I gave my newsletter subscribers a little spiel about the importance of education this month, so I thought I’d elaborate on it a bit more. While most of us might recognize the importance of both formal and informal education, I haven’t used education as a major theme in my novels, or educators, for that matter.

Sure, Detective Castilblanco takes his Buddhist lessons from his mentor, and STEM student Kayla Jones has an early school friend in Billy, but my novels don’t take place in a classroom. Gail, one main character in Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, and her new lab assistant, Jeff, who’s the other, work at a small college outside Philly, but I only use that setting at the beginning of the novel to joke around a bit about weird professors (I once was one). Using only my stories, you might conclude I don’t value formal education very much (I do).

I think education is important, formal or otherwise. I would have discovered books without it (I basically did, and I certainly read some that wouldn’t have met the approval of my teachers). Yet I probably wouldn’t have had a decent day-job without my formal education. Now it allows me to write my stories without worrying very much about the financial aspects of publishing.

My father, an excellent artist who was also a gruff old fellow with a heart of gold, often said, “Children should be seen, not heard.” The same can be said about education. I don’t mean we should take it for granted, far from it. Rather, it’s such a basic necessity and right that we shouldn’t have to think about it very much. It’s like air: We need it and should maintain its quality, but we generally don’t think about air with every breath we take—that’s automatic. I don’t discuss air in my books much (except for a few scenes in More than Human: The Mensa Contagion), and I don’t discuss education that much either.

Yet there’s a subtle sidebar here: My novels often treat profound and serious themes (even a sci-fi rom-com like Time Traveler’s Guide) that they can be considered educational because of those themes. You might say they educate by example. Or, by simply exposing readers to issues they might not otherwise think about. I know some readers don’t like that. All I can say to them is that there’s plenty of fluffy, formulaic novels out there to keep them happy.

We can learn from reading books, fiction included. Maybe books where that can be done aren’t bestsellers or become blockbuster movies, but I can’t lower myself to write simple novels. Or read them, for that matter. I need to continue learning about life and this world and others, a continuing education about the human (or ET) experience. I find this informal process, reading fiction, an important part of my education. I hope you do too.

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Comments are always welcome.

Two more “Esther Brookstone” novels. Did you miss them? Maybe you thought Esther’s adventures ended with the story of her honeymoon with Bastiann, Death on the Danube? No, there are more adventures involving crimes back in merry old England after the couple returns home. In #4, Palettes, Patriots, and Prats, they befriend an American artist, only to find there’s a lot more to her troubles than expected. In #5, Leonardo and the Quantum Code, everyone wants to steal new algorithms for quantum computers based on ideas of Leonardo Da Vinci. If you love the idea of 21^st versions of Miss Marple (Esther) and Hercule Poirot (Bastiann), don’t miss any of the books in this series.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Those who are accustomed to my blog posts—minimally, an op-ed comment on current events on Tuesdays and something on reading, writing, or the publishing business on Thursdays—might find it strange that I’m placing this post here on a Tuesday. There’s a simple explanation: reading and understanding what we read are building blocks in the democratic foundation of our country.

A dear friend and I were talking over the holiday about reading “popular science” articles. These are supposedly designed so that an “intelligent layperson” can develop some understanding about an esoteric bit of science or technology. I complained about Scientific American’s overly detailed articles in fields I’d like to learn more about for my sci-fi writing. “Don’t worry about it,” said my friend. “They’ve dumbed down the articles now.”

Some translations are in order. First, there’s no such thing as “popular science” anymore. Science isn’t popular, from outright attacks on it by religious fanatics and politicians who are sycophants for Corporate America, unwilling or otherwise, to teachers telling students that they should study something else because science is too hard (especially egregious when a male teacher adds “…for girls”). In all age groups, many consider science and technology to be the root of all the problems society faces, and there are many others who encourage such an opinion.

Second, “intelligent layperson” is all too often another oxymoron nowadays. I’m not speaking to the obvious cases where someone believes dinosaurs and human beings coexisted and the world with all its wonderful diversity of flora and fauna was all created six thousand years ago. I’m talking about the average Joan or Joe who reads something but can’t understand what they’ve just read. Call it what you will, it’s an indictment against popular culture. At the critical lower levels in our educational systems, teachers over-emphasize getting through the words—understanding is secondary. Certain content is emphasized; there’s not much practice analyzing and digesting new content. Too many people read something that’s devoid of facts but don’t have the background or even common sense to know better.

Third, “dumbed down” is a nice way of saying that essay and book writers know all about the problems mentioned above and bend over backwards to compensate in order to get their message across. The latter is a struggle that’s becoming increasingly difficult, even for fiction writers, where “dumbed down” has destroyed serious literature.

Even if we get people to read with all the other distractions they have—streaming video, social media, video games, and so forth—getting them to understand what they are reading is a high hurdle to jump over. I’ve often read a review of a “popular science” book and asked myself, “Did the reviewer read the same book I did?” That would probably happen with fiction too, but I don’t bother to read those reviews unless I’m making excerpts for the PR and marketing of my own books.

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When you get to be my age—old but young-at-heart—you start wondering if you had to do it all over again, what different choices would you make. Life is about choices, of course—choices covering an entire spectrum, from small to big. You might have some regrets too. That’s only human.

I don’t regret the choices I’ve made in my personal life. Given the same circumstances, I’d make the same ones. I wouldn’t have minded if some of them had turned out differently—I’d like to decrease the bad experiences and amplify the good ones—but I generally wouldn’t change the choices I made that led to these experiences.

I started publishing my fiction 10+ years ago (the first edition of my second novel, Full Medical, was published in 2006). At an early age, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I’m a practical person, though, so I made the choice to become a scientist, figuring that being a successful writer was too much like winning the lottery. It is, no matter what some authors or writing gurus say. Don’t give up on your day-job just yet. I think Dean Koontz’s wife gave him a year or so to achieve success. That’s unheard of nowadays, unless you win the lottery like Hugh Howey, J. K. Rowling, or Mark Weir. Writing good fiction is a necessary condition; there are no sufficient ones.

Science might not seem like a career that forms a basis for writing success (except maybe for sci-fi—many successful sci-fi writers are ex-scientists). One can wonder what careers are best for that. A love of languages has always accompanied my love for writing. I have a modest ability with languages. Given other circumstances, I might have become a linguist. That seems to be a fulfilling career for putting food on the table while you write stories and wait for some modicum of success. Probably not as lucrative as hard science and technology, though, which everyone calls STEM nowadays. While a journalism degree is probably better than an MFA (the former produces more understanding of and exposure to the human condition), the study of languages is undeniably related to what a writer does all the time: putting ideas into words and choosing the right words and logic to do so.

Of course, any writing career does this, even writing verses for Hallmark. But the study of languages goes far beyond writing skills. Understanding the linguistic history and structure of languages, especially one as dynamic as English, offers the future and present writer an incredible base for the logical choices s/he must make in her or his writing.

I don’t own many print books now. Although I have enough to keep bookshelves sagging, I generally find ebooks more practical—they’re easy to read, very accessible, and don’t take up any physical space beyond my Kindle. But there’s one print book on my reference shelf that I greatly value, David Crystal’s The Stories of English. Even if you ignore current dialects and regional variations, English is a complicated amalgam of many bits and pieces that has seen a dynamic and rapid development. The Spanish reader can still read Cervantes; we struggle with Shakespeare. And these men were almost contemporaries (Shakespeare died one day after Cervantes).

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Writers tend to be introverted, so I have no problem working mostly online. (As you get older, it’s harder to be social in the conventional sense—many of your friends and colleagues have passed on, after all. The crowds in the pubs are younger; if you go to church, you only see irascible oldsters like yourself worrying about their mortality; and so forth) But three news items from the business world caught my attention recently. First, venerable Macy’s is closing a slew of stores. Second, bookstore-barn-giant B&N just fired their CEO. And third, the Trump casino in Atlantic City will file for bankruptcy. What do these news items have in common? Their cause, the internet. At least partially. Let me explain.

People are spending more time online, whether via smartphones or computers (their distinction is only semantical now), and whether buying, playing, or socializing.  All department stores from Macy’s to Wal-Mart have been affected by online buying. People don’t go out and buy as much anymore.  And if people get out to shop in these hectic times when you might not be sure you have a job next week, they often don’t buy; they just look (window-shopping is the old descriptor), assess their options, and go home and order the goods online. Some pundits call this the Amazon effect, usually in a pejorative sense, but that gives that retail giant way too much credit.

B&N bookstores’ problems are just bigger ones that every bookstore shares and are comparable to the department stores’—online buying is preferred by many customers. The B&N bookstores are big barns for books; the department stores are big barns for clothing, home furnishings, and other goods. The merchandise is different, but the effects of the internet are the same. There are other effects, of course. B&N has been in a downspin since they spun off the Nook business. Macy’s has been hurt from the top and the bottom—your elite stores like Nordstrom’s and Lord and Taylor’s pretend to have better quality merchandise and your Targets and Wal-marts the same products at better prices. And then there’s Amazon.

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In his op-ed article on creativity in the NY Times, Prof. Adam Grant, management and psych professor at the Wharton School of UPenn, says step one to creativity is to procrastinate.  “Creativity takes time.  So I’m trying not to make progress toward my goal.”  I think that’s BS, and I’m hoping I’m not alone.  The first part depends on your definition of creativity, of course.  Presumably, this prof, who’s trying to sell his book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, is using a business definition.  I don’t see much creativity in the business world.  I see it in the author/composer of Hamilton; I’ve seen it in the works of Alejandro Obregon and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and I’ve seen it in scientists and engineers, from researchers to smart phone and car designers.  Grant confuses creativity with business acumen.  Trump has the latter, but he isn’t creative (come to think of it, Trump and his progeny went to Wharton).

So, let’s get past that first statement in the quote and move on to the second.  Procrastination is the opposite of creativity!  If one procrastinates, s/he’s doing absolutely nothing.  Now Alan Watts might say doing nothing is accomplishing something—that’s part of Buddhist teaching (make your mind blank to achieve enlightenment)—but it sure as hell isn’t being creative.  I’d generally call it wasting time!  At a conference once some Austrian physicists told me that they were in the process of thinking about getting some dinner.  Maybe that’s typically Austrian—I seem to remember Vienna as pretty laid back (but probably not during WWII)—but dinner just isn’t that complicated, and time spent in the process of thinking about it would be better spent doing physics in this case, where a physicist can and should be creative.  Leave the dinner creativity to chefs—culinary art is creative, but only when you do it, not in the process of thinking about it.

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[This series started last week.  If you haven’t already done so, you might want to read Part One.]

Have I convinced you book reading America is in trouble?  There’s another chapter in this story.  No, it doesn’t have anything to do with traditional publishers and their writers trying to kill indies.  For the most part, readers can ignore that problem (unless they’re also authors).  Moreover, I’ve dealt with that enough in this blog as have many other people (Joe Konrath, in particular).

No, in this second part, I claim what few avid readers are left are spoiled.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Authors and publishers should spoil their readers (something traditional publishing fails miserably at).  Authors produce the raw product—think of bananas—and readers eat it up.  We’d have no market for the raw product if they didn’t do that.  (Traditional publishing adds a new wrinkle.  Like a certain banana company responsible for even the overthrow of governments, traditional publishing represents the middle people who exploit their workers, the writers, and exploit their consumers, the reading public.)

I want to spoil my readers with entertaining, meaningful stories, though.  Genre fiction writers are like the bards of old, providing entertaining stories at reasonable cost (indie writers, at least).  Maybe all writers fit into that role.  We should value every reader we have.  A satisfied reader will come back to buy my bananas.  A satisfied reader will tell other readers I sell good bananas.  Such a reader won’t like everything in my books (I don’t even like everything in my books, but I need to release my bananas or they’ll spoil).  Such a reader should complain to me about what s/he doesn’t like—I listen.  I might change my way of growing bananas.  But maybe not.

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I made some comments over on Scott Dyson’s blog.  (Scott’s post is the genesis for these ideas.)  I’d like to amplify on them here and next week.  To summarize bluntly: reading in America is in trouble.  Maybe in the rest of the world too, but it’s clear that we’re in trouble here.  Let’s consider some numbers.

I’ve upped my presence on Goodreads lately.  Forget Facebook; Goodreads is where the readers are.  Authors too, but they’re second-class citizens for the GR team, and justifiably so.  My goal is to entertain readers.  To the extent that authors are also readers, I can entertain them too, but my goal is to reach out to readers.  (Warning to authors: All those writing groups you belong to won’t help you find readers.)

I can’t help but notice the numbers on Goodreads.  Three of the groups I belong too are huge!  Goodreads Authors/Readers has 21,534 members last I checked (why isn’t it Readers/Authors?); the Mystery, Crime, and Thriller Group has 12, 682; and the Sci-fi and Fantasy Book Club has 14,187.  Given that there’s probably some overlap (me, for example), those numbers represent a PR and marketing teams’ dream.  (Warning to them: PR and marketing efforts are frowned upon in GR and are generally relegated to only certain sections of a group’s list of discussions…and justifiably so.)

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Teachers’ unions and evaluations, Common Core, SAT reform, charter schools…education has been making the news lately.  In a week-ago Sunday’s NY Times magazine, there’s an article about Common Core champion and SAT reformer Dave Coleman.  He calls for data-based reform, a strange clarion call from a non-scientist who admittedly studied things generally considered impractical.  For the needed overhaul of our educational system, what works?  What doesn’t?  Not only here, but outside the U.S.  Coleman basically ignores the latter, by the way, committing the usual Ptolemaic sin of thinking that the U.S. is the center of the educational universe and looking for the epicycles to fix it within the same system.

The balance for the U.S. is negative, of course; the balance for everywhere else isn’t.  Our graduates rank far below many countries we compete with.  Is this a bad thing?  Is it possible that we’re right and the rest of the world is wrong?  Maybe the rest of the world is producing unthinking students who can’t really create new ideas or risk losing their positive human qualities.  In fact, is it even possible to compete in a cutthroat capitalistic world and still maintain our humanity?  These are the big questions the Times article ignores.  Maybe dumbing down the SAT is just what’s required to make our students happier and more human.

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In many states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures—even here in NJ with a Republican governor and Democratic legislature—teachers’ unions and public school teachers have come under fire.  The issue here isn’t black and white—issues rarely are.  I can’t pretend to be comprehensive in a simple blog post, but let me throw in some loose change to up the ante and gray up the issue even more (forty shades, remember?).

Most of us have heard the adage that goes something like “People who know, create; people who don’t know, teach.”  Like many stereotypes and adages, there is some truth to that statement.  Back in prehistoric times when I attended college (I’m a product of state-run universities–when I started, I paid about $300/quarter + room and board and everyone with a B+ HS average could enter some state university), this adage was somewhat formalized, at least in the math department—there was a track for math majors and another track for students who wanted to teach primary and/or secondary mathematics.  This bifurcation engendered a bit of what nowadays we call bullying.  Moreover, for whatever reason, students in the first track seemed to do better than students in the second.

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In the U.S., one of the myths we have lived with is that everyone has access to a basic education, grades 1 through 12.  Another myth is that if you want to go to college, there’s a way for you to do it.  Social engineers, often in service of elites, love to parade these myths, but they are myths.  Like religion, they promise a better tomorrow.  The problem with the first myth is in the definition of “basic education.”  The problem with the second is that it’s just not true.  And the problem with both is that the elites, that famous 1% (you pick the percentage you want—it depends on your stats), want to make sure that neither one is true.

The definition of “basic education” has been forever a moving target.  In colonial days, neither women nor slaves went to public schools (at that time, you could just lump both those two groups together as slaves as far as voting rights were concerned, because women were also treated as property).  Those few who went to these schools learned the basics: the famous three R’s.  Most of the “learning” was through rote memorization and repetition.  If you happened to be a leftie, you were whipped until you wrote with your right hand, not the left; but, oh my goodness, what penmanship they had (e.g. the signature of John Hancock).  But heaven forbid you learned to think!  That was the job of the private schools that taught the children of the wealthy elites.

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