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I was pleasantly surprised to read in phys.org that some researchers are coming to the conclusion that Victorian era people were more intelligent than those of us who have come after.  With all the self-congratulating blather about the Flynn curve and just reflexive over-confidence, a corrective is in order.  (It’s probably too much to ask people these days to put on a little humility about anything, but I digress…)

Right: torsional analysis of tubing, from the work of Saint-Venant.  Keep in mind that both the math and engineering behind the analysis and the graphical production were done without the aid of a computer.

I’ve spent a great deal of time–especially in the last decade or so–documenting things and people from the Victorian era and immediately beyond.  Much of this concerns my family both at work and at play, but I’ve gone further afield as well.  I’m frankly inclined to agree with this assessment.  Here are some observations:

Victorians were, on the whole, more literate.  Since almost all their books are in the public domain and many have been scanned, it doesn’t take much of a search to realise that, for us, they are hard reading.  Much of that is due to the fact that Victorians were classically educated and often conversant in Greek and Latin.  (Just try to plough through any work on the Greco-Roman world and find the endless citations in both.)  And that’s even true on both sides of the Atlantic.  The United States in the nineteenth century was a literate nation but not a literary one, but the prose is still of good quality.

It’s easy today to blame the Internet on the poor standards of reading and writing we tolerate these days, but the downhill run since World War I has been driven in this country by at least two factors: the takeover of the public school system by the teachers’ trade union, and the corrosive effects of television.

The Explosion of Science, Without Massive Funding:  My geriatric foray into my PhD program has impelled me into look into a good deal of scientific history.  Although it’s easy to forget about it now, it’s really amazing how much the sciences advanced during the nineteenth century, and that without the computational tools we have today.  This is especially true in mathematics.  For example, learning about mathematical cubic splines (essential for programs like Adobe Photoshop) in numerical analysis got me to thinking: I wonder how much use my great-grandfather got out of real cubic splines in designing the yachts and other craft he did around the turn of the last century.

It’s also interesting to note that much of this advance was done without the massive government funding that is de rigeur today.  That is largely a legacy of the Cold War, but we act like it’s always been done that way.

Victorians had a better sense of the relationship between the theoretical and the real:  That speaks more to the industrial and civil works that were put out during the era.  Our tendency to specialise in either design or manufacturing or use have deprived us of the “big picture” in the design of manufactured products, buildings and other structures.  In those times most of those associated with theoretical advancements also had deeper involvement in practical problems, which often inspired the theory.

Many analyses of Victorian engineering achievements show limited opportunity for optimisation, given the building materials and construction techniques of the time.  Now we use computer aided design to compensate for that, but that leaves a decided dip in the quality of things between then and now.

These are just a few examples–most drawn from the scientific end of things–that should give pause for thought on our own self-designated superiority.

One of the diciest spectacles we have in education these days is the rush to apply technology to the process.  Our school systems are spending enormous amounts of money to equip students with the latest gadget (these days, it’s a tablet) and make sure they know how to run these things.  Textbook publishers are rushing to put students into e-textbooks, which are great until:

1. Your open book tests do not allow internet capable devices (mine don’t);
2. You realise the digital rights management (DRM) doesn’t let you resell the book, which means that you’ve just spent more on the e-textbook then you would have if you had bought and resold the paper one; or
3. Someone steals the tablet you’ve been issued, DRM following.

A lot of this push comes from Boomer administrators and educators who are a) mercifully retiring and b) in a complete panic over technology in general.  For them, the on/off switch on desktops was a complete mystery, to say nothing about the little dimple at the bottom of their iPhone/iPad.  Much of their push re technology is done without a clear understanding of how it works, which is one reason why it’s an uphill battle to get students to learn how to code (which, in turn, would enhance everyone’s understanding of how computers really work).

Boomers come up with all kinds of buzzwords to hide their ignorance on many points.  One of them is their insistence upon things, people and organisations being “leading edge”.  Once again, this is the mantra of a generation who is scared to brown pants about being left behind.  This has also oozed into the church world.

My first job was in the aerospace industry, designing what you see above, and that the year Star Wars came out.  I had never had much exposure to aircraft outside of flying around in them, although I learned later that my grandfather (right) was a different story altogether.  One of the first revelations was that a) the term “leading edge” refers to the “front” edge of a wing and b) wings have both leading and trailing edges, both of which are important to the flight of the aircraft or missile or whatever.  (I’m still tangentially involved with aerospace people, and you can see how they show leading and trailing edges of wings work here).

Today we’re obsessed with being “leading edge” or “cutting edge”.  But the trailing edge has its place too.  Technology has transformed just about every aspect of productive work (and unproductive work too) but one can have a career in some stuff that would be classified as “trailing edge”.  My family business was decidedly in that group, but we were in the middle of an industry which was (and still is) very advanced in its technology and vital in its product, if not politically correct.  It took me a long time to grasp that it was really OK and, of course, I doubt most manufactured products have examples that are still in their original use after a century or more.  My teaching field (geotechnical engineering) always seems to lag the rest of civil engineering in the application of new techniques, but rare is the structure that does not rest on the foundation.  And the reason for the lag is simple: with the many uncertainties of any earth science, the price of failure (especially in our legal environment) is very high.

For success, we must have a place on the wing, so to speak.  Sometimes that means moving from one edge to another (that’s not uncommon with computer people) but having that place takes more than following the latest trend or parroting the latest buzzword.  It takes planning, long-term planning, and in the short-term emotionalism that characterises American thinking, that’s not easy to break away from the crowd and do.

The current decline of the personal computer is well-known.  One ministry friend noted that content generators prefer the PC while content consumers go for the tablets.  That’s true, so the question is this: will you be a generator, or simply a consumer?  Long-term success will be difficult if all you do is find yourself in the latter mode.  But unfortunately the “gee-whiz” approach we take to science and technology encourages that, and it’s a recipe for failure.

We can be on the leading edge, we can be on the trailing edge, or somewhere between, but the key is that we take flight.  As was noted at the beginning of the greatest adventure in history:

No sooner had Jesus said this than he was caught up before their eyes, and a cloud received him from their sight. While they were still gazing up into the heavens, as he went, suddenly two men, clothed in white, stood beside them, And said: “Men of Galilee, why are you standing here looking up* into the heavens? This very Jesus, who has been taken from you into the heavens, will come in the very way in which you have seen him go into the heavens.” Then the Apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called Olivet, which is about three-quarters of a mile from the city. (Acts 1:9-12)

*I would have said “looking stupid” but the men (really angels) were more charitable than I would have been.

It’s that time of the year again, when some students turn into wage-earners, others just move on to another curriculum, and still others just tank.  Once the mediaeval outfits return to the closet while some who just came out of the closet try to push others they don’t like into the closet, college faculty are generally saddled with the task of documenting their work for accreditation agencies.

Thinking about that turns me back to my last degree pursuit, and the course in Statically Indeterminate Structures.  It was my first structural course past the very basics (my first degree was in Mechanical Engineering, where I specialised in machine design).  But it was indeterminate in more ways that structurally; the professor’s MO struck me as bizarre.  After years of textbook/problems/tests, there was none of that here.  His treatment of topics reminded me of a 1960’s art movie; no plot, and no clear connection between one scene and the next. He had no textbook, just notes which appeared on the overhead projector.  Homework consisted in substantial projects whose due dates were flexible; you worked and worked until the incomplete disappeared.

I despaired of learning anything (my father dying in the middle of course didn’t help) but I really did.  There was method in his madness; I am a better engineer for the effort.  As the department head, he made two more decisions which went against the grain.  When his only other full-time professor retired, he brought in one full-time professor (now department head) and me as an adjunct.  Both of us had our primary experience in the offshore oil industry, and this in a landlocked state!

Getting back to the accreditation progress, one of the requirements of our discipline specific accreditation organisation (in our case ABET) was that we develop an objective for our college.  True to form, my professor said that we could develop any objective, down to and including becoming the worst engineering school in the country.  Once again that struck me as bizarre, but after reflection I realised he was right, because if we had an objective to be the worst engineering school in the country, we wouldn’t be that worst school!  The programs with no goals would do that!

The point of this strange diatribe is that having an objective, a goal, is essential to success in life, no matter how you define success.  To start with you can’t succeed at anything if you have no criteria for success, and an objective gives you that criterion.  Beyond that, as with ABET, having a goal–any goal–will put you ahead of everyone else that doesn’t have a goal, and that’s a large set of people these days.

There’s a lot of debate these days about why people raised in the upper stratum of society have the best shot of ending up there themselves.  We speak of more stable family structure, better educational opportunities, better mental stimulus, etc.  But my experience teaches me that underlying all that is that people raised in expensive zip codes are given goals in life and then pushed to make them reality.  Sometimes it doesn’t work; the goals given are unrealistic, unsuited for the subject, or just plain worthless.  But the combination of being raised at the top and having a purposeless life almost never happens, especially these days.

Down the ladder things are different.  It’s easier to get into a pattern of drifting through life, bouncing from job to job, dole to dole and lover to lover without much thought about where one wants to end up.  It’s especially easy in this country, and one of the unstated goals of the welfare state is to make that drifting the norm.  It’s why immigrants at all levels do so well; they come from places where those without a goal get wiped out.

A few years ago Rick Warren had his tremendously successful The Purpose Driven Life.  At the time churches marvelled at the idea, but for me it was a given.  Is there any other way to live it?  But unfortunately for many it is, even in churches where a purpose is an underlying assumption.

For the Christian, the ultimate goal is eternal life in Jesus Christ.  That idea, oddly, has come under attack from some Christians who believe that an emphasis of the heavenly goal is the road to earthly irrelevancy.  But I disagree; the eternal goal not only moulds your actions here leading up to it, but also puts you beyond the ultimate hold of the “god of this age” (cf. 2 Cor 4:4) and his agents and assigns, which is why same agents and assigns dislike Christianity so much.

But that dislike shouldn’t dissuade us from the pursuit of those eternal goals:

But all the things which I once held to be gains I have now, for the Christ’s sake, come to count as loss. More than that, I count everything as loss, for the sake of the exceeding value of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. And for his sake I have lost everything, and count it as refuse, if I may but gain Christ and be found in union with him; Any righteousness that I have being, not the righteousness that results from Law, but the righteousness which comes through faith in Christ–the righteousness which is derived from God and is founded on faith. Then indeed I shall know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, and all that it means to share his sufferings, In the hope that, if I become like him in death, I may possibly attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:7-11)

It’s time to not only have an objective–which is better than none–but the objective.