MEN WANTED

Sir Ernest Shackleton when he was about to set out on one of his expeditions, printed a statement in the papers, to this effect:

“Men wanted for hazardous journey to the South Pole. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success. Ernest Shackleton, 4 Burlington Street.” [May 15, 1913]

In response to his posted ad, Shackleton was supposedly flooded with 5,000 responses, men clamoring to take their chances on the icy southern continent. [September 10, 1913]

 

(When the survivors returned, WWI was on, so they joined the military.)

USE OF HISTORY

 “The things that are now before us,” said the Princess, “require attention, and deserve it. What have I to do with the heroes or the monuments of ancient times—with times which can never return, and heroes whose form of life was different from all that the present condition of mankind requires or allows?”

“To know anything,” returned the poet, “we must know its effects; to see men, we must see their works, that we may learn what reason has dictated or passion has excited, and find what are the most powerful motives of action. To judge rightly of the present, we must oppose it to the past; for all judgment is comparative, and of the future nothing can be known. The truth is that no mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments. Our passions are joy and grief, love and hatred, hope and fear. Of joy and grief, the past is the object, and the future of hope and fear; even love and hatred respect the past, for the cause must have been before the effect.

“The present state of things is the consequence of the former; and it is natural to inquire what were the sources of the good that we enjoy, or the evils that we suffer. If we act only for ourselves, to neglect the study of history is not prudent. If we are entrusted with the care of others, it is not just. Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may properly be charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it.

“There is no part of history so generally useful as that which relates to the progress of the human mind, the gradual improvement of reason, the successive advances of science, the vicissitudes of learning and ignorance (which are the light and darkness of thinking beings), the extinction and resuscitation of arts, and the revolutions of the intellectual world. If accounts of battles and invasions are peculiarly the business of princes, the useful or elegant arts are not to be neglected; those who have kingdoms to govern have understandings to cultivate.

“Example is always more efficacious than precept. A soldier is formed in war, and a painter must copy pictures. In this, contemplative life has the advantage. Great actions are seldom seen, but the labours of art are always at hand for those who desire to know what art has been able to perform.

“When the eye or the imagination is struck with any uncommon work, the next transition of an active mind is to the means by which it was performed. Here begins the true use of such contemplation. We enlarge our comprehension by new ideas, and perhaps recover some art lost to mankind, or learn what is less perfectly known in our own country. At least we compare our own with former times, and either rejoice at our improvements, or, what is the first motion towards good, discover our defects.”

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (42-43) [1759]. Kindle Edition.

DEKULAKIZATION

How many “kulaks” died in the course of “de-kulakization”? On 1 January 1932, the GPU carried out a general census of all deportees: it listed 1,317,022 people. We know, by the same police sources, that nearly 1.8 million “kulaks” were deported during the two main deportation waves in 1930 and 1931. Losses accordingly numbered close to half a million people, or nearly 30% of all deportees. Undoubtedly, a not insignificant proportion of those had escaped. In 1932, the GPU komandatury, which actually managed to keep accurate records of the deportees they were supposed to keep watch over, counted no less than 207,000 escapes (38,000 runaways were recaptured); in 1933, the number of escapes was 216,000 (54,000 recaptured). Considering a number of local GPU reports (for different periods in 1930 and 1931) on the flights of deported “kulaks”, we can extrapolate that around 200,000-250,000 deportees managed to escape in 1930-1931. This still leaves us with approximately 250,000-300,000 deaths. 

A number of local reports confirm the very high mortality rates among the deportees, especially among children and elderly people. In 1931, the mortality rate was 1.3% per month (16% per annum) among the deportees to Kazakhstan, and 0.8% per month (10% per annum) for those to western Siberia. Infant mortality oscillated between 8% and 12% per month, and peaked at 15% per month in Magnitogorsk. From June 1931 to June 1932, the mortality rate among deportees in the region of Narym, in Western Siberia, reached 11.7%. In 1932, the overall number of deaths among deportees was over 90,000 (annual death rate: 6.8%); in 1933, it was 151,600 (annual death rate: 13.3%). Altogether, more than half a million deportees died in 1930-1933, or 22% of the 2.3 million people deported during those years. Most of them died untimely deaths, of general exhaustion and hunger (Zemskov, 2003; Danilov & Krasilnikov, 1993, 1994, Viola, 2007).

Nicholas Werth, SciencesPo, 23 September 2011

BATTLE OF THE BULGE

But the greatest lesson was one learned from the enemy: to hate. Word of the Malmédy Massacre, of the massacres of civilians at Stavelot, Trois Points, and Bande, passed from man to man, and from unit to unit. Until the Ardennes the GI had fought a civilian’s war. Now he was learning to kill without remorse or pity.

John Toland, Battle: The Story of the Bulge
New York: Random House, 1959, pp. 329-331

    Reports from men drifting back from the front were alarming. Entire units, claimed many wild-eyed refugees, had been cut off and were being wiped out. Back at Division, General Grow had no clear idea of how great his casualties were. But he did know that it was the worst day in the history of his 6th Armored Division.

    The retreat of the 6th Armored wasn’t the only reverse on George Patton’s front. For the savage meeting engagement was at its climax. Violent German attacks had struck all along the Bastogne front. In particular the 17th Airborne Division, in their first real day of action a few miles west of town, had been dealt shocking casualties, some battalions losing 40 per cent of their men.

    Ordinarily the most optimistic of American generals, Patton was now in a despondent mood. Each man lost that day weighed heavily on him. He sat at a desk and wrote in his diary, “We can still lose this war.”

    But at the front, later that night, a strange thing began to take place where the day’s disaster had been greatest. Men stopped running, and were digging in. Terror was being replaced by anger.
 
    Not far behind the 6th Armored Division breakthrough area, Colonel John Hines was in a stone house where refugees from the front were thawing out their frozen rifles and frozen bodies.

    One man, his face covered with blood and dirt, his eyes two bitter holes, was saying, “I used to wonder what I was doing in the army. I didn’t have anything personal against the Krauts, even if they were making me live in a freezing, frigging foxhole. But I learned something today. Now I want to kill every goddam Kraut in the world. You know why? To save my own ass.”

    There was a new GI in the Ardennes.

    The good-natured, rather careless, supremely confident GI who had known one victory after another since landing in Normandy; who had assumed he would be well clothed, well fed, and well led; who accepted it as his heritage to outgun and outmachine the enemy, was gone. Since December 16 he’d had few days of the overpowering air support and air cover he’d taken for granted; his clothing didn’t keep out the cold; his boots were traps for trench foot, his tanks were outnumbered; often his machines were immobilized by cold, snow, and terrain.

    He was cold and hungry. He had just fought a humiliating series of retreats where terror roamed far behind the lines. He had tasted defeat.

    But he had learned bitter lessons that were beginning to pay off. In this first major winter battle ever fought by Americans he had learned that the wounded die fast in the zero cold. He had learned in a few weeks that cold is a living enemy and must be fought.

    Medics had learned to tuck frozen morphine Syrettes under their armpits; to put plasma under the hoods of trucks and jeeps. Infantrymen were saving their hands from frostbite by cutting four oversize mitten patterns from blankets and sewing them together. Trench foot, which was cutting down more Americans than bullets, was beaten with muffs made from blankets. At night the men learned to take off their soggy combat boots and socks, massage their feet, and then pull these blanket “Tootsie warmers” on, topped by overshoes. 

    They learned how to dry socks and shoes: heat pebbles in a can; dump the hot pebbles into the wet socks and the socks into the shoes.

    They learned that ordinary field jackets were little protection against the biting winds of the Ardennes. Inner linings were made of blankets sewed to the inside.

    They learned that two wool shirts were equal in warmth—and less bulky to fight in—than a shirt and overcoat. But the shirts had to be switched every night, the one next to the body, wet from perspiration even in the coldest day, taken off and hung up to dry.
 
    They learned what tramps and people of depression days had long known, that paper was a good insulator. A few sheets of newspaper wrapped around the chest between shirts was a buffer against the rawest wind.

    They also learned to wear shoes and overshoes that were a little too big, for tightness, cutting off circulation, brought on almost instant trench foot. They would stuff paper between shoes and arctics—a trick long used by hunters. The paper not only anchored their misfit footgear but retained body heat.

    They learned to heat food over a  “flambeau”—a wine bottle filled with gas with a wick of twisted rags.

    The facts of cold, long known to men of Minnesota and Maine, were passed on to men from Alabama and Texas. Frozen toes, ears, noses were rubbed gently to start circulation. The old wives’ remedy of rubbing snow on these frozen parts often brought on gangrene. Hands stiff from cold, unable to trigger a gun, were placed under armpits. To survive a night in a freezing foxhole many a man lived by covering his head with a blanket and trapping his own warm breath.

    The GIs learned not to eat snow except in very small doses or their stomachs would become chilled. Tankers learned that their great friend, Calvados, was their great enemy in the cold. For alcohol brought body heat to the surface, causing radiation and deadly chilling.

    They learned that cold metal would sweat when brought indoors, and then quickly freeze when taken outside. All weapons and ammunition were left outdoors, protected only from the falling snow.

    They learned the big lessons too. That their tanks should be whitewashed to blend with the snow; that they should wear sheets like Halloween ghosts.

    Mechanics, with Yankee ingenuity, soon learned how to make their machines work under sub-zero conditions. Where rubber tracks were unavailable for tanks, great metal cleats were welded on steel tracks to conquer ice and snow.
 
    But the greatest lesson was one learned from the enemy: to hate. Word of the Malmédy Massacre, of the massacres of civilians at Stavelot, Trois Points, and Bande, passed from man to man, and from unit to unit. Until the Ardennes the GI had fought a civilian’s war. Now he was learning to kill without remorse or pity.

BOLSHEVIK INHUMANITY

A number of historians have rightly emphasised the point that the February revolution in 1917 did not provoke a counter-revolution. The overthrow of the Tsarist regime prompted a wide variety of reactions among the former ruling class: a resignation to events, a bitterness at the incompetence and obstinacy of the imperial court, yet also an initial optimism among its more liberal and idealistic members. Most of the nobility and bourgeoisie supported the Provisional Government in the hope that it would at least restrain the worst excesses and keep the country together. The initial absence of any attempt to fight back illustrated not so much apathy, as the feeling that there was little of the ancien regime left that was worth defending.

A determination to resist only began to develop during the summer, when the Bolshevik programme polarised opinion. The question is important when it comes to the origins of the civil war itself, which led to the deaths of up to 12 million people, the utter impoverishment of the whole country and suffering on an unimaginable scale. Konstantin Paustovsky lamented the lost opportunity for democratic change. ‘The idyllic aspect of the first days of the Revolution was disappearing. Whole worlds were shaking and falling to the ground. Most of the intelligentsia lost its head, that great humanist Russian intelligentsia which had been the child of Pushkin and Herzen, of Tolstoy and Chekhov.

It had known how to create high spiritual values, but with only a few exceptions it proved helpless at creating the organisation of a state.’ Spiritual values never stood a chance against a fanatical determination to destroy all those of the past, both good and bad. No country can escape the ghosts of its past, least of all Russia. The writer and critic Viktor Shklovsky compared the Bolsheviks to the devil’s apprentice who, in an old Russian folk tale, boasted that he knew how to rejuvenate an old man. To restore his youth, he first needed to burn him up. So, the apprentice set him on fire, but then found that he could not revive him.

Fratricidal wars are bound to be cruel because of their lack of definable front lines, because of their instant extension into civilian life, and because of the terrible hatreds and suspicions suspicions which they engender. The fighting right across the Eurasian land-mass was violent beyond belief, especially the unspeakable cruelty of Cossack atamans in Siberia. Even that arch-conservative politician V.V. Shulgin believed that one of the major reasons for the failure of the Whites was a ‘moral collapse’—that they behaved as badly as their Bolshevik enemy. There was, nevertheless, one subtle yet important difference. All too often Whites represented the worst examples of humanity. For ruthless inhumanity, however, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable.

Antony Beevor, Russia (501-502). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

THE MEMORY HOLE

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames. What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. 

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. 

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of the Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. 

Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed; always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy. But actually, he thought as he readjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. 

Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.

George Orwell, 1984 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

SOFT BIGOTRY

You might expect policymakers to be scrambling to shore up academic standards. In fact, they are doing the opposite.

The Economist
March 18, 2024
Soft bigotry
New numbers show falling standards in American high schools
Low-achieving pupils may suffer the most

SPRINGFIELD, in MASSACHUSETTS, might seem an improbable setting for an education miracle. The city with a population of 155,000 along the Connecticut river has a median household income half the state average; violent crime is common. Yet graduation rates at the city’s high schools are surging. Between 2007 and 2022 the share of pupils at the Springfield High School of Science and Technology who earned a diploma in four years jumped from 50% to 94%; at neighbouring Roger Putnam Vocational Technical Academy it nearly doubled to 96%.

Alas, such gains are not showing up in other academic indicators. At Springfield High scores on the SAT, a college-admissions test, have tumbled by 15% over the same period. Measures of English and maths proficiency are down, too. The pass rate on advanced-placement exams has fallen to just 12% compared with a national average of 60%.

The trend at Springfield High is all too common. Between 2007 and 2020 the average graduation rate at public high schools in America leapt from 74% to 87%. During this period pupils notched up gains in course credits and grade-point averages. Yet SAT scores fell (see chart 1). Results from the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international test of 15-year-olds, show that maths and reading literacy are flat or down. An analysis by The Economist suggests that schools are lowering academic standards in order to enable more pupils to graduate. And the trend is hurting low-performing pupils the most.

America has fretted about academic standards at its public schools for decades. In 1983 the Department of Education released a landmark report, “A Nation At Risk,” which warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” in the country’s schools. The response was swift. Within five years 45 states had raised graduation requirements; and more than two dozen had introduced other reforms, including more comprehensive curriculums and higher salaries for teachers. Some states also started requiring graduates to pass “minimum-competency” exams, standardised tests introduced in the 1970s that evaluated pupils’ ability to do eighth- or ninth-grade level English and maths.

But as graduation requirements were toughened up, coursework was watered down. A survey conducted in 1996 by Public Agenda, a policy research group, found that just half of public high-school students felt that they were being challenged academically. Another survey in 2001 found that only a quarter of pupils thoughßt that their teachers had high expectations of them. Even the federal government acknowledged again that academic standards were falling short. A report by the Department of Education found that more than a tenth of maths coursework taken by the class of 2005 consisted of primary- and middle-school-level material. Only a third of algebra 1 students and a fifth of geometry students received “rigorous” instruction.

Grading got easier, too. The best evidence for this comes from comparisons of classroom grades with performance on state exams taken at the end of the school year. A study by Seth Gershenson of American University found that between 2005 and 2016, 36% of North Carolina public-school students who received Bs in their algebra 1 courses failed their end-of-course exams. Pupils with Cs failed 71% of the time. Another study, by Chris Clark of Georgia College & State University, analysed maths courses at Georgia public high schools in 2007 and yielded similar results. “Some schools and school systems appear to be inflating course grades,” Mr Clark concluded, “while others appear to hold their students to higher standards.”
Such evidence suggests that academic standards at American high schools are too low. But are they getting worse? To answer this, The Economist assembled data on graduation rates and standardised test scores at 3,000 high schools across six states—Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan and North Carolina—for school years from 2007 to 2022.

Doing the maths

We found that four-year graduation rates in our sample increased during this period, even as test scores fell. Gains were greatest in high schools with the lowest test scores. In 2007 schools with scores on the sat or act, another college-admissions exam, in the bottom tenth of our sample graduated half of their pupils; in 2022 they graduated two-thirds. As low-performing schools have passed more pupils, the relationship between test scores and graduation rates has weakened (see chart 2).

Just how far has the academic bar been lowered? To quantify this, we conducted a regression analysis of graduation rates between 2007 and 2022 that controlled for average ACT or SAT scores, dropout rates and school year. If academic standards were consistent over time, we would expect no underlying trend in graduation rates from year to year. Instead, we found that graduation rates drifted upward, even after controlling for changes in test scores and dropout rates.

Our analysis suggests that high schools are graduating thousands of students who, not long ago, might not have made the grade. Some states have lowered the bar more than others. In Illinois graduation rates are about one percentage point higher than we would expect based on academic performance alone; in North Carolina they are nearly eight points higher. Overall, we found that public high schools in our sample are inflating graduation rates by roughly four percentage points compared with 15 years earlier.

Sceptics will point out that the test-taking population is significantly different today than it was 15 years ago, and that this may be making test scores look worse than they actually are. “If more and more students are sitting for these tests,” says Thomas Dee of Stanford University, “the composition changes over time in ways that probably bias scores downward.” Such “compositional effects” do not appear to explain our results, however. The share of students taking the ACT or SAT in our sample actually fell from 78% in 2007 to 68% in 2022. This would suggest that, if anything, our estimates of graduation-rate inflation may be too low, rather than too high.

You might expect policymakers to be scrambling to shore up academic standards. In fact, they are doing the opposite. In May last year New Jersey’s board of education voted to lower the passing score on the state’s high-school graduation test, saying the current standards had “adverse impacts” on students. In November Oregon education officials scrapped its “essential skills” graduation exams in maths, reading and writing. At least four more states—Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York—are considering doing away with their own exit exams. In January Alaska’s board of education voted to lower proficiency standards for the state’s reading and maths exams.

The trend towards weakening standards can be blamed in part on No Child Left Behind, an education-reform law passed in 2002. It required states to track the share of students graduating in four years and set annual targets for improvement. Schools that failed to hit their targets faced sanctions, including possible closure. Although such policies were well-intentioned, they had perverse outcomes. To keep graduation rates up, teachers devised creative ways of raising grades: allowing students to retake exams, removing penalties for late assignments, adjusting grading scales. “We’re doing what I call ‘grading gymnastics’,” says Eric Welch, a social-studies teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia. “There’s a lot of pressure to hit the metric, regardless of how you do it,” explains Peter VanWylen, a data consultant and former teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. “Nobody wants to lose their job and so there’s this pressure to get the number where it needs to be.”

Other concerns are also at work. “The push for educational equity, and in particular racial equity, has been used in a lot of places to push against higher standards for high-school graduation,” says Morgan Polikoff of the University of Southern California. When New Jersey debated new testing benchmarks last year, one board-of-education member argued that a higher standard would be “unfair” to black and Latino students in urban districts. Oregon’s decision to drop its graduation exam in November was based in part on a report by the education department which concluded that the test produced “inequitable outcomes” for “historically marginalised” groups.

Must try harder

Lowering standards, it is thought, can help narrow such achievement gaps. Yet it may have the opposite effect. A recent working paper by Brooks Bowden, Viviana Rodriguez and Zach Weingarten of the Universities of Pennsylvania and Texas at San Antonio analyses how a more lenient grading policy introduced by North Carolina public high schools in 2014 affected effort and academic performance. The authors found that after schools implemented the new grading scale, which led to more As and fewer Fs, students with low test scores showed up to class less often and put in less effort. The attendance of high-scoring students did not change. Although the policy led to slightly higher graduation rates, it also contributed to wider gaps in GPAs and standardised test scores between high- and low-achieving students.

This suggests that policies that lower the bar may harm the very students they are meant to help. “I don’t think we’re helping anybody by handing out higher grades or giving out graduation certificates,” says Dr Bowden, one of the authors of the study. Better instead to set expectations high, reckons Dr Polikoff. “People rise to the expectations you set.” ■