Port 80

This weekend, I got the chance to read through In Code: A Young Woman’s Mathematical Journey. The book is the autobiographical story of Sarah Flannery, an Irish secondary school student who won international acclaim (and the 1999 Young Scientist Award) for her research into public key cryptography. After more than a year of research, she devised a cryptographic system that was substantially faster than the standard RSA method. Although the system eventually proved vulnerable to attack, her research was impressive, to say the least.

Throughout the entire book, Flannery remains professionally modest, giving credit to those who inspired her and downplaying her own abilities:

I have no doubt that I am not a genius. I am not being falsely modest. Through my father’s classes I have seen examples of true genius, and I know that I do not possess that “insight” that distinguishes geniuses from those regarded as merely intelligent.

Sarah Flannery, In Code, page 243

This modesty and lack of pretension stands in sharp contrast to another book I read this weekend, namely Stupid White Men by Michael Moore. Although Moore is clearly a man of intelligence, he is certainly not a man of modesty. (In fact, intellectual honestly isn’t one of Moore’s strong points, either.) Throughout Stupid White Men, Moore portrays himself as unmasking conspiracies that involve countless parties, including, but not limited to:

• The Bush family
• Haliburton and Enron
• Florida election commissions
• The Miami Herald
• The United States Supreme Court
• The entire Republican party
• Most of the Democratic party (for knuckling under to Republicans)
• The entire Caucasian race (except for Michael Moore)

At first glance, this list appears to be the work of a delusional paranoid, not an Oscar-winning director. If one switches races and political parties in the above list, one could accurately describe a member of the Aryan Nation or the Klu Klux Klan. Is Moore really this vitriolic, biased, or simply out of touch with reality?

I think that there is a far simpler and more mundane reason for Moore’s apparent paranoia: He doesn’t expect that anyone will call him to account for his distortions, misquotations, or lies. And if you’re not in any danger of getting caught stretching the truth, why not take your complaint to an extreme?

My primary source for this conclusion is Moore himself, or more precisely, his description of his years in high school. Moore was an intelligent student who found himself bored by school from grade one onwards. His parents prohibited him from skipping a grade, so he went through school frustrated and unchallenged. In high school, Moore got a chance to change that. On the verge of Moore’s 18th birthday, the 26th Amendment passed, lowering the voting age to 18. Simultaneously, the school board president in Moore’s district retired, leaving the position vacant for the upcoming elections. Moore saw his chance and took it: twenty signatures later, he was on the ballot for the school board presidency, with the platform of firing the principal and vice-principal of his high school. The five adults who ran against him split the adult vote among themselves, and Moore found himself in change of his school district. The principal and vice-principal handed in their letters of resignation a few months later.

Now, let’s stop and review. The closest thing that Moore had to an election strategy was a pledge to “smash the system” by firing those currently in power. His target audience were high school students. And, thanks to the incompetence or lack of willpower of those around him, the plan worked. The lesson here is twofold: First, demagoguery works. Why mess around with rational debate when whipping people into a frenzy is so much easier? If you don’t have a plan, a rationale, or a logical argument for your point, why not go with sheer emotional appeal?

The second, and much more important, lesson that Moore may have learned from this event is this: You are smarter then the people around you. Your parents and the administrators are helpless to stop you. Those in the community who would oppose you are so incompetent that they hand you what you want most. Authority can be safely ignored or outwitted (to quote the closing words of Moore’s chapter on education: “Remember, there is no permanent record!”) The only support you need is popular support – and you can play the public like a Stradivarius.

The end result of this is a recipe for the sort of populist distortions that we see from Moore now: Ignore the facts, because no one will challenge you on them. Play to fear, emotion, and hatred, not to reason. If the public is going to ignore logic, why shouldn’t you? No one will notice that although you rant about how we assume recyclable waste will be correctly disposed of if we separate it properly, you abandoned your broken Civic on the side of the road in downtown Washington, DC without a second thought. It worked in high school: Why not now?

Let’s go back to Sarah Flannery, our Irish researcher into cryptography. While Moore outwitted his teachers, she was challenged by them. Furthermore, her parents took interest in her education, always getting her to try something harder. Raw intelligence is one thing, but the ability to take that intelligence and use it to synthesize disparate facts into a logical whole is another. It is precisely that ability that should be developed by education. For Moore, the development of that process ended before he left high school, because he had no need to develop it further. For Flannery, whose arguments were constantly challenged by those more experienced, I am certain that the development of that process continues to this day. She found that she needed to be accurate and modest in her statements and claims if she was to succeed, as her work was reviewed by others just as intelligent as she was. Moore found that he only needed to be accurate enough to convince the lowest common denominator, and that emotional vitriol was just as effective as a logical argument. We have already seen the end result: In their writing (and films), both Moore and Flannery stick to what they know works.

What lesson can we draw from this? The most important lesson, and the one that I see little appreciation of in the schools, is this: The child who races ahead of the class is in just as much danger of failure as the child who lags behind. I have seen far too many students, who attended schools that did not recognize this fact, give up on classes entirely as “boring” and “useless.” Indeed, if a student knows the material before the teacher presents it (as did Moore, who could read while the other students were learning the alphabet), what value is there to school? It merely becomes the forced review of material that student already knows. Michael Moore took this observation to its logical conclusion: If school is meaningless, why not at least have some fun while you’re there?

This is why the discussions one often hears about “challenging education” need to be more than just idle talk, and why the “challenge“ must be authentic. (Far too often, “challenging materials” simply give students more of the same work they were doing before.) As the example of Moore shows, intelligent students whose energy is not absorbed in the challenges provided by school will find other challenges. With the help of her parents, Sarah Flannery found her challenge in mathematics. Michael Moore found his challenge in attacking the school system. Thanks to a combination of intelligence, depression, and angst, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold found challenges that were altogether more destructive than any of the political games of Michael Moore. I have witnessed far too many bright students give up on the school system entirely because they could find no challenge there at all. Sadly, recognition of this problem within the school system appears to be distant, with administrators fighting against programs such as PSEO that could challenge these students. How long will it be before those schools that so eagerly claim responsibility for the successes of their Sarah Flannerys also claim responsibility for the work of their Michael Moores?

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to wind glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt