My full interview with Ray Stata is now online at CEE’s site. (An abridged version of the interview was published in the December issue of Kaizen [pdf].)
Ray Stata is Chairman of Analog Devices, Inc., based in Norwood, Massachusetts. Working out of his basement, Mr. Stata co-founded Analog Devices in the 1960s. As of 2009, ADI serves over 60,000 customers, has 9,000 employees and a market capitalization of over $6 billion.
The interview’s theme is Entrepreneurship and Technology Leadership. Two sample excerpts, the first on the best kind of education:
“We’re finding that it is very, very challenging to be at the top of your game as an engineer. First, the technical knowledge required is both deep and broad, often cutting across multiple disciplines. And products are so complex that it often takes large teams of engineers with different specialties working across international borders. That requires human skills and communication skills to encourage collaboration and manage teams with quite varied backgrounds and experiences. And engineers must understand the financial implications of manufacturing and product development cost, as well as customer requirements and where products should be positioned in the market with respect to competition. The most successful engineers truly are ‘Renaissance Men’ and not just technical specialists.”
And the second on trust:
“First, one way or other you’ve got to be good at something, even though that something will no doubt change over time. As you enter your career, strive to achieve excellence at whatever you do.
“Back to some of the things we talked about, you soon find out that you don’t get very much accomplished in life on your own. Now there are exceptions, like musicians, artists and writers who can go off on their own and accomplish remarkable things. But most of us find that we accomplish more by working in concert with others to leverage our combined skills and competencies. “I’ve found that one of the most important factors in being a leader, or more generally in engaging with people, is to build trustful relationships. What does that mean? Trust is built on honesty, integrity, reliability, sincerity, competence. Conduct yourself so that people can depend on what you say and what you do, on the fact that you’re more often right than wrong, on the fact that you meet your commitments, on the fact that you are straight with people and tell it how it is. If people trust you and you trust them, you can get a lot more out of relationships and out of life.”
TV premiere on BET
Sunday, February 7th at noon ET/PT
Don’t miss this compelling documentary from award-winning filmmaker Mary Mazzio, which chronicles the inspirational stories of several teens from low-income communities as they compete in the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE)’s national business plan competition. What they learn along the way profoundly changes their lives and destinies.
Beethoven, according to biographer Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven:
“Wegeler tells us that when a series of lectures on Kant was organized in Vienna in the 1790s, ‘Beethoven didn’t want to attend even once, even under my urging.’ Rather, Beethoven preferred self-education through voracious reading in popularizations of the works of the major thinkers; through rich encounters with poetry, drama, and opera; and, most happily, through discourse and conversation with good minds in pleasant surroundings—whether in the salon or the tavern, the palace or the coffeehouse.” (pp. 36-37)
And: “In 1809 [Beethoven] wrote to the Leipzig music publisher Breitkopf & Hä̈rtel: ‘There is hardly any treatise which could be too learned for me. I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly called erudition. Yet from my childhood I have striven to understand what the better and wiser people of every age were driving at in their works.’” (p. 37)
That intense engagement with the great works of the great minds reminds me of Michelangelo’s early and ongoing education.
When Michelangelo was a teen, according to biographer William Wallace, he was exposed to the best of the Florentine intellectual ferment:
“To begin with, the young boy was taken into the famiglia by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who treated him like a son. He spent two of the happiest years of his life in the Medici Palace, surrounded by the members of Lorenzo’s humanist circle and alongside his future patrons, Giovanni and Giulio de’ Medici (respectively popes Leo X and Clement VII).” (The Genius of the Sculptor in Michelangelo’s Work, p. 152)
“Michelangelo venerated Dante throughout his life, and addressed two of his own poems to him. When he stayed in Bologna for about a year after the fall of the Medici in 1494, he is said to have read every evening to his patron Giovan Francesco Aldovrandi passages from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – only stopping when his employer fell asleep.” (p. 21)
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Duncan continued: “That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that ‘we have to do better.’ And the progress that they’ve made in four years since the hurricane is unbelievable. They have a chance to create a phenomenal school district. Long way to go, but that — that city was not serious about its education. Those children were being desperately underserved prior, and the amount of progress and the amount of reform we’ve seen in a short amount of time has been absolutely amazing.”
So a question: Without hoping for more natural disasters, what can we do to emulate New Orleans’s progress in other dysfunctional school districts? The hurricane shocked the system: Katrina (1) made everyone to focus on essentials, (2) disempowered the entrenched advocates for continued dysfunction, and (3) galvanized everyone else to positive action. In my judgment, we are good at (1) and (3), but we are weak at solving (2) through peaceful methods.
Another question: What else has Katrina taught us about disaster preparedness and how to recover? The Mercatus Center has a excellent ongoing project devoted to Entrepreneurship and Disaster Recovery. The project has published a useful series of articles and working papers by scholars studying the aftermath of the hurricane.
Two of Mercatus’s scholars, Professor Emily Chamlee-Wright and Professor Steven Horwitz, spoke last year at Rockford College on post-Katrina disaster response in the private sector. Their talks were sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and my ten-minute video interviews with them following their talks are available at CEE’s site: Chamlee-Wright on social entrepreneurial activity, and Horwitz on for-profit organizations’ response.
Another evocative quotation from Sidney Hook’s autobiographical Out of Step. In an earlier post I quoted Hook’s account of his family’s living conditions. Here Hook recalls his authoritarian schooling:
“Although the public schools were religiously attended (children feared the wrath of their parents much more than the threats of the truant officer), the classroom experience was far more enjoyable. First of all, the discipline was exacting. Our teachers were little more than martinets. We had to sit erect, with our hands clasped on the edge of the desks or folded behind our back, in absolute silence. Everything was done at command, according to a rigorous and rigid schedule. Even the occasional interesting lesson would be broken off when the allotted time was up, no matter how eager the students were to continue. The slightest infraction of proper conduct—a whisper, a paper dropped on the floor, a shove, a pinch, or the dipping of a girl’s braid in the open inkwell—evoked withering sarcasm, denigrating scolding, and corporal punishment—whacks with the twelve-inch ruler on open extended palms, and whacks with the heavy ferule on the rump. Only the boys got the latter treatment, which was more humiliating than painful. In addition there was staying in after school was over and writing a hundred times some silly sentence like ‘I must not talk to my neighbor.’ Conversely, the ‘good’ students were relentlessly held up to the rest as a model by insensitive teachers, unaware of how hateful ‘teacher’s pets’ were to other children. This happened to me all too often.” (p. 12)
Sounds like young Sidney’s school was much in the tradition of education developed and promoted by Plato, St. Augustine, and Kant.
A warning to start: This video is repulsive, but I can’t stop thinking about it. The scene is Christmas morning, and we see a youth opening a present. He first thinks he’s gotten an Xbox — but then he realizes that his present is clothes packaged in an Xbox container.
We see the kid’s emotions go from anticipation as he’s tearing the wrapping paper, to wow-could-it-be excitement at the sight of the Xbox container, to disbelief when he only finds clothes inside, to disappointment as he realizes there’s no Xbox for him, to tears and trying to hold them back.
Meanwhile, a man in the background, presumably his father, is laughing at his predicament. Closer and to the right is a woman, presumably his mother, who first eggs on his excitement, then laughs along with the father, and then, seeing her son’s disappointment, tries to explain that they can’t afford an Xbox.
With that warning, here is the video:
Some speculations about the psychology involved.
First, there is evidence of design here and that part of the purpose of the “joke” gift-giving was to teach the boy a life lesson. I got the impression that the mother wrapped the present, from the way she was egging him on initially like she knew what was coming, and from the way, after, she was quizzing him about how nice the box was, and from the way she readily tried to explain, repeatedly, that they couldn’t afford a real Xbox and that clothes were a necessity.
But it was a formal gift, and it was wrapped. Presumably, they don’t have an Xbox, but they found an Xbox container somewhere. And they chose to use it for this boy’s present.
So there seems to have been some awareness ahead of time that the boy would (a) be excited about Christmas, (b) feel for a moment that he’d gotten a wonderful gift, and (c) then be deflated and depressed.
The lesson: Don’t expect too much, even at Christmas. Expect to be disappointed.
I also noticed the quality of the father’s laughing — it’s a big laugh, and it is an ongoing and almost-uncontrollable laughing. Interpretation (again speculative): One type of laughter is a response to the juxtaposition of opposites. In this case, the father sees that the boy is experiencing first-hand hope-and-then-crushing-disappointment. Yet the man feels that to be a deep truth about life: You have big dreams but life grinds them down. The man’s seeing that experience made real in his son’s face strikes a chord in him, and that kind of laughter is his genuine response: Yes! That’s life! And you were childish enough to think differently! Big laughs!
Maybe one believes that life lesson is true. It certainly is the lived experience of many people. Even so, there is still the issue of how one teaches it to others, especially one’s own child. There are ways to teach negative lessons about pain and disappointment in appropriate contexts and in a way a child can handle.
In this case, the parents seem to be using the kid’s own dreams against him. They know what he wants and they manipulate his hope to cause him pain.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into all of this. Scanty evidence and all that. Maybe it’s only a practical joke gone bad.
But then: How do you respond when your practical jokes go bad? Especially if you’re a parent and you make a mistake like that with your own child? You apologize, you comfort the suffering child, and you try to make it up to him in some way.
In this case, we see the mother walk off and leave the child alone in his misery. Brutal.
I wonder about the lesson the boy will take from this. What will he feel when next Christmas morning comes around and he sees under the tree a present with his name on it? Will he also generalize the suffering of this occasion and resolve not to let anything hurt him in the future? It will take a strong kid to rise above his pain, especially if (again speculating) this is a regular feature of his home life.
Johann Fichte was a disciple of Kant. Born in 1762, he studied theology and philosophy at Jena, Wittenberg, and Leipzig. In 1788 he read Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, and that reading changed Fichte’s life. He traveled to Königsberg in order to meet Kant, then the ruling philosopher of Germany. But the great man was initially distant, so Fichte worked as a tutor at Königsberg while writing his moral treatise, Critique of All Revelation. When it was finished, Fichte dedicated it to Kant. Kant read it, admired it, and urged that it be published. It was published anonymously in 1792, and this made Fichte famous in intellectual circles: It was so Kantian in style and content that it was taken by many to have been written by Kant himself and to be his fourth Critique. Kant disclaimed authorship but praised the young author, thus launching Fichte’s academic career.
The major breakthrough, however—the event that launched Fichte permanently onto the German landscape as not only a leading philosopher but also as a cultural leader—came in 1807. A year after Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussians, Fichte stepped onto the public stage and delivered his ringing call to arms, his Addresses to the German Nation.
In the Addresses, Fichte spoke as a philosopher who had descended from abstractions to connect with practical affairs, in order to situate those practical affairs within the context of the most metaphysical.[66] He addressed the defeated Germans, calling for a renewal of their spirit and character. The Germans had lost the physical battle, Fichte argued, but now more was at stake: the real battle now was a battle of character.
Why had Germany come under the dominion of Napoleon? Fichte granted that many factors were responsible, most of them having to do with the infiltration of softening, Enlightenment beliefs—“all the evils which have now brought us to ruin are of foreign origin”[67]—and that many reforms were needed in the military, religion, and the administration of government.
But the fundamental problem was clear: the educational system had failed Germany. Only with a total revision of the method of educating children could Germany hope to become immune from the Napoleons of the future. “In a word, it is a total change of the existing system of education that I propose as the sole means of preserving the existence of the German nation.”[68] In Fichte’s educational philosophy, themes from Rousseau, Hamann, Kant, and Schleiermacher are integrated into a package that would be influential for more than one hundred years.
In the Addresses, there is no question in Fichte’s mind about what abstract system is the right one. With Kant, “the problem has been completely solved among us, and philosophy has been perfected.”[69] But Kant’s philosophy had not yet been applied systematically to the education of children.
Fichte started by looking back to see how Germany got into its current sorry state. Germany used to be great. In the Middle Ages, “the German burghers were the civilized people,” and “this period is the only one in German history in which this nation is famous and brilliant.” What was great about the burghers was their “spirit of piety, of honour, of modesty, and of the sense of community.” They were great because they were not individualistic. “Seldom does the name of an individual stand out or distinguish itself, for they were all of like mind and alike in sacrifice for the common weal.”[70]
Fichte was, however, not a conservative apologist for the good old days. In the context of feudal Germany, Fichte was a reformer who believed that it was the corrupt upper classes that had ruined Germany: “its bloom [was] destroyed by the avarice and tyranny of princes.”[71] The Germans had become further corrupted by the modern world, which led to their impotence in the face of Napoleon. What about the modern world, essentially, caused the corruption? Self-seeking: “self-seeking has destroyed itself by its own complete development,” and “[a] people can be completely corrupted, i.e., self-seeking—for self-seeking is the root of all other corruption.”[72]
And this, echoing Rousseau, was because men became rational, under the guise of Enlightenment. This undermined religion and its moral force. “The enlightenment of the understanding, with its purely material calculations, was the force which destroyed the connection established by religion between some future life and the present.” Consequently, government became liberal and morally lax: “the weakness of governments” frequently allowed “neglect of duty to go unpunished.”[73]
So now the German has sold his soul, lost his true self, his identity. “It follows, then, that the means of salvation which I promise to indicate consists in the fashioning of an entirely new self, which may have existed before perhaps in individuals as an exception, but never as a universal and national self, and in the education of the nation.” Echoing Rousseau again: “By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest.”[74]
To start with, education must be egalitarian and universal, unlike previous education, which was feudal and elitist: “So there is nothing left for us but just to apply the new system to every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation.” Such education will aid in the creation of a classless society: “All distinctions of classes … will be completely removed and vanish. In this way there will grow up among us, not popular education, but real German national education.”[75]
Real education must start by getting to the source of human nature. Education must exert “an influence penetrating to the roots of vital impulse and action.” Here was a great failing of traditional education, for it had relied upon and appealed to the student’s free will. “I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system.” Compulsion, not freedom, is best for students:
On the other hand, the new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied upon with confidence and certainty.[76]
Unfortunately, it is difficult to do this under contemporary living arrangements, in which children go to school and then return to corrupting influences in their homes and their neighborhoods at the end of the day. “It is essential,” Fichte then urged, “that from the very beginning the pupil should be continuously and completely under the influence of this education, and should be separated altogether from the community, and kept from all contact with it.”[77]
Once the children are separated, educators can turn their attention to internal matters. In his essay on education, Kant had of course argued that “above all things, obedience is an essential feature in the character of a child, especially of a school boy or girl.”[78] However, Fichte pointed out, children are children and as such they do not naturally impose duties upon themselves. So the school’s authorities must firmly impose the duties upon them:
“[T]he legislation should consequently maintain a high standard of severity, and should prohibit the doing of many things. Such prohibitions, which simply must exist and on which the existence of the community depends, are to be enforced in case of necessity by fear of immediate punishment, and this penal law must be administered absolutely without indulgence or exception.”[79]
One of the duties to be inculcated is the obligation of the student who is more able to help the more needy students. Yet “he is to expect neither reward for it, for under this system of government all are quite equal in regard to work and pleasure, nor even praise, for the attitude of mind prevailing in the community is that it is just everyone’s duty to act thus.” Anticipating Marx, Fichte believed that the school should be a microcosm of what the ideal society would be like: “Under this system of government, therefore, the acquirement of greater skill and the effort spent therein will result only in fresh effort and work, and it will be the very pupil who is abler than the rest who must often watch while the others sleep, and reflect while others play.”[80]
More broadly, the new education will eliminate all self interest and inculcate the pure love of duty for its own sake that Rousseau and Kant had prized:
“[I]n place of that love of self, with which nothing for our good can be connected any longer, we must set up and establish in the hearts of all those whom we wish to reckon among our nation that other kind of love, which is concerned directly with the good, simply as such and for its own sake.”[81]
If the system is successful, its fruit will be as follows: “Its pupil goes forth at the proper time as a fixed and unchangeable machine.”[82]
But this moral education is not enough. Drawing upon Hamann and Schleiermacher, Fichte next turned to religion.
“The pupil of this education is not merely a member of human society here on this earth and for the short span of life which is permitted to him. He is also, and is undoubtedly acknowledged by education to be, a link in the eternal chain of spiritual life in a higher social order. A training which has undertaken to include the whole of his being should undoubtedly lead him to a knowledge of this higher order also.”[83]
Despite being seen as soft on religion by the Lutheran orthodoxy, Fichte argued that education must also be intensely religious. “Under proper guidance,” the student will “find at the end that nothing really exists but life, the spiritual life which lives in thought, and that everything else does not really exist, but only appears to exist.” He will find that “Only in immediate contact with God and the direct emanation of his life from him will he find life, light, and happiness, but in any separation from that immediate contact, death, darkness, and misery.” “Education to true religion is, therefore, the final task of the new education.”[84]
So far Fichte’s program of education includes the communal separation of children, severe authoritarian top-down training, strict moral duty and selflessness, and total religious immersion. Not quite the Enlightenment model of liberal education.
But Fichte’s program did not end there. For now we add the importance of ethnicity. Only the German is capable of true education. The German is the best that the world has to offer and is the hope for the future progress of mankind. The German “alone, above all other European nations, [has] the capacity of responding to such an education.”[85] But as goes Germany, so goes the rest of Europe and, ultimately, all of humankind. Either the Germans will respond to Fichte’s call and reform themselves—or they will sink into oblivion. “But, as Germany sinks, the rest of Europe is seen to sink with it.”[86]
Thus Fichte, with his passionate style and force of personality, spurred the Germans to action. The Germans listened admiringly and with approval. In 1810, three years after the delivery of his Addresses, Fichte was appointed dean of the philosophy faculty at the newly-founded University of Berlin. (Schleiermacher was appointed head of the faculty of theology.) In the following year Fichte became rector of the whole university, and so was in a position to put his educational program into practice.
Nor was Fichte a flash in the pan. One spark appears over a century later in 1919, in Friedrich Ebert’s speech at the opening of the National Assembly at Weimar. Germany had once again been defeated by foreign powers, and the nation was demoralized, resentful, and starting over. Elected first president of the German Republic in 1919, Ebert made a point in his opening address of stressing the relevance of Fichte to Germany’s situation:
“In this way we will set to work, our great aim before us: to maintain the right of the German nation, to lay the foundation in Germany for a strong democracy, and to bring it to achievement with the true social spirit and in the socialistic way. Thus shall we realize that which Fichte has given to the German nation as its task.”[87]
References
[66] Fichte once said to Madame de Staël: “Grasp my metaphysics, Madame; you will then understand my ethics.”
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago at 1:17 pm. 2 comments
Ray Stata is Chairman of Analog Devices, Inc., based in Norwood, Massachusetts. Working out of his basement, Mr. Stata co-founded Analog Devices in the 1960s. As of 2009, ADI serves over 60,000 customers, has 9,000 employees and a market capitalization of over $6 billion. 
“I’ve found that one of the most important factors in being a leader, or more generally in engaging with people, is to build trustful relationships. What does that mean? Trust is built on honesty, integrity, reliability, sincerity, competence. Conduct yourself so that people can depend on what you say and what you do, on the fact that you’re more often right than wrong, on the fact that you meet your commitments, on the fact that you are straight with people and tell it how it is. If people trust you and you trust them, you can get a lot more out of relationships and out of life.” 
Don’t miss this compelling documentary from award-winning filmmaker Mary Mazzio, which chronicles the inspirational stories of several teens from low-income communities as they compete in the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE)’s national business plan competition. What they learn along the way profoundly changes their lives and destinies. 
Two of Mercatus’s scholars, Professor Emily Chamlee-Wright and Professor Steven Horwitz, spoke last year at Rockford College on post-Katrina disaster response in the private sector. Their talks were sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and my ten-minute video interviews with them following their talks are available at CEE’s site: Chamlee-Wright on 
“Although the public schools were religiously attended (children feared the wrath of their parents much more than the threats of the truant officer), the classroom experience was far more enjoyable. First of all, the discipline was exacting. Our teachers were little more than martinets. We had to sit erect, with our hands clasped on the edge of the desks or folded behind our back, in absolute silence. Everything was done at command, according to a rigorous and rigid schedule. Even the occasional interesting lesson would be broken off when the allotted time was up, no matter how eager the students were to continue. The slightest infraction of proper conduct—a whisper, a paper dropped on the floor, a shove, a pinch, or the dipping of a girl’s braid in the open inkwell—evoked withering sarcasm, denigrating scolding, and corporal punishment—whacks with the twelve-inch ruler on open extended palms, and whacks with the heavy ferule on the rump. Only the boys got the latter treatment, which was more humiliating than painful. In addition there was staying in after school was over and writing a hundred times some silly sentence like ‘I must not talk to my neighbor.’ Conversely, the ‘good’ students were relentlessly held up to the rest as a model by insensitive teachers, unaware of how hateful ‘teacher’s pets’ were to other children. This happened to me all too often.” (p. 12) 
