Since self-confession seems to be “in,” I might as well add to the brew: I’m a man who finds it hard to criticize, and damn near impossible to criticize aggressively. For those of you conservatives who are somewhat slow in keeping pace with the current degradation of culture, let me explicate the currently-accepted style of paraphrase of the above: this psychological weak point makes me especially vulnerable to motormouths.

So I must, in conformance to this weak point, disclose that the following critique of a certain kind of progressive education is based upon data I acquired the hard way – through trying it out myself rather than regurgitating something I read. How inefficient of me.

The specific experiment I performed grew out of a newly-acquired hobby which I put to good use while writing a novel. More than six months ago, I bought a five-pound sword from a Quebec manufacturer who designs them in a style that copies the medieval original. (Mine was a Normandy-style one that arrived very blunt.) Since I was buried in mathematics at the time, and found it hard to concentrate, I hit upon the idea of exercising with the sword as a sort of reading break to pep up my concentration. What I was hoping for was to increase my comprehension of what I had to read.

After trying this both with mathematics and with French, I found this: pumping myself up through the use of exercise between study sessions does increase the concentration somewhat, but was lousy for my retention of the material I read. For both subjects – one traditionally associated with the high-I.Q. type and one not traditionally associated with the MENSA set – I found myself having to re-read material more times than the amount I normally needed, thus demonstrating that being pumped on testosterone is in fact lousy for the absorption of new information.

I know that this brings up a certain stereotype – that of the “musclehead” who thinks that the cure for any lapse in performance is more testosterone. I can say through my own experience that there is this basis to that stereotype: the testosterone junkie does need more pass-throughs to memorize the material they’re reading to bring their absorption rate up to the level that matches the speed of the more sendentary type.

But there is a kind of learning to which the “musclehead” characterization does not apply: thinking with information already absorbed and retained. The application of old knowledge to new situations is actually more efficacious for the testosterone-pumped, which is a beneficial effect that I encountered as well. My French learning curve might have been slow, but my facility in the language, such as it was, showed a comprehension that the more literal-minded seem to lack. I began to see nuance while still at the early “Franglais” stage.

This explains the paradox of the supposedly stupid “old dog” that’s surprisingly quick with their head when dealing with an emergency. I’ve seen this on both sides.

In a normal culture, this is where it would end. “Testosterone man” would be a sort of Tory of the intellect – the man who efficiently meets new situations with old knowledge, but is also the man who can’t pick up on the unprecedented that quickly, and “Stick Boy” would be the Whig – an intellect that is not very competently engaged with the events of the day, but is excellent at absorbing the new.

But, vanity being what it is, there’s always the temptation to combine the two by going for “Superbrain”: a testosterone-drenched pragmatist that can also absorb the new and unprecedented with the same speed as a young man so calm and quiet that it appears as if the Puberty Spirit passed him by.

Based upon my own experiences, it looks as if there’s only one way to fully accomplish this trick: self-cruelty. Bending your brain out of shape by forcing new material into a brain not calm enough to receive it efficiently.

You might guess that a large part of this brain warp involves treating new information as if it was old. Yes, indeed, the path to supposed Superbraindom is strewn with memorization strategies that give you the facility to interpret the new at the verbal level by linking it with what you already learned, when quieter, through associational memory techniques.

For the normal sort, this gives you the typical education of a chucklehead – someone using concepts as if they knew what those words meant, but always giving their shortcutting away through a characteristic sloppiness of syntax.

If this was a MENSA Site, the conclusion above would be greeted with what are basically sneers. Thankfully, this isn’t, so instead of a superior roar, I can discuss this seriously.

Joe Chucklehead might be a shortcutter by inclination, but he’s also a growing boy, unless he’s as the college level, in which case he’s a naïve young man. To expect him to seriously question a certain pedagogical method successfully when a student is really asking too much of him. It’s a job us oldsters have to do.

Since the educational establishment likes to assume a scientific air, it’s interesting that the above hypothesis I proffered hasn’t been tested at a level consistent with the social sciences: taking a group of kids of comparable I.Q. scores and socio-economic background; splitting them into two; and giving each group the same assignment. One group is encouraged to keep quiet and calm, and the other is encouraged to get pumped up. Each group has to write the same test.

Until such an experiment is performed, with appropriate controls, we have to say that the style of education which consists of making learning exciting is based upon little more than dogma, and perhaps a few “Superbrains” that acquired their knowledge through the (hidden) use of the hickory stick, whether the physical or the psychological variety.

It’s reasonable to place the onus upon the progressivists because of another issue which parents know all-too-much about: the breakdown of classroom discipline. Making kids pay attention through raising their testosterone level makes them impulsive also; it gives them a relatively short fuse. Anyone involved in institutional discipline of any sort will tell you that the most reliable predictor of delinquent behavior is poor impulse control, which the learning-as- excitement strategy encourages.

So the test of hypothesis should be framed this way: “Is the increase in retention and learning sufficiently better to make up for the increase in disciplinary problems which such excitement encourages?” As far as I know, the strategy of education-through-vanity has not met that test.

If you know your history of quack cures, you know that most of them use some form of painkiller to mask the symptoms and hide the disease. If my own experience is an adequate test of a testosterone-drenched educational style, then “making learning fun” in that way qualifies as a kind of quack cure. It might even build up a bad-syntax habit that gets an otherwise normal student labeled “learning disabled” later in life.