Bill Buckley died last week, and among the many tributes to him was a worry, voiced by Peggy Noonan, that we will all be poorer if our supply of well rounded, articulate men like Buckley starts petering out. (Her column was headed “May We Not Lose His Kind.”) It is a legitimate concern. It is now conventional wisdom that the future of our economy and our way of life depends on our ability to focus the education of our young on science and technology.
I yield to no one when it comes to recognizing the importance of math and science, and I agree that we are now at a competitive disadvantage because our youngsters score much lower in such subjects than the Chinese, the Japanese, and many others, including the Finnish children, who apparently are at the top of the list. On the other hand, what we need most of all are students who are good at math and science AND writing and history and at least one foreign language and geography and civics and all the other subjects that one had to learn, once upon a time, to graduate from high school. A bachelor’s degree from college was a certificate attesting to the fact that you were an educated person, in the fullest sense of the term.
Bill Buckley – writer, yachtsman, bon vivant, occasional politician, TV personality, philosopher, magazine founder and editor – was, flagrantly, an educated man. A renaissance man. There have been others, and one doesn’t have to travel back to Leonardo DaVinci to find them. Alfred Lee Loomis was one. After graduating from Yale Law School, he joined a New York law firm and was a rising star when he left law to pursue investment banking, rescuing a failing bond firm, making a large fortune, and selling out before the Crash. He was one of the 10 wealthiest men in the United States, yacht-racing with the Vanderbilts and their ilk. But, while Wall Street was his “day job,” on weekends he presided over one of the country’s foremost technology laboratories, at his estate in Tuxedo Park, 40 miles north. For Loomis was also a first-class scientist, and he was able to draw the best and the brightest from MIT, Stanford, and elsewhere. Among those drawn to Tuxedo Park were the giants of the era – Einstein, Bohr, Fermi. In the late 30’s, with war threatening, FDR called on Loomis to organize work on radar, and some of the Tuxedo Park crew were recruited for work on the Manhattan Project. Loomis’s amazing story is well told in the book “Tuxedo Park,” written by Jennet Conant, granddaughter of a noted Harvard president.
Another renaissance man was a fellow I once knew while working at General Radio in the 50’s. This was Robert Rines, a patent attorney with Rines & Rines, of Boston. Since General Radio’s engineers were notoriously prolific and creative, there were hundreds of patents to be awarded, and Bob was a master of his craft. But Rines the patent attorney was also Rines the scientist, with bachelor’s degree (MIT) and doctorate in physics, plus his law degree from Georgetown. His pioneering work on high-definition sonar systems was vital to the search for the Titanic and the Bismark. On vacation in Scotland, he became absorbed by the tales of the Loch Ness monster and became one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject. Is there more? There is more. He was also a composer, writing scores for 10 Broadway and off-Broadway musicals.
Then there was my old boss and mentor, Charlie Worthen, another MIT engineer who was a voracious reader of British literature, in particular the essays of Orwell and the arcana of J.R.R. Tolkein. Charlie knew so much more about art and literature and music than I did that it was embarrassing, because he was the engineer and I the liberal arts graduate. (In retribution, I tried mightily but vainly to become a self-taught electronics engineer.)
Engineers are often good musicians, I find, probably because the mathematics of music fascinates them. Lawyers also seem to be drawn to music, and long before Bob Rines, a lawyer named Arthur Schwartz became a hugely successful Broadway composer. (“Dancing in the Dark” was one of his many hit songs.) So the multitalented person is not all that rare. If you have the creative gene, it seems, it will find a variety of outlets.
Not everyone can be a Buckley or a Loomis or a Rines. But everyone can at least be interested in more than one thing at a time, and our schools can return to the old standard, the idea that education means more than knowing one thing well. The Jesuits called their master plan the “ratio studiorum,” and their plan of studies covered the widest possible arc, within the time constraints of the school day. I know, having gone through the drill and having taught at a Jesuit high school for a year.
So, much as I applaud the renewed emphasis on math and science, it would be a tragedy if the rest of the ratio studiorum were crowded out. I wonder, when I hear parents gushing that their eight-year-old Willy “is a whiz at the computer,” whether the child will eventually be taught anything about gerunds or magnetic theory or basic economics. Will he ever know who fought in the Boer War? Will he know where Acadia was? Will he ever read Shakespeare or Pushkin or Ibsen?
Maybe he will. Maybe he’ll Google them and eventually get interested enough to search them out at the library. I hope so, because if he is nothing more than a whiz at the computer, he is being cheated out of most of what life is all about.
