability to grasp certain concepts outside of (or tangential to – yes, I do know what “tangent” means) mathematics to the same mental deficiency I discovered that first day of calculus.
      What brought all this up is a current news story about the French authorities putting on a grand display – under the l’Arc de Triomphe, no less – of destroying tons of objects made of ivory in order to discourage elephant poaching. What I cannot understand is how destroying things made of ivory will discourage the trade in ivory. It seems to me that the effect would be to encourage poaching, since it will make ivory even more valuable than it already is. Sure, it may demonstrate that the authorities are adept at finding and confiscating illegal ivory, and that might discourage some poachers. But wouldn’t destroying the confiscated ivory encourage others, since the increased risk that they might be caught and their wares confiscated would be offset by ivory’s increased rarity, now that so many tons of it were crushed to powder under the Arch of Triumph?
      There must be a more complicated explanation, one which I am unable to comprehend.
      One huge, important thing which I fail to understand, is money – where its value comes from. I understood money when it was backed by gold. That was simple algebra: there was x amount of gold and silver and that equaled y amount of dollars and pounds. The values of x or y could change, and different variables might come into play, but at the end of the day it was an equation with an equal sign in the middle.
      After the gold standard was dropped, I still kind of understood money. Governments printed (or coined) money; money still had a physical existence, as bills and coins; no matter how much was minted, there still would be a limited, finite amount of it, just as there was a limited, finite amount of stuff that could be bought with it. It was another equation, a lot more complicated, but still with an equal sign in the middle of it.
      But now money is not based on the physical existence of the bills and coins in people’s pockets and in the vaults of banks, it is based on nothing more than numbers in computers, on electronic combinations of 0’s and 1’s. The amount of money that can be put into circulation is infinite. All it takes to produce money, to accumulate money or to spend money, is a few clicks on a computer keyboard. 
      Is there enough real currency in the world to cover the amount of real assets in the world?

      If I, or any of my friends, decided to cash it all in, to sell our investments, to sell all our assets, we could, with a bit of scurrying around, eventually realize it all in dollars, which we could put in some suitcases and wander off with to Macao or Monte Carlo. But what if Microsoft decided to cash it all in? Would there be enough hard money – dollars, yen, pounds, renminbi, etc. – for Microsoft to dole it out to its erstwhile shareholders? Maybe. But then what if Apple were to do the same thing, and Google, and Walmart, and de Beers and IBM and Grand Union, General Mills, Motors and Electric, British Air and Petroleum, etc. etc. Is there enough cash in the world to cover all those assets? I doubt it. All there would be would be a bunch of 0’s and 1’s.

      But, as I say, I have a mental deficiency. Either I rely too much on logic or my logical facilities are limited. Perhaps I simply am unable to grasp certain abstract realities. I could not grasp how a symbol on a blackboard could represent a tangent between two lines. In the same way I cannot grasp how inserting a symbol, such as $ or £ or ¥, before a number can create confidence in a rational person’s mind that the number has a value that can be translated into real things such as a banana, or 100,000 acres of banana trees with all the machines and labor required to maintain them and bring in a harvest.

      The emergence of bitcoins and other virtual currencies seems to bolster my dubiousness. There is no question that the duds of the geeky virtual money emperors do not really exist and they will soon be seen as parading around buff naked. But what about the great emperor, the emperor of the world, the greatest emperor of them all: “real” money. Isn’t his regalia just as imaginary and isn’t all that protects him nothing but a bubble which one little prick of lost confidence can destroy?

      But, as I say, I’m just stupid about some things. There must be more propping up money than just popular confidence. Not everyone believes in God, but everyone believes in money. I do too, after all. So there must be more to it than just blind faith, mustn’t there?