Pi in the Sky

[cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]

Three news items that caught my eye today:

Police recently found a house in Fresno with a pile of butchered corpses and, nearby, a pile of coffins. According to the AP report:"Authorities did not know why the coffins were there and said it might be a coincidence."

A coincidence? Jeez, d'ya think?

Today's Opelika-Auburn News quotes Alabama Governor Bob Riley on the subject of the state's social services:"We can tell you how many people we serve. We can tell you how much we spend. But we can't tell you whether it's effective."

For a moment I thought Riley might be experiencing a glimmer of economic understanding. But no, he was calling for (what else?) more studies.

In fact Alabama's state government, as a monopoly insulated from the price system, is inevitably going to be deprived of any way to assess its own effectiveness -- as Mises and Hayek explained long ago. But the Governor has already shown through his past actions that he is far from understanding this lesson.

The third item, also in the Opelika-Auburn News, was a remark by Bob Cloud, math teacher at Auburn's Drake Middle School and organiser of"Pi Day.""The students deal with circles every day in the real world," he explained."They need to know the attributes and properties of circles."

As a justification of geometry this is weak. The likelihood that the average person will have a burning practical need to calculate the area or circumference of a circle is actually fairly slim -- and most kids are too savvy to be fooled into thinking otherwise.

The real reason one should know geometry is not for some further pragmatic purpose but for its own intrinsic nobility and beauty, and because it is inherently shameful for a rational being to be ignorant of the basic principles of reality. As Aristotle writes in the Metaphysics:

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves ... not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything .... Of the sciences, also, that which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it is more of the nature of wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results. ... For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize ... Evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end ... for it was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured, that such knowledge began to be sought. Evidently then we do not seek it for the sake of any other advantage; but as the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's, so we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake.

Or as Ælfric put it more succinctly in his Colloquy, we should be"eager for learning" in order not to be"like stupid cattle that know only grass and water." This is the original notion of a liberal education -- an education befitting a free human being. Our students deserve to hear the truth: the life of the mind is not a means to some higher practical end; it is itself the highest practical end.