Way back in the dark ages I took — as many did — a high school class in geometry. Or perhaps it was calculus, though I doubt it. The reason is that math in general did not appeal to me, and the esoteric side of math left me cold.
Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division — those were fine, and even practical. Geometry was good for my pal Bill, who went on to become an outstanding architect. Calculus was probably good for those who went into various engineering disciplines.
Math almost grabbed me one time, though, when I read a story about a young man who was born for it. Once I knew his name, but have forgotten it. I have not forgotten what he did.
In some grade school class, perhaps it was the fifth or sixth grade, a teacher gave the class an addition problem to solve. The instructions were simple: “Add every number from 1 to 100 together, then give me the answer.”
The teacher asked if everyone understood, and our math whiz raised his hand.
“Yes?” she asked. “Do you have a question?”
“No,” he replied. “I have the answer.”
“And what is that?”
“5,050,” he said. And he was correct.
The teacher wanted to know how he had solved the problem before any student had put pencil to paper.
“Simple,” he said. “1 and 99 equals 100. 2 and 98 equals 100. 3 and 97 equals 100. And so does every other pair on either side of 50. Of course 100 also equals 100. There are a total of 49 pairs, plus 100, plus the 50, so 5,050 is the answer.”
See?
The advantage that boy had was not his ability to add, it was his ability to see.
Too many teachers of young minds believe their job is to teach that 2 + 2 = 4. That is true, and it might even fulfill their contract. I’m not against it, but all of us who teach could do more. My geometry teacher, Mr. Purdy, tried to do that.
“Your hook is not hung high enough,” he would say, and I wondered what he meant because I didn’t have a hook nor had I been instructed to hang one anywhere.
Of course he meant that we needed a more challenging vision for our lives, even though he had not asked us what our current visions were. Years of teaching had taught him that most of us were looking for a lower bar, and some of our teachers encouraged that.
Harry Chapin wrote a song called Flowers Are Red that talks about this. In it a little boy on the first day of school gets some crayons and paper and starts drawing all over the paper with lots of colors. Here are some of the lyrics:
“He drew colors all over the paper
For colors was what he saw”
The teacher explained:
“Flowers are red young man and
Green leaves are green
There’s no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen.”
Always?
“There’s no need to see flowers any other way than the way they always have been seen.”
I’m here to tell you that is a lie. There is a great need to see flowers — and people and ideas and opinions and problems — in ways they have not been seen.
In the song, the teacher drums that mantra into the boy’s head until his creativity is numbed. When his family moves to a different town and a new teacher encourages a broader vision, the boy’s flowers are only red.
Who in your life tells you to always color inside the lines and that flowers are always red? Don’t think just of a single person, see a broader picture. Is it a news channel? Is it a TV show? Maybe it’s a band, or a kind of music you like. Is it society in general?
Examine your own vision briefly. Ask yourself if all white people are racists or all poor people are lazy or all athletes are spoiled or all Christians are hypocrites. Stereotypes, those are called. They are the equivalent of Flowers Are Red. Do not believe them.
Some days this drives me so crazy that I think the only people who dislike a lower bar are limbo dancers.
How?
How did the bar get so low? The bar of standards, the bar of morality, the bar of decency, I mean. Have we the people demanded it?
No, we have not demanded it, but we have accepted it.
It has crept in on us gradually yet persistently from places like academia and entertainment. When I say academia, I don’t just mean universities. But if you want to influence generations, you might start by introducing ideas there, getting them into the minds of students, waiting patiently for those students to become teachers in high schools and grade schools, and watching as those ideas spill over into the young people they influence.
I’ll leave entertainment for now, but it seems that most of the news programs airing today are not news, they are entertainment.
Finally, there are the special interest activists who insist that their ideologies, often held by very few people, get equal exposure wherever exposure can be found. So there are now TV shows that not only have gratuitous sex, they also have gratuitous LGBT sex. Neither is part of the plot, nor adds to the story. They just check a box.
And with every checked box, the bar gets just a little lower.
How can we raise the bar?
One answer, perhaps, might resemble the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). There the task is to identify wasteful spending and cut it, then add back the parts that are necessary and good. Is that disruptive? Of course. Raising the bar always is.
Morally speaking, God set the bar with the Ten Commandments. Then the administrators got involved and finished with 613 laws!
How about we just get back to the basics? Of course one of the most basic solutions of all is this:
Do good. It’s in you.
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