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Thomas Sowell: It's Best to Build on Knowledge of the Past

Stanford, Calif. - Consider the confusion as to whether 2000 is the last year of the 20th century or the first year of the 21st century and the third millennium. It all goes back to the fact that people were using Roman numerals when they began counting centuries since the birth of Christ.

When you are measuring anything - whether the height of a person, the length of a table or the time your meal is cooking in the microwave - you start at zero. But there is no zero in Roman numerals, and people were using Roman numerals when they began counting the years since the birth of Christ. Therefore, the Christian era did not begin at zero but at one.

When the Christian era was only two weeks old, it was already Year One, even though one year had not yet passed. On Jan. 1 of the year 100, only 99 years had passed, so the first century was not yet over. The second century would begin on Jan. 1 of year 101. That is why the 21st century will begin on Jan. 1, 2001.

Zero is a very important concept in mathematics, but the greatest minds in Western civilization did not come up with that concept during all the centuries when Roman numerals were used. The idea of zero was imported with a new numbering system from India during the Middle Ages. Because the West learned of this new system from the Arabs, it was called Arabic numerals, though in fact these were Hindu numerals.

The enormous amount of time it takes even the greatest minds to come up with what may later seem like simple basic concepts shows the utter idiocy of the new fashion in our public schools of asking children to develop their own ways of reasoning about math, their own ways of using language and other such fads.

Anyone with any serious understanding of history would see what an incredible waste of time it is to expect children to re-invent the wheel. In reality, highly sophisticated civilizations existed among the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere and lasted for centuries without inventing the wheel, just as European civilization failed to invent the zero.

Anyone with even a superficial acquaintance with economics today knows that supply and demand determine prices, but that was heresy in the early 19th century, when the great economist David Ricardo and his followers were the dominant influence in economics. However, by the end of the 19th century, supply and demand were so well established that there was no longer any controversy about it.

Ricardo was one of the great minds in the history of economics, and his followers included John Stuart Mill. But it took half a century of exhaustive controversy for the new concept of supply and demand to prevail over the earlier concepts used by Ricardo and his followers.

Today, supply and demand is taught in the first week of Economics 1 - but it took centuries of intellectual development before the idea arose in a form that could challenge the classical orthodoxy of the profession, and another two generations before it would prevail. Today, students studying economics in our universities learn supply and demand by what public school "educators" would disdain as "rote learning," instead of by discovering it "creatively" for themselves.

These students do not have generations or centuries to spend discovering for themselves something that can be taught in a week. Neither do students in Chemistry 1 have time to re-live all the fumbling and false starts that even intellectual giants went through before the principles of modern chemistry were established.

Only people ignorant of history and too shallow to understand what an enormous task it is to create anything could believe that children can reach any serious understanding of even basic concepts by the faddish methods of "discovery" and "creativity" being used in public school classrooms. No wonder our students so often are at or near the bottom when they take tests that students in some other countries - even poorer countries - handle so much better.

Most of us, even as adults, will never discover or create anything significant that was not understood before. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke of "the great intellects that have spent themselves in making some addition or improvement" to the law, "the greatest of which is trifling compared to the mighty whole."

The time is long overdue to stop people who call themselves "educators" from trifling with our children and get down to the serious work of teaching them.

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