'An Appalling Report'

[Florestan]

To claim that the US might be "far ahead of the rest of the world in education" invites a skepticism similar to the "greatest composers" discussion, related to the nature (and narrow scope) of the criteria.

Well, Kristof's claim is that US were far ahead prior to 1970, but your point is still valid.

Not all that unrelatedly, the decline in education in the US seems to me in large part to result from curiously narrow (and in certain misapplied ways, 'scientific') notions of the nature of education.

Could you elaborate a bit, Karl?

[Homo Aestheticus]

Florestan,

Here is a very nice summation of most of Murray's ideas, excerpted from chapter 3 of his recent book, ´Real Education.´ It also addresses a few misconceptions that some have had in this thread... (i.e. that below average students should automatically be directed towards career/vocational studies or that they should not be exposed to the humanities)

He also provides examples of introductory college level material for freshmen in various subjects to remind people of the difficulty.

If you have the time to read it very carefully, I'd like to know where you believe he is misguided... I invite everyone who has been following this thread to share their thoughts. I believe he says many important things throughout.

******

Who Should Acquire A Liberal Education ? And When ?

To ask whether too many people are going to college requires us to think about the importance and nature of a liberal education. "Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men and women for some special mode of gaining their livelihood," John Stuart Mill told students at the University of St. Andrews in 1867. "Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings."  If this is true (and I agree that it is), why say that too many people are going to college ? Surely a mass democracy should encourage as many people as possible to become "capable and cultivated human beings" in Mill's sense. We should not restrict the availability of a liberal education to a rarified intellectual elite. More people should be going to college, not fewer.

E. D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge as the Skeleton of a Liberal Education

Yes and no. More people should be getting the basics of a liberal education. But for most students, the places to provide those basics are elementary and middle school. E.D. Hirsch Jr. is the indispensable thinker on this topic, beginning with his 1987 book 'Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know'. Part of his argument involves the importance of a body of core knowledge in fostering reading speed and comprehension, an important pedagogical finding that I discuss in the notes to this chapter. With regard to a liberal education, Hirsch makes three points that are germane here:

1. Full participation in any culture requires familiarity with a body of core knowledge. To live in the United States and not recognize Teddy Roosevelt, Prohibition, Minutemen, Huckleberry Finn, Wall Street, smoke-filled room, or Gettysburg is like trying to read without knowing some of the ten thousand most commonly used words in the language. It signifies a degree of cultural illiteracy about America. Not to recognize Falstaff, Sistine Chapel, Apollo, Sistine Chapel, Inquisition, Twenty-third Psalm, or Beethoven signifies cultural illiteracy about the West. Not to recognize solar system, Big Bang, natural selection, relativity or periodic table is to be scientifically illiterate. Not to recognize Mediterranean, Vienna, Yangtze River, Mount Everest, or Mecca is to be geographically illiterate.

2. This core knowledge is an important part of the glue that holds the culture together. All American children, of whatever ethnic heritage, and whether their families came here three hundred years ago or three months ago, need to learn about Pilgrims, Valley Forge, Duke Ellington, Apollo 11, Susan B. Anthony, George C. Marshall, and the Freedom Riders. All students need to learn the iconic stories. For a society of immigrants such as ours, the core knowledge is our shared identity that makes us American together rather than hyphenated Americans.

3. K-8 are the right years to teach the core knowledge, and the effort should get off to a running start in elementary school. Starting early is partly a matter of necessity: There's a lot to learn, and it takes time. But another reason is that small children enjoy learning myths and fables, showing off names and dates they have memorized, and hearing about great historical figures and exciting deeds. The educational establishment sees this kind of curriculum as one that forces children to memorize boring facts. That conventional is wrong on every count. The facts can be fascinating (if taught right); a lot more than memorization is entailed; yet memorizing things is an indispensable part of education, too; and memorizing is something that children do much, much better than adults. The core knowledge is suited to ways that young children naturally learn and enjoy learning. Not all children will be able to do the reading with the same level of comprehension, but the fact-based nature of the core knowledge actually works to the benefit of low-ability students --- remembering facts is much easier than making inferences and deductions. The core knowledge curriculum lends itself to adaptation for students across a wide range of academic ability. In the twenty years since 'Cultural Literacy' was published, Hirsch and his colleagues have developed and refined his original formulation into an inventory of more than six thousand items that approximate the core knowledge broadly shared by literate Americans. Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation has also developed a detailed, grade-by-grade curriculum for K-8, complete with lists of books and other teaching materials and of course topics involving the mechanics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The Core Knowledge approach need not stop with eight grade. High school is a good place for survey courses in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences taught at a level below the demands of a college course and accessible to most students in the upper two-thirds of the distribution of academic ability. Some students will not want to take these courses, and it can be counterproductive to require them to do so, but high school can put considerable flesh on the liberal education skeleton for students who are still interested.

In summary: Saying "too many people are going to college" is not the same thing as saying that the average student does not need to know about history, science, and great works of art, music, and literature. They do need to know - and to know more than they are currently learning. So let's teach it to them, but let's not wait for college to do it.

Liberal Education in College

Liberal education in college means taking on the tough stuff. A high school graduate who has acquired Hirsch's core knowledge will know, for example, that John Stuart Mill was an important 19th century philosopher who was associated with something called Utilitarianism and wrote a famous book called 'On Liberty'. But learning philosophy in college, which is an essential component of a liberal education, means that the student has to be able to read and understand the actual text of 'On Liberty'. That brings us back to the limits set by the nature of college-level material. Here is the first sentence of 'On Liberty':

"The subject of this essay is not the so-called liberty of the will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of philosophical necessity; but civil, or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual."

I will not burden you with 'On Liberty's last sentence. It is 126 words long. And Mill is one of the more accessible philosphers, and 'On Liberty' is one of Mill's more accessible works.

The difficulty of college-level material is obvious in engineering and most of the natural sciences, where students cannot get a degree unless they can handle the math. "Handle the math" means being able to pass courses in at least advanced calculus and statistics, a requirement that immediately makes the 10 percent estimate plausible. In the humanities and most of the social sciences, the difference between high school work and college-level work is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with average reading ability to sit through lectures and write answers in an examination book. But people with average reading ability do not understand much of the text in the assigned readings. They take away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion they know something they do not.

Perhaps the best way to convey how tough it is to deal with genuine college-level material is to remind you what the books are like. Each of the following passages of about a hundred words is taken from texts commonly used for college survey courses. To quash the temptation to cherry-pick the most difficult text, I used the same page number for selecting each passage (page 400, chosen arbitrarily).

Western History. "The Protestant Reformation could not have occurred without the monumental crises of the medieval church during the 'exile' in Avignon, the Great Schism, the conciliar period, and the Renaissance papacy. For increasing numbers of people the medieval church had ceased also to provide a viable religious piety. There was a crisis in the traditional teaching and spiritual practice of the church among its many intellectuals and laity. Between the secular pretensions of the papacy and the dry teaching of the Scholastic theologians, laity and clerics alike began to seek a more heartfelt, idealistic, and -- often in the eyes of the pope -- increasingly heretical religious piety." D. Kagan, S. Ozment, and F. M. Turner (1983). 'The Western Heritage' (2nd ed. New York: Macmillan.

Art. "Although the Humanists received with enthusiasm the new message from pagan antiquity, they nevertheless did not look upon themselves as pagans. It was possible for the 15th century scholar Laurentius Valla to prove the forgery of the Donation of Constantine (an early Medieval document purporting to record Constantine's bequest of the Roman empire to the Church) without feeling that he had compromised his Christian faith. The two great religious orders founded in the 13th century, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, were as dominant in setting the tone of 14th and 15th century Christian thought as they had been earlier, and they continued to be patrons of the arts." H. de la Croix and R.G. Tansey (1975). 'Gardner's Art Through the Ages (6th ed.) New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Economics. "Suppose any industry like wine-grape growing requires a certain kind of soil and location (sunny hillsides, etc.). Such sites are limited in number. The annual output of wine can be increased to some extent by adding more labor and fertilizer to each acre of land and by bidding away some hill sites from other uses. But as we saw in chapter 2, the law of diminishing returns will begin to operate if variable factors of production, like labor and fertilizer, are added to fixed amounts of a factor like land. Why is that ? Because each new variable addition of labor and fertilizer has a smaller proportion of land to work with." P.A. Samuelson and W. D. Nordhaus (1985). 'Economics' (12th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Psychology. "An exciting feature of artificial neural networks is their capacity to learn from experience, as some interconnections strengthen and others weaken. Their learning, together with their capacity for parallel processing, enables neural network computers to pick up how to navigate, play soccer, mimic others' expressions, and recognize particular shapes, sounds, and smells -- tasks that conventional computers find extremely difficult. A striking example: Thomas Landauer and his colleagues applied principles of computer neural networking to 'read' a previous edition of this textbook. As their 'Latent Semantic Analysis' program read the entire book, it associated all the individual words with one another." D.G. Myers (2004). 'Psychology' (7th ed.). New York: Worth Publishers.

Philosophy. "The most prominent philosophical outcome of these several converging strands of postmodern thought has been a many-sided critical attack on the central Western philosophical tradition from Platonism onward. The whole project of that tradition to grasp and articulate a foundational Reality has been criticized as a futile exercise in linguistic game playing, a sustained but doomed effort to move beyond elaborate fictions of its own creation. More pointedly, such a project has been condemned as inherently alienating and oppresively hierarchical -- an intellectually imperious procedure that has produced an existential and cultural impoverishment, and that has led ultimately to the technocratic domination of nature and the socialpolitical domination of others." R. Tarnas (1991). 'The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View´. New York: Ballantine Books.

English Literature: "If a man chooses to call every composition a poem which is a rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize the writer's intention. If it were subjoined that the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting as a tale or as a series of interesting reflections, I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem and an additional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I answer it must be one the parts of which mutually support and explain each other." Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Biographica Literaria." In M. H. Abrams et al. (eds.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature (4th ed., Vol. 2, 1979). New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
_____

On any random page of textbooks for introductory courses in the core college disciplines, that's the kind of prose that a freshman must be prepared to read and understand. It's not easy. The sentences in the passages average twenty-six words (by way of comparison, the length of the average sentence in a well-regarded high school history textbook is thirteen). Long sentences demand a high degree of focus if the syntax and vocabulary are simple. But the syntax in the passages I just quoted actually ranges from demanding to tortuous, involving intertwined independent and dependent clauses and frequent interpolations of material. Then the reader has to figure out what the words mean, and the barriers are many. The passages are studded with unexplained references that impede understanding if the reader is unfamiliar with them (Avignon, diminishing returns, Dominicans, Early Medieval, Franciscans, Great Schism, Humanists, parallel processing, Platonism, Reformation, Renaissance, Scholastics).

Then there are words that most students use in ordinary conversation, but are being used in the text to convey a less familiar, sometimes downright obscure meaning ("......admit this as another fit ingredient......," "......affecting as a tale......, "......by bidding away some hill sites......," "......fixed amounts......," "......the distinction is at least competent to  characterize......," "......he had compromised his Christian faith......," "......a futile exercise," "......elaborate fictions of its own creation," "......rhyme, or measure, or both......," "......religious orders," "......the whole project of that tradition").

Finally there is the relentless use of words that not many high-school seniors know. Excluding the specialized vocabulary and historical references, these short passages contain twelve words that are not among the 20,000 most frequently used English words: obloquy, alienating, clerics, conciliar, foundational, heretical, imperious, impoverishment, interconnections, pretensions, subjoined, technocratic, and uncontroverted. Nor should one bet that more than a minority of high-school seniors know baleful, antiquity, articulate, characterize, converging, existential, hierarchical, inherently, laity, latent, monumental, neural, pagan, papacy, patrons, piety, pointedly, semantic, viable and alembic.

All these difficulties arise in passages totaling not much more than the length of a single page in a typical college textbook. The intellectual demands of traditional college-level material in the social sciences and humanities cannot be described as concretely for engineering, mathematics, and the sciences, but they are as severe in their own way.

It would be nice if everyone could acquire a fully formed liberal education, but they cannot. We are once again looking at the 20 percent tops, and probably closer to 10 percent, who have the level of academic ability necessary to cope with the stuff of a liberal education at the college level. Should all of those who do have the academic ability to absorb a college-level liberal education get one ? It depends. Suppose we have before us a young woman who is in the 98th percentile of academic ability and wants to become a lawyer and eventually run for political office. To me, it seems essential that she spend her undergraduate years getting a rigorous liberal education. I will make this case in detail in the next chapter. The short version is that, apart from a liberal education's value to her, the nation will benefit. Everything she does as an attorney or as an elected official should be informed by the kind of wisdom that a rigorous liberal education can encourage. It is appropriate to push her into that kind of undergraduate program. But the only reason we can get away with pushing her is that the odds are high that she will enjoy it. The odds are high because she is good at this sort of thing -- it's no problem for her to read Mill´s 'On Liberty' or Plato's 'Symposium' or Milton's 'Paradise Lost'. It's no problem for her to come up with an interesting perspective on what she has read and weave it into a term paper. And because she is good at it, she is also likely to enjoy it. It is one of Aristotle's central themes in his discussion of human happiness, a theme that John Rawls later distilled into what he called the Aristotelian Principle: "Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity." And so it comes to pass that those who take the hardest majors and who enroll in courses that look most like an old-fashioned liberal education are concentrated among the students in the top percentiles of academic ability. Getting a liberal education consists of dealing with complex intellectual material day after day, and dealing with complex intellectual material is what students in the top few percentiles are really good at, in the same way that other people are really good at cooking or making pottery. For these students, doing it well is fun. Every percentile down the ability ladder -- and this applies to all abilities, not just academic -- the probability that a person will enjoy the hardest aspects of an activity goes down as well. Students at the 80th percentile of academic ability are still smart kids, but the odds that they will respond to a course that assigns Mill or Spinoza or Milton are considerably lower than the odds that a student in the top few percentiles will respond.  Virtue has nothing to do with it. Maturity has nothing to do with it. Appreciation of the value of a liberal education has nothing to do with it. The probability that a student will enjoy 'Paradise Lost' goes down as his linguistic ability goes down, but so does the probability that he works on double acrostic puzzles in his spare time or plays online Scrabble hour after hour, and for the identical reason. The lower down the linguistic ladder he is, the less fun such activities are.

And so we return to the question: Should all of those who have the academic ability to absorb a college-level liberal arts curriculum get one ? If our young woman is at the 80th percentile of linguistic ability, should she pushed to do so ? She has enough intellectual capacity, if she puts her mind to it and works exceptionally hard. The answer is no. If she wants to, fine. But she probably won't, and there is no way to force her. Try to force her (for example, by setting up a demanding core curriculum), and she will transfer to another school, because she is in college for vocational training. She wants to write computer code. Start a business. Get a job in television. She uses college to take vocational courses that pertain to her career interests. A large proportion of people who are theoretically able to absorb a liberal education have no interest in doing so. And reasonably so. Seen dispassionately, getting a traditional liberal education over 4 years is an odd way to enjoy spending one's time. Not many people enjoy reading for hour after hour, day after day, no matter what the material may be. To enjoy reading 'On Liberty' and its ilk -- and if you're going to absorb such material, you must in some sense enjoy the process -- is downright peculiar. To be willing to spend many more hours writing papers and answers to exam questions about that material approaches masochism.

We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a limited number of people. Most students at today's colleges choose not to take the courses that go into a liberal education because the capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students are not lazy, any more than students who do not want to spend hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eight-inch dice are lazy.

A liberal education just doesn't make sense for them yet colleges do their best to avoid admitting this.

******

[adamdavid80]

Helluva "excerpt". 

[PSmith08]

Helluva "excerpt". 

It would have been even more powerful were it probative of anything in particular.

[Florestan]

It also addresses a few misconceptions that some have had in this thread... (i.e. that below average students should automatically be directed towards career/vocational studies or that they should not be exposed to the humanities)

I don't remember anyone in this thread endorsing such ideas.

If you have the time to read it very carefully, I'd like to know where you believe he is misguided...

Not so much misguided, as disingenuous, although he makes some valid points. I will only comment on those issues which I find either highly debatable or plain truisms. Let's see.

"Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men and women for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings." 

"On LIberty" aside, to this I subscribe with the caveat that the word "only" be inserted before "intended" and "to make". If one goes to Harvard Law School, or to MIT's School of Engineering, s/he has a specific career in mind. I would think very poor of those universities were they not intended to make skilful lawyers or engineers.

On any random page of textbooks for introductory courses in the core college disciplines, that's the kind of prose that a freshman must be prepared to read and understand. It's not easy. The sentences in the passages average twenty-six words (by way of comparison, the length of the average sentence in a well-regarded high school history textbook is thirteen). Long sentences demand a high degree of focus if the syntax and vocabulary are simple. But the syntax in the passages I just quoted actually ranges from demanding to tortuous, involving intertwined independent and dependent clauses and frequent interpolations of material. Then the reader has to figure out what the words mean, and the barriers are many. The passages are studded with unexplained references that impede understanding if the reader is unfamiliar with them (Avignon, diminishing returns, Dominicans, Early Medieval, Franciscans, Great Schism, Humanists, parallel processing, Platonism, Reformation, Renaissance, Scholastics).

Now, wait a minute.

First, the excerpts Murray provides are not from "textbooks for introductory courses" but from academic books on their own.

Second, which colleges use these books as introduction for freshmen?

Third, if one is to become a cultivated human being, this requires personal effort to study, think and understand, i.e. the very things a college education is supposed to foster.

Fourth, taking  a random paragraph from page 400 (four hundred, mind you!) and pretending that the references are unexplained is the top of disingenuity. To understand that paragraph you need (a) all the 399 pages preceding it, (b) the footnotes or endnotes, and (c) a good amount of personal research.

All these difficulties arise in passages totaling not much more than the length of a single page in a typical college textbook. The intellectual demands of traditional college-level material in the social sciences and humanities cannot be described as concretely for engineering, mathematics, and the sciences, but they are as severe in their own way.

This paragraph is risible because it implies that the intellectual difficulties presented above pertain to engineering, mathematics and the sciences, and that those related to social sciences and humanities are as severe --- while the reality of Murray's text is completely the other way around.

It would be nice if everyone could acquire a fully formed liberal education, but they cannot.

Of course. It's common-sense. Can you name a specific person here who thinks otherwise?

The probability that a student will enjoy 'Paradise Lost' goes down as his linguistic ability goes down, but so does the probability that he works on double acrostic puzzles in his spare time or plays online Scrabble hour after hour, and for the identical reason. The lower down the linguistic ladder he is, the less fun such activities are.

Of course. It's common-sense. Can you name a specific person here who thinks otherwise?

And so we return to the question: Should all of those who have the academic ability to absorb a college-level liberal arts curriculum get one ? If our young woman is at the 80th percentile of linguistic ability, should she pushed to do so ? She has enough intellectual capacity, if she puts her mind to it and works exceptionally hard. The answer is no. If she wants to, fine. But she probably won't, and there is no way to force her. Try to force her (for example, by setting up a demanding core curriculum), and she will transfer to another school, because she is in college for vocational training. She wants to write computer code. Start a business. Get a job in television. She uses college to take vocational courses that pertain to her career interests. A large proportion of people who are theoretically able to absorb a liberal education have no interest in doing so.

Of course. It's common-sense. Can you name a specific person here who thinks otherwise?

Now, I infer from this lengthy excerpt that had I gone to a School of Engineering in the US I would have been forced to study not only Calculus, Fluid Mechanics or Technical Drawing, but also English Romanticism, Western History or Psychology. This I very much doubt.

[karlhenning]

Helluva "excerpt". 

Eric hasn't been to school, so he doesn't understand the concept of "summation."

Florestan,

Here is a very nice summation of most of Murray's ideas . . . .

[Josquin des Prez]

The real problem with the schools today:

http://www.mensaction.net/video/DBS-7B-Dysfunctioning-Educational-System-Grade-Schools/

http://www.mensaction.net/video/DBS-8B-Dysfunction-of-Educational-System-Part-2-High-School/

Please, take your time to watch those videos, takes about an hour. The masculine principle being driven out of our educational systems is where the problem lies. Turning schools into vocational centers won't solve anything. It is still a problem of imparting informations rather then knowledge, and it will still reward those who have a genetic advantage in dealing with informations (those who score higher in IQ tests), while ostracizing those who can acquire the knowledge, but cannot process informations as quickly and as fast as their more fortunate school mates. For the record, i agree with Eric that not everybody has the same "potential".

[karlhenning]

For the record, i agree with Eric that not everybody has the same "potential".

Is anyone here questioning that simple notion?

[Josquin des Prez]

Let me rephrase that then. Not everybody has potential, period. I'd reckon the vast majority of our female population does not posses the ability to create new ideas and concepts. In that sense, certain facets of our liberal education is wasted on them, which is why historically they were barred from pursuing particular paths. It was just a waste of time and resources.

[karlhenning]

I'd reckon the vast majority of our female population does not posses the ability to create new ideas and concepts.

You'd be out of your reckoning, then.

[Josquin des Prez]

Plus, home schooling is predominantly in this country done by families who don't want their children exposed to the sciences/to learn the theory of evolution. 

Sources?

[Josquin des Prez]

You'd be out of your reckoning, then.

I guess we'll see who's right once our boys are driven out of higher education entirely and the rate of scientific progress in America comes to a grinding halt.

[PSmith08]

I'd reckon the vast majority of our female population does not posses the ability to create new ideas and concepts.

Delete "female," and you'd have my assent, though I hardly see why such a silly standard deserves any weight.

Of course, the existence of someone like Emmy Noether pretty much destroys any foundation upon which you might rest your "theories," especially when one considers that many of her innovations were not made by the men intervening between Évariste Galois and her. Add to that someone like Lise Meitner, and you might want to consider revise your notions of the way things "are."

Who, however, would want to study the history of science before making assertions about competence and aptitude?

[Josquin des Prez]

Of course, the existence of someone like Emmy Noether pretty much destroys any foundation upon which you might rest your "theories," especially when one considers that many of her innovations were not made by the men intervening between Évariste Galois and her. Add to that someone like Lise Meitner, and you might want to consider revise your notions of the way things "are."

That hardly proves anything. If you want to truly understand how those proverbial exceptions to the rule occur (and make no mistake, there is a rule), read Sex and Character, by Otto Wieninger.

Delete "female," and you'd have my assent

You don't think that creativity is manifest in every facet of our society, and not merely in the higher spheres of human ingenuity? That's a very narrow point of view.

[PSmith08]

That hardly proves anything. If you want to truly understand how those proverbial exceptions to the rule occur (and make no mistake, there is a rule), read Sex and Character, by Otto Wieninger.

You're up a creek if that's the best cite you can offer. Points for effort, I suppose.

You don't think that creativity is manifest in every facet of our society, and not merely in the higher spheres of human ingenuity? That's a very narrow point of view.

There's creativity and there's creativity. It is a narrow point of view, but, let's be realistic here, there is a manifest difference between a novel and elegant mathematical proof and figuring out how to fix a Chevy 454 block. Why not define at the high end? To do otherwise is to water down someone's accomplishments.

[Josquin des Prez]

You're up a creek if that's the best cite you can offer. Points for effort, I suppose.

It's the best authority there is. Weininger got closer to the truth then anybody ever did, either before him or since, most definitely since now that we've replaced the pursuit of truth with feel-good make believe nonsense.

There's creativity and there's creativity. It is a narrow point of view, but, let's be realistic here, there is a manifest difference between a novel and elegant mathematical proof and figuring out how to fix a Chevy 454 block.

There is no difference when you are trying to determine a trend.

[Bulldog]

Let me rephrase that then. Not everybody has potential, period. I'd reckon the vast majority of our female population does not posses the ability to create new ideas and concepts. In that sense, certain facets of our liberal education is wasted on them, which is why historically they were barred from pursuing particular paths. It was just a waste of time and resources.

Have you ever been married to a woman?

[mn dave]

Have you ever been married to a woman?

[Josquin des Prez]

Have you ever been married to a woman?

Ho wow, shame tactics, trying to get in touch with your femininity now? 

[knight66]

Does misogyny generally follow marriage; or preclude it?

Mike