Off Course

There are a few courses I’d like to see added to the high school curriculum. These aren’t in what most people would consider the category of “basics.” Nevertheless, I think these courses are necessary for a young person in America today.

Course number one is “Critical Thinking.” Some colleges offer this. Put succinctly, it is a course in developing one’s bullshit detector. The course addresses such questions as:

What is a logical argument?
How can language be used to clarify or confuse an issue?
How do propaganda and advertising work?

We are all bombarded with dubious advertising claims and illogical feel-good marketing. Politicians and political activists of all stripes confront us with arguments and counter-arguments about critical policy decisions. In our own private lives we encounter complex situations that require clear thinking. A course like this prepares students to separate fluff from substance and make sound decisions.

Another required course should be “Direct Democracy and Meeting Facilitation.” Here in Vermont we might call it “Town Meeting 101.” Whether you live in Vermont or not, many times in your life you will find yourself in a room with a group of people who are trying to make a decision together. There are no courses that I know of in public school that teach people the skills they need to get through this. Thus, all the endless, unfocused, contentious, and ultimately useless meetings we know so well.

When I started being politically active in college I actually studied how to facilitate meetings, that is, how to run them and make them work. It wasn’t magic, but it seemed like it when people were able to finish a meeting early and walk out feeling good about what they accomplished. People need to learn how to run a meeting, how to efficiently participate in one, and how to achieve a unified decision. All they learn right now is how to shut up and follow.

Young people should take a course dedicated to our constitution. They don’t need the depth of instruction offered to law school students, but they should understand the framework of our country, its history, and its meaning. It is imperative that they have an understanding of how our government works and the extent and necessity of our constitutional rights.

There should be a course dedicated to the history of science and scientific method. Many people don’t understand the difference between science, non-science, and pseudo-science. They don’t understand the way scientists work, what constitutes a properly conducted experiment, or how experimental results are presented and interpreted. As with politics (and generally because of politics), we are confronted with conflicting claims in the fields of medicine, the environment, sociology, psychology, and education itself. We need the intellectual tools to sift through these claims and identify the ones with scientific validity.

I have a couple of ideas for less vital, and yet very useful courses for high school students. One would be on energy – where it comes from, how we extract it, how we use it, and the consequences of using it. Another practical course would be on “How Ordinary Things Work.” For example, most of us are utterly dependent on automobiles, but most people have only the foggiest notion of how their automobile works. Likewise our furnaces, refrigerators, air conditioners, computers, and our telephone system. Yes, there are professionals out there to repair these things, but we still need to make informed decisions about their selection and use.

How about offloading a couple of things to make some space in the schedule?

A show of hands please – How many of you have solved a quadratic equation since the final exam of your high school algebra class? Let’s see…..one……two……ok, two. My own work requires a large number of calculations, but my use of algebra is rare enough. High school students have a limited amount of time, energy, and memory capacity. Parents and educators need to make some decisions about what most students will actually need in their post-school lives, what will develop unique mental skills, and what is just another brick in the backpack.

Team sports, especially football, need to be de-funded or at least dramatically de-emphasized. Ok, these aren’t academic courses, but that’s the point. What used to be a minor diversion for school kids and parents has become, in many places, the focus. High school football, especially, diverts funding and attention away from teaching kids what they will need to know in real life. Besides, ask any orthopedic surgeon about the effects of football injuries on developing bodies.

The focus on team sports results in a bizarro world where young men with remedial reading skills (in part due to the focus on sports) get full scholarships to major universities. Meanwhile, students with reasonable academic abilities, who could and would actually benefit from a college education, are left scrounging for student loans.

Detecting bullshit, running meetings, understanding democracy, and understanding science – these are things that your average American could use all the time. The quadratic equation and the shotgun pass? Not as much.

The standardized child

Children all over America are now being funneled back into that great crumbling structure we call public education. Only 75% of them will ever graduate high school, a pathetic number compared to the high 90’s achieved elsewhere. Many that do graduate will be semiliterate and unprepared for work, citizenship, and managing their own lives. I’m all for public schooling, but not the way it is done now.

One of my favorite quotes about the public school system comes from an educational reformer whose name, unfortunately, I forget. He said, “People say our school system is doing a terrible job. This is not true. It’s doing a great job of preparing the farm kids of 1900 for the factory jobs of the 1920’s”

I can’t go through the whole history of public schooling here, but remember that it started in the 1800’s in Prussia. The Prussians had just lost a war and decided that their kids needed more discipline. Hence, kindergarten, a regimented place away from home and family to teach conformity and obedience. The modern public school in America copied the Prussians when industrial development was drawing people away from the farms and into factories. The factory school system was expressly designed to filter out the intellectually promising from the future coal shovelers, obedient employees from free thinkers and rebels, and to teach most children that spending their days in oppressed boredom was normal. If you think this assessment is unduly harsh, read the words of those who designed the system.

Means become ends. When we lecture and test, we teach our children to gorge information and puke it out onto paper (What I call “bulemic education”). When we build and run our schools like medium security prisons, we create young adults fit for prison, either the corporate or legal type. Where else in society are people restricted to a set of buildings under threat of punishment and forced to run from one concrete box to another when a bell rings? The modern urban school, with its security guards and metal detectors, is even closer to the paradigm.

Ask any teacher or school administrator what they are trying to accomplish and you’ll get something like, “We’re trying to prepare kids for the adult world and develop their full potential as individuals.” They mean it. Too bad they have the wrong tool for the job – a deadening, infantilizing, conformist, repressive system. To start with, we need to get rid of grades, grades, and walls.

The first grades we need to eliminate are the age related ones. All students get rammed through a certain amount of material in a fixed time period, ready or not. If they are far enough behind their peers, they get held back, a humiliating and often school ending experience in that strictly age-segregated world. Mostly they get shoved onward, unready for the next force-feeding. Different people take different amounts of time to learn the same concepts and skills, so give each child the time to actually fully learn a skill or body of knowledge before moving on. Maybe it will take one child five years to learn what another learns in five months. So be it. Perhaps some kid will take his entire school career just to achieve basic literacy. At least he will be literate. Teachers should be teaching particular bodies of knowledge, not warm bodies of a particular age. Why allow for failure at all? We didn’t have a time limit on learning to walk, or methodological restrictions. We just tried till we got it.

Letter grades are simply a crime against children. When you consider all the factors outside a child’s control that influence that single letter summary, you realize what an absurd, arbitrary value judgement it is. “Ok kid, you have ADD, your teacher is a burnout, you are harassed by bullies, you are in a class of 35 kids, your dad is an abusive alcoholic, you didn’t get breakfast, and you had a stomach flu the day before the final. Here’s a D – you’re a moron.” Letter grades are not accurate measures of knowledge or effort. They are just as often indicators of pure dumb luck. And yet, we are dedicated to the utterly futile practice of standardized testing.

Standardized testing will work when someone invents the standardized child.

Millions of children are being tested for:

-How well they can handle intellectual bulemia
-How well they are able to work under time pressure and fear of failure without reference materials
-Their physical and emotional state on testing day
-How well their teachers “taught to the test”

We are testing how well children fit our system. It makes millions for the testing industry and gives people numbers to point at, but nothing more. The “No Child Left Behind Act”, with its combination of standardized testing and penalizing low scoring schools, is just an excuse for bayoneting the wounded.

If we want to prepare children for real life, why do we isolate them all day in an artificial environment? Why is anybody surprised when so many children find their studies irrelevant to their lives, or react like the prisoners that they are? Schools need to be integrated into the real life of the community. Yes, it will be more difficult to administrate, but why should that be the priority? All real learning is voluntary, and when children can make a connection between their lives and their studies, they will want to learn.

Our present attempts at educational repair are like computerizing a steam engine. It costs a lot and generates impressive numbers, but it’s still inefficient. It will be an act of bravery to give up on the old model, with all of its benefits for vested interests, and design a new model based on the needs of children today.

Home, sweet light crude heated home

In my last piece I offered some energy saving tips relating to your car, and the 9.1 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil that goes into the collective American gas tank. Fuel oil and propane combined account for 7.3 million bpd, or 35% of our total consumption. In this post I’d like to offer a few hints on low cost ways of conserving fossil energy at home.

Your house will lose about half its heat because air is leaking into and out of your house. Even a new, well built house will experience a complete change of air once every two or three hours. Good thing, too, or else we’d die of the stink. Older, leakier houses might exchange air at twice that rate or more. The ideal situation is to have your house as airtight as possible and then voluntarily adjust the air exchange rate as needed. Luckily, it is not expensive to work on this.

Look around the outer walls of your house. Every place where two materials meet is a possible leak: windows, doors, outlets, utility entrances, vents. To start with, get a roll of rope caulk, a roll of self-adhesive foam tape, some tubes of good silicone caulk and a caulking gun, and a can or so of expando-foam. Get the $17 caulking gun, not the $3.99 one – the cheap ones only last a week or so before something bends or snaps. The rope caulk is good for temporarily sealing the sliding joints in old double hung windows. The foam tape is for butting surfaces around windows and doors. Don’t forget the door or hatch up into the attic. The silicone caulk is for around the outside of windows and doors, and the expando-foam is for those huge Grand Canyon gaps between the concrete in the basement and the wood framing on top of it. You can also get little foam pads for underneath switch and outlet plates.

So far you have spent less than $50 and you have done a lot to keep the precious oil heat in your house. This will probably pay back in the first winter month.

Windows are a weak point in the thermal armor of your house. A standard 2x6 framed house with decent windows and insulation can lose 20-30% of its heat through the windows. Even double pane windows are pathetic insulation compared to walls, and even with low-e coatings heat still radiates through them. A decent double pane window might have an R-value of 3.3. Really good ones approach R-6. A 2x6 stud wall with fiberglass insulation is R-28 or better.

I recommend insulated curtains. You can get window blanket material at a local fabric store and make your own Roman shades. You can go to Blinds Wholesale (the cheapest place I’ve found so far) and buy so-called honeycomb shades, which add R-4 to R-6, depending on the style. This will knock you back $100+ a window, depending on size, but will pay back. If you are really strapped for bucks, go to your local camping store or army surplus outlet and get some of those silvery survival blankets. They are just rectangles of aluminized reflective mylar – one of the elements in that window blanket material. Cut them to size and attach them to the back of your existing curtains. If you want to get fancy, buy some polyester batting at your local fabric store and sandwich that in. An important element in this is to seal around the edges of the curtain with magnetic strips or velcro to keep air from circulating behind the curtain.

Perhaps most important, take care of your heating device. If you have an oil furnace, when was the last time you had it tuned and cleaned? Whatever you use to burn fossil fuels, maintain it at peak performance. Even a small increase in efficiency at the burner can save you the cost of the technician’s visit in a few months.

This is simple, relatively inexpensive work that has a fast payback, both for you and the environment. For the next step, have an energy audit of your house. An expert can assess your situation and run the numbers on the best steps to take for further savings. In Vermont, call or email Efficiency Vermont, our energy efficiency utility. The Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy site has good information on weatherization techniques and how to find an energy auditor.

Energy efficiency isn’t rocket science, doesn’t require a lot of capital, and is a better investment than stocks, bonds, or money market funds. It is a way for you to benefit yourself and the world at the same time. Don’t wait for winter.

Less for the oil companies, more for you

I promised a piece on saving energy, oil in particular, at the end of my piece on the decline of the Cantarell oil field. There is a lot of information out there on how to save energy, and a lot of it is obvious. What is less obvious is what you can do that gives the biggest bang for the buck, or for the effort.

In 2005, the U.S. used about 20.6 million barrels per day of crude oil. Of that,

9.1 million went to gasoline (44%)
4.1 went to fuel oil (20%)
3.2 went to propane/LPG (15%)
1.6 went to jet fuel (8%)

That is 87% of our use. The rest goes to petrochemicals, asphalt, lubricants, kerosene, and the like. I’ll concentrate on the top four. Consider: Completely eliminating our use of petrochemicals (0.68 million bpd), which is impossible without decades of intense R&D and conversion, would be the equivalent of reducing our gasoline consumption by 7.5%, an attainable short term goal.

Motor fuel is the biggest use, and mercifully the easiest to deal with. There are a number of absurdly simple things you can do to cut your gasoline use, without shelling out for a new Prius hybrid.

Drive slowly. I'm serious. The energy required to push your car through the air goes up by the square of the speed. This doesn't mean driving around at 15 mph. Just obey the speed limit, ok? How about 60 on the highway instead of "Oh, they give you five mph anyway"? To quote the government fuel economy site, “As a rule of thumb, you can assume that each 5 mph you drive over 60 mph is like paying an additional $0.20 per gallon for gas.” Regular gas is around $2.93 at my local pump. Do you like paying $3.33 for regular at 70 mph? No? Added benefit: you stop getting that sudden pang of fear when you see a cop car.

Check your tire pressure. Studies have found that most people's tires are under inflated. This can cost you 3-4% in gas mileage. Multiply it by $2.93 and save ~$0.10 a gallon.

Next time you buy tires, check out Consumer Reports for the ones that have the lowest rolling resistance - another couple of percentage points for no more money than you were going to spend anyway.

Go easy on your accelerator. You are blowing somewhere between 5% and 33% of your gas mileage when you tromp on it.

Don’t let the car sit there idling. You are getting zero miles per gallon, fouling the sparkplugs, and contaminating the oil. As a rule of thumb, starting the car takes the same amount of gasoline as ten seconds of idling.

So far you have done the equivalent of saving at least $0.60 a gallon with the expenditure of a little restraint, a few minutes every two weeks to check your tires, and $2.99 for a tire gauge. Your wallet is benefiting immediately, and you are doing your part to reduce our oil dependence.

Check out: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/drive.shtml

Carpool, even if it is just one day a week. One day a week in your car with one other person cuts gas consumption for the two of you by 10%. Two days, 20%,and so on.

If you live in a northern state, get an electric block heater and a timer. In the winter, set the timer to start heating your engine block early in the morning. Watch your winter gas mileage jump by 10-20%. Most of your winter mileage loss comes from the first ten cold minutes of driving, when your oil is like jello and your engine is dumping in the gas. The electric energy you use will be far less than the gas you were wasting. Your engine will always start.

The next time you are in the market for a vehicle, buy one that gets at least 5 mpg better than your last one. Think hard about how much vehicle you really need. Think about getting a Toyota Prius, a Honda Civic Hybrid, or if you really want to ignore the gas pumps, a Honda Insight. Go to http://www.fueleconomy.gov/ and look for the highest mileage vehicle that will do what you need to do.

What if this kind of behavior, short of buying all new cars, became widespread in the U.S. driving population? Let’s say we get 20% compliance. That means one out of five people does all of these things, or everybody does one-fifth of them, or something proportional. That would drop our national oil consumption by around 5.6%, and world oil consumption by 1.4%. That’s half of the oil now produced by Nigeria. The price of oil would drop, our trade deficit would drop, and we would be on our way to compliance with the Kyoto accords. And that’s without even reducing the number of miles we drive.

Next time, some tips on quick and cheap ways to save fuel (and your share of the planet) at home.

Back to school - on foot?

I had intended to follow my piece on the decline of the Cantarell oilfield with a piece on how to reduce energy consumption, but history, as is its wont, has marched on.

In the Cantarell piece I referred to a study by an organization called Securing America’s Future Energy. That study estimated that a 4% reduction in world oil supply would lead to an oil price spike into the range of $160 a barrel. This would result in ~$6 a gallon gasoline and heating oil and, according to their unsurprising projections, a worldwide recession. To quote one of the participants, former Director of Central Intelligence Robert M. Gates, “The real lesson here [is that] it only requires a relatively small amount of oil to be taken out of the system to have huge economic and security implications.”

British Petroleum has just shut down their Prudhoe Bay operation in Alaska due to corroded pipes. They will be replacing most of the piping and can’t give an estimate of when it will come back on line. That means that 400,000 barrels per day (b/d), about half a percent of world production, is shut in for an indefinite period.

Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council has issued an ultimatum to Iran – stop enriching uranium by August 31st or else suffer sanctions. Iran has responded with defiance, including a reference to the “oil weapon.” Iran exported 2.7 million b/d in 2005, or about 3.2% of world production.

Iraq is either in the midst of a civil war (according to Iraqis and most world observers), or on the edge of one, if you work for the Bush Administration. Iran has great influence over the Shiite sections of Iraq, and could make the situation much worse if it was in their interest. Iraq ekes out roughly 2 million b/d, or roughly 2.4% of world production.

The rebels in the oil rich sections of Nigeria are kidnapping oil workers on a regular basis and disrupting production there. Rebel attacks temporarily shut in about 675,000 b/d earlier this year. Nigeria exports 2.25 million b/d, about 2.7% of world output.

Let us not forget the 4-6 major hurricanes that the NOAA is predicting for the Gulf of Mexico this season. The U.S. portion of the Gulf produces 1.5 million b/d, about 1.7% of world production. 100% of it was shut in after Katrina, with 50% of capacity still down weeks later. The production shut in was temporary, but major.

Anything could happen, and nothing might happen. BP might be magicians and get that 400,000 b/d back in a few weeks, but I doubt it. I will leave my crystal ball in its velvet-lined box, but I will do some simple arithmetic.

Half a percent of world production is indefinitely shut in, and 10% is at risk in the next few months. The mullahs that rule Iran will be making a decision before Labor Day weekend about the cost/benefit ratio of crippling the world economy. Do they continue to delay and play the diplomatic game, or do they screw the valves shut and say the Persian equivalent of “How do you like me now, infidel?” (0.5% + 3.2%= 3.7%)Would they also give the signal to their allies within Iraq to step up attacks on oil infrastructure there? ( 3.7% + 2.4% = 6.1%) Nigeria is an unknown, as is Mother Nature.

The cosmic dice may roll and give us sevens, or they may give us snake eyes, or something in between. Even a slightly bad scenario would push oil prices over $100 a barrel. My main point is that we are living very, very close to the edge of a bad situation. My second point is that we have very little control over the supply side of the equation. If we begged the Saudis they might be able to squeeze out another 2 million b/d, but that is not guaranteed, either.

Which brings me back to the people at SAFE. They point out that we can’t wait around for the oil dice to roll if we want to avoid a long bout of economic, social, and political pain. We need an accelerated program of demand reduction. We, the people, can’t expect any such rational action from the federal government right now, so it is up to us on a personal, local, and state level.

Now is the time to do the home weatherization you have been meaning to do. Get that carpool going, even one day a week. Telecommute. Retire the beater SUV and get the hybrid you’ve always wanted, or at least something with an extra 10 mpg. Eat more locally grown food. Just drive less. Forward this post to your friends and ask them to do the same. Even if you can’t save the country, you can put yourself and your community in a better position for when the probabilities play out.

Ok, next time, the energy reduction piece.